My gut feeling is that many F500s would feel more confident that their support contracts would be continued and SLAs would be met under IBM's patronage as opposed to the potential feeding frenzy that might see the breakup of Sun's market and services if they slide any further.

Don't forget there is now loads of Sun hardware in dedicated data centers underpinning large corporate IT. The so-called 'cloud' has grown considerably in the last couple of years and will do so even more as businesses look to cut costs in the current economic environment.

I will spare you my pedestrian spiel and say that I think it would be a great move that would boost market confidence and SunOS and Solaris might continue to do well. They have some terrific IP involved in their software projects.

Given the hardware and software footprint and the market share, I recon we could even see a counter offer from HP?