Oracle's purchase of Sun will likely work out better for Apple in the long run than if IBM had followed through on the deal, thanks to not only Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's friendship with Steve Jobs but also the fact that Sun and Apple offer complementary technologies, including Unix-based operating systems.
While Mr. Ellison was quoted as saying that Sun's Solaris OS is "by far the best Unix technology on the market," Anthony Frausto-Robledo wrote in a commentary for Architosh: "Sun could foster an interest in running Solaris in its own Virtualbox as an industry Unix workstation platform, giving Mac Pro customers even more options. Sun could sell Virtualbox in the future preconfigured for a guest Solaris install and highly tuned and configured for engineering and science on the Mac Pro.
"At the same time, Apple could update both Boot Camp and work together with Oracle's Sun to focus Virtualbox on becoming the strongest performing virtualization tool for engineering and CAD, thereby enabling thousands of engineers and scientists with deep history in Solaris-based workflows to continue along in this direction but with the added benefit and flexibility of Mac OS X behind them. This helps Solaris stay meaningful in the high-end science and engineering world."
In addition, Sun's strength in enterprise sales and support could assist Apple in that area, while the two companies' chip engineers could come up with "even more wonderful micro-processors," Mr. Frausto-Robledo wrote.