Intel 'Surrounding Our Enemies With Our Friends'

The Sun Microsystems-Intel alliance announced Monday makes this a day when chip maker Advanced Micro Devices must deal with a double dose of bad news.

Not only is AMD slated to announce scaled-back earnings in the face of extreme pricing pressure, its executives will likely have to explain what they think is the potential impact of one of its top customers, Sun, now doing business with its chief rival. Sun doesn't quite frame it that way, though, as its CEO Jonathan Schwartz explained on his blog:

To be clear, this isn't about displacing one another's competitors, it's about getting as big a piece of the future as possible. The market's not shrinking, after all.

(Emphasis in original.)

Eleanor Wynn, an enterprise architect for social computing at Intel, explains it this way:

Now comes the Sun deal and the Open Source implications, and Intel doing a kind of game theory strategy of surrounding our enemies with our friends. Yay!

I don't like to say it, but we Intel employees have been through a heck of a year. Strenuous thinning exercises, reorganizations—I won't dwell on it. And so far no sign of the consultancy-promised bounce in stock price to be seen from it all.

But our alliances are cause for great good cheer. The progressive stance shown by these moves is what will fuel our future success.

(Emphasis in original.)

Sun had been an island of friendship for AMD in the Tier 1 world, and now it has to share the beach with Intel like it does with every other large vendor.