Why Sun really bought Cobalt

“Sun Microsystems’s recent purchase of Cobalt Networks tells me that somebody at Sun has his
or her head screwed on right. Sun has publicly positioned this move as an opportunity to jump
into the low-end server appliance market; buying Cobalt was undoubtedly one of the best possible
ways to do that. And in the long run, Cobalt helps Sun hedge its bets against the probability that its
Solaris- and Sparc-based systems will not forever hold the lead in the high-end Internet server
space.”