Tom Foremski, do Silicon Valley Watcher, conta uma historinha sobre a sugestão de Ray Lane [Kleiner Perkins] para Sam Palmisano [IBM]: Compre a SAP!. Ele sabe. Todo mundo sabe que a MS cogita tal hipótese desde o final do ano passado, quando a Oracle papou a Peoplesoft. Imagina agora após a digestão da Siebel...

Se a largura da banda da fumaça aumentar um cadinho, testemunharemos um dos maiores duelos (se não o maior) da história da nossa indústria. Saca só um trechinho:

Mr Lane is convinced that IBM should acquire SAP. "Earlier this year I told Sam [Palmisano] that IBM should acquire SAP," Mr Lane said. But the IBM chief rejected that advice.

I pointed out that IBM makes more money out of SAP than SAP, because about one in ten dollars is spent on license fees, the rest is for implementation–the IT services that forms about one-half of IBM.

But Mr Lane believes that IBM needs applications on top of its middleware stack. I pointed out that IBM was terrible at enterprise applications and abandoned the market in 1999. "Well, Oracle was terrible at apps too," he said.