There has always been a strange relationship between Cobalt's primary business model and its most obvious product: the self-branding Qube. Every time I spoke with him, Stephen DeWitt made it clear that his company's business was selling rack-mounted servers — its RaQ brand, especially — to ISPs, which in turn would sell box-resident value-added services to their customers. In fact, Cobalt has developed a large number of third parties whose applications could be packaged with Cobalt RaQs, and sold to ISPs.
The Qube was a great little product, easily put to use anywhere one could find a constant net connection and an available IP address: basically for SOHO settings. It was an easy product to love: a bright blue cube with a wide greenish light in the front. But the server appliance market was yet another of those zero-billion dollar categories that would get around to delivering their promise when broadband was less the exception than the rule. As Qube observer Luke Tymowski puts it, "There's more money to be made selling RaQs to ISPs than Qubes to you and me."
But when Cobalt sold itself to Sun Microsystems a few days ago (as I write this, on October 4, 2000), the Qube and the Appliance Category seemed to be the whole story.
Take coverage by the San Jose Mercury News . Under the headline "Sun to Buy Cobalt for $2 Billion" ran the subhead "Deal gives company market for low cost server appliances." In the first sentence Cobalt was identified as "the maker of a compact server-in-a-box." The obvious manifestation of that label is the Qube. But the practical one is the RaQ. And Cobalt has done a remarkable job of productizing RaQs as appliances — as plug & serve devices.
Cobalt has had very good marketing instincts from the beginning, playing the Linux label much the same way as it played the appliance label.
The question now is whether or not Sun will screw with that success. Sun has always gone out of its way to say it "supports" Linux but remains anything but a "Linux company." With Cobalt, however, Sun buys one of the most familiar Linux companies in the world.
Yet Cobalt, unlike VA Linux, Penguin Computing and other Linux hardware companies, has been a Linux company only to the extent that it employed Linux as a small, handy commodity OS. (It also used a small, handy commodity microprocessor. Any idea what it is? Hint: it's not Intel or Motorola. There's marketing at work for you.) Among all the literature provided to me by Cobalt during Spring Linux World Expo in 1999, the only mention of Linux was in 6-point type on the back of the company's data sheets.
But Cobalt quickly welcomed identification as a Linux Company, and surely benefitted from that association with a big IPO in fall of 1999. Around that time, "appliance" was becoming a hot term. Cobalt soon wisely itentified nearly all its products as "server appliances." Looks like it paid off.
Once Cobalt is part of Sun, there probably won't be much semantic leveage left in the word "Linux" — simply because of Sun's antipathy to the commodity OS. And sure enough, Sun is already reportedly thinking about dumping Linux from Cobalt servers and replacing it with Sun's own appliance-specific version of its own operating system, Solaris. (One wonders if they'll also insist on SPARC processors.) But Luke Tymnowski says "That they are making noises about moving the RaQs over to Solaris from Linux doesn't mean much. It wasn't the OS that was remarkable, it was the web administration interface."
Indeed. It's hard to imagine a simpler UI for a server than the one Cobalt designed for it's appliances. Let's hope for their sake that they keep it that way.
— Doc Searls