This morning’s SmartBrief on ExecTech newsletter contained an alluring headline: “Why “superstacks” are becoming an IT strategy.” Clicking through to the CRN article revealed less than stellar journalism; luckily the full PDF is available from Accenture for download. (This infographic PDF tells you everything you need to know, so you don’t actually have to read a whole lot.)
A Superstack (pronounced like “Superstar” by Molly Shannon, SNL) is:
…a more extensive and cohesive integration of operating systems, semiconductor chips, devices, applications and end-user services than the industry has traditionally achieved.
Apple is prominently cited as providing just such:
Accenture Superstack (appropriated w/o permission from Superstack PDF; very sorry)
I remember another company that also offered a Superstack, but they weren’t very marketing savvy, and ultimately lacked strategy, which Apple had in spades (under Jobs). They were called Sun Microsystems.
Sun had:
- Chipsets
- an OS (if they’d have open-sourced Solaris sooner Linux would have fared poorly)
- Server hardware
- Middleware
- Virtualization (xVM, Java!)
- A kick-ass filesystem
- Grid computing
- Office applications
And they had the Sun Ray™ Ultra-Thin Client (PDF)—a most cool idea that didn’t go anywhere (and wasn’t portable like an iPhone). So many benefits, so few buyers.
I don’t really miss Sun, but I don’t think of Apple as pioneering (hypocritical comes to mind more readily).
marcsimony 