The folks at hewlett-packard thought they landed the big one when Ebay, the Web auction house, indicated it would stop using servers from Sun Microsystems and switch to HP machines. The deal was all but signed when Ebay stunned HP in May with the announcement that it would stick with Sun. Why the reversal? According to Valley scuttlebutt, Sun gave Ebay the deal of a lifetime: a five-year lease on its high-end servers free of charge, a deal that will save Ebay hundreds of millions of dollars in operating expenses. Sun even agreed to spend $18 million advertising on Ebay's Web site.
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