Oracle buy SUN, WTF!! part deux
over dinner I was talking with Nathalie and some further thoughts on the deal emerge
1/ DUH! the big diamond in the rough is of course MySQL. How could this not jump at me! Larry E must have freaked out at the thought of IBM getting its hands on mySQL. This way Larry gets to nip that one in the bud... I always thought he would pull this maneuver on RedHat to get JBoss. Of course the fate of our dolphin friends at SUN is all of the sudden very iffy. Something tells me Larry will try to make something of it and rank and file within Oracle will kill it quickly... to be followed.
2/ Oracle may actually be good for SUN. SUN was always a good company whose potential was not realized by poor middle management. By middle management I mean directors and low level VPs. I have never seen such a bunch of time-serving political hacks. Sun was full of petty fights over nothing by people that had nothing better to do, because, let's face it, SUN was a company on auto-pilot for awhile.
3/ Java. I don't expect anything to happen to java. Java has moved in maintenance mode a long time ago and being part of a healthy company like Oracle can only help.
4/ Hardware: serious headwinds? In a age where the emerging trend is $300 PCs are we going to see $3000 servers replacing $30,000 boxes? Oracle is new to this game. This comforts the view of "acquisition for maintenance stream aggregation".
Interesting acquisition...
1/ DUH! the big diamond in the rough is of course MySQL. How could this not jump at me! Larry E must have freaked out at the thought of IBM getting its hands on mySQL. This way Larry gets to nip that one in the bud... I always thought he would pull this maneuver on RedHat to get JBoss. Of course the fate of our dolphin friends at SUN is all of the sudden very iffy. Something tells me Larry will try to make something of it and rank and file within Oracle will kill it quickly... to be followed.
2/ Oracle may actually be good for SUN. SUN was always a good company whose potential was not realized by poor middle management. By middle management I mean directors and low level VPs. I have never seen such a bunch of time-serving political hacks. Sun was full of petty fights over nothing by people that had nothing better to do, because, let's face it, SUN was a company on auto-pilot for awhile.
3/ Java. I don't expect anything to happen to java. Java has moved in maintenance mode a long time ago and being part of a healthy company like Oracle can only help.
4/ Hardware: serious headwinds? In a age where the emerging trend is $300 PCs are we going to see $3000 servers replacing $30,000 boxes? Oracle is new to this game. This comforts the view of "acquisition for maintenance stream aggregation".
Interesting acquisition...
Comments
You missed out on the cloud angle. with $3000 servers and a bunch of software free. the Technology business is now a Utilities business
You can only make money on a subscription basis with end to end capabilities.
Anon @ 1:56. Interesting points. I will put some money that says the opposite on venture because a/venture is dead b/ it is tough to fork a brand. I may lose that bet... Excellent point on the cloud but please do expand on what oracle would do about it. Obviously a salesforce.com generalized is a mighty competitor. I don't know what Larry can do but accelerate the movement...
Edwin, a/ I was the best strategic thinker. We needed to :) b/ I will give you that I don't spend a second thinking about the industry anymore c/ in reading slashdot, which usually gives you a cross section of opinion i couldn't really find new arguments but a fleshing of the points above.
Anon @ 3:39. I don't know, the nature of oss is a leader (mySQL) and much smaller competitors (postgres and commercial knock-offs). I was thinking about them yesterday but I don't see them doing any better. I would see the mySQL venture fund before I see the postgres thing. I could be COMPLETELY wrong of course :)
anon 6:41. Yes, people underestimate how bad moronic middle management is at SUN. I chuckle when I read Ponytail boy's email to the troops "Oracle recognizes our most important asset is:... our people" (kid you not on the tempo). Watch Oracle take an axe to "our people". The layers of moronic fat in SUN was staggering.
Sorry. I didn't explain my point well. Your statement is part of my point. The other part is that the JVM isn't Java but it's critical to Java and other languages now. I'm more concerned about paying a license to use the JVM.
On top of that you have Harmony (Apache's JVM), and Intel is putting a lot of resources towards developing a JVM that isn't controlled by someone with a vested interest in non-x86 architecture.
I think even if Sun's JVM development was frozen tomorrow, things would be perfectly fine.
Perhaps they'll sell 'professional support' for Java?
It has always amazed me that the Redhat guys are selling support for the OS, Marc and his crew sold support for the App Server, yet java, (a crucial part of the runtime stack), never pushed commercial support?
I think that would be a way to make more money off the runtime while still keeping things free.
Thanks for the info. Sounds like nothing to be alarmed about with the JVM.
From a strictly monetary standpoint there is probably a short-sighted gain to be made from closing Java. There may or may not be a long term play that allows Oracle to profit from Java.