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What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems?
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle's existing database business would make sense, given Oracle's 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with 'the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,' McAllister writes. But the 'crown jewel' of the deal would be Java. 'It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle's middleware strategy,' McAllister contends."
I find it insulting when applications bundle unrelated crapware like browser toolbars, particularly when the installation selects the extra junk by default...
...software upgrades need to be elegant and streamlined. Bundling in a browser toolbar cheapens the whole experience because it starts looking just like so many other crapware applications that plague the PC industry.
. . . if we can get all those Anonymous Cowards and folks with ridiculous names like mine to chip in $10 each.
The company's direction and strategy could be guided by a Slashdot thread. A potent brew of "Informative, Interesting, Troll . . ."
Hell, maybe we could even patent that business model . . . crowd governance . . . or mod governance?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I don't see anything changing. Right now we have a 3-way fight between three heavyweights: Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Everyone else is unimportant.
However, IBM and Microsoft have other competencies and sources of revenue. Oracle does not. In result, Oracle has been looking for new ways to enter the low-end market. So owning MySQL could be a boon for them, but it wouldn't significantly change the market.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Yes, I agree completely. However, the only way it will happen is if they become a more customer oriented company. Right now they make amazing things that no one really wants, and try to convince people to buy it. They need to figure out what people actually do want, and build it for them. If they can figure out how to do that and still make amazing things, they will succeed.
Qxe4
Have you worked with contractors? It's not about what country they're from -- it's about their contractor status. Of the ones I had, the foreigners were better coders, though poorer communicators. But in all cases, the lack of ownership in the product, of knowledge of the history, business purpose, and architecture of the product, the lack of sense of long-term commitment, of common goal, of responsibility for the outcome (in terms of ongoing maintenance, not just "going live") ... all made my life a lot harder. It's difficult work to get good, solid work out of contractors, and not because they don't mean well. They do. They're great people, sometimes even great coders, but their "wanderer" status has its drawbacks and you have to learn special skills to manage them.
So the GP is correct to worry about the quality of outsourced code.
Show me a developer who doesn't think everybody else's code is crap.
PostgreSQL is still a *huge* player (in fact, they're pretty-much the only open-source, fully-transactional DB available).
Also, Access isn't MS's DB offering... MS SQLServer is the real player. Access is as much a database as a go-cart is a race car (which is to say, kinda-sorta, but not really).
Oracle has no interest in Sun. Oracle just launched the Database Machine/Exadata with HP. Does anyone think that they are going to stab HP in the back and buy Sun? Definitely not.
Oracle is not a hardware company. It doesn't want to be a hardware company. Sun has way too much hardware for Oracle to even consider them.
I agree. Developers today (at least the vocal ones) seem to be a lot more interested in putting down the work of others than improving their own. That's why there are sites like The Daily WTF.
Oracle has no allegiance but to itself.