Ballmer, IBM Surprised By Oracle-Sun Deal

Geon Lasli writes "Reporters caught up with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Moscow to get his take on Oracle's deal to buy Sun Microsystems for US$7.4 billion. Ballmer was at a loss for words: 'I need to think about it. I am very surprised.' According to a source, IBM hadn't given up on purchasing Sun and was blindsided by Oracle's move. I guess IBM must be regretting playing tough 2 weeks ago. Unknown to outsiders, Sun had probably found the Oracle lifeboat before they decided to pull the plug on the deal."

Comments

Re:I still can't believe it...

[Shadow Wrought]

"I saw *that* coming."

I remember reading either comments or journals about that here that Oracle would be a good fit for buying Sun. So how is that slashdotters, slashdotters FFS!, could see this coming but Balmer couldn't. He should either fire himself or start reading the frontpage. At -1.

Re:Is this good?

[rackserverdeals]

Oracle has always been bullying Microsoft.

Larry Ellison want's to create the world's largest software company and dethrone MS. He's tried everything including support for nettops.

Considering MS gained dominance through an operating system and an office suite, what Ellison did with just a database is quite remarkable.

They have since grown their software portfolio to include enterprise applications, application servers and middleware.

Now with Sun, their getting an OS, a great development platform and a lot of other nice things in addition to the hardware business.

Oracle's revenue after the Sun acquisition should be close to Microsoft's and close to half of IBM and HP's.

Sun was only about a quarter of the size of IBM and HP, it's two biggest competitors and wasn't doing too bad considering who they were up against. And like I said, Oracle wasn't too shabby in the software world.

The combination of the two, if done properly, should really be fierce. Oracle has been buying a lot of companies in the past few years and all reports I've read in the press indicate that Oracle has been handling the mergers very well.

I thought Cisco would have been the ideal buyer for Sun and I didn't even consider Oracle. Now that the merger has been announced and I had time to think about it, I couldn't think of a much better buyer of Sun.

The two companies have so much in common. People that deploy Oracle tend to do it on Solaris/SPARC more than any other platform and that's been the case for a long time. So the companies have had a strong relationship over the years. Not always great, but overall pretty good. The big knock was when Ellison decided to switch developer workstations to Linux from Solaris, which may not have been a good idea since Solaris/SPARC deployments still beat linux deployments for Oracle.

Here you have two CEO's that hate MS, and want to dominate IBM. We're in for some interesting times.

While I don't hate Linux, the linux fanbois on here have been getting on my nerves so let me throw in this barb.

When IBM was rumored to be in talks with Sun, rumors were going around that Oracle was looking to buy RedHat.

When the opportunity to buy Sun, Oracle chose them over RedHat. RedHat wouls probably have cost them only $2bln compared to the $5.6bln it's going to cost to buy Sun. So suck it! :)