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62% of Sun's Stockholders Vote For Oracle Deal
Moon Workstation writes "In an special meeting held at Santa Clara, CA, 62% of Sun's stockholders voted for the acquisition by Oracle. As a result of this Sun's stock will be taken from the stock market as of Friday. The acquisition is still waiting for approval by the US Department of Justice and anti-trust offices in other countries. The planned acquisition is source for rumors and speculation about the future of different Sun products, like OpenSolaris, CPUs and others." (MySQL among them.)
It is truly the end of a era. At one time, SUN was the epitome of enterprise class hardware. Now it will be reduced to Larry's little toy.
To quote netcraft: SUN is dying.
SUN is dead.
Thanks, Larry.
Monty is the man who will keep MySQL alive regardless of Oracle. Oracle can funble and bumble it all they want. In fact, you can expect MySQL development to slow to a crawl over the next 3 years as Oracles tries to figure out what to do and to integrate it. In the meantime, Monty AB is going to become the new defacto standard for MySQL replacing Oracles version in the open source community. Distros will start picking up Monty AB and as a result, more installs of Monty AB will be used than that Oracles MySQL in 5 years do to licensing issues or lack of development.
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*OR* everyone will just wake up to the fact that PostgreSQL is superior in pretty much every way now (including performance and ease of maintenance) and dump MySQL altogether.
Personally I think Oracle and Sun are perfect for each other business wise. Two companies that have some good products, often don't even realize the potential of what they have, have no real vision other than getting big contracts signed, and couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag.
Now that there is even a hint that something might change, I halfway expect managers to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off spewing crap like "Solaris is going to be desupported!" or "Sparc servers are 'going away' soon". (I went through this with Oracle Forms when Oracle dropped the Win32 client ARRAGGG!)
It would just be nice if they could make their intentions 100% clear on what specifically they plan to do with Sun's products.
I really would have expected more than 62% to vote for the acquisition. Having 38% abstain or vote against it... I will be surprised if some of the nay-sayers didn't file a lawsuit to prevent it from happening.
Why has Sun Microsystems not done particularly well in the last few years
Um, just as a guess, because they didn't invest in hardware research and gave away all their software? "Services are where it's at" say companies who can no longer compete technologically. Weren't the Sun E-series supers acquired from Cray Research?
Note to all in this business: if you decide against investing in R&D, don't be surprised if you're left with nothing but "services" in your portfolio and diminishing margins. Someone I respect called this "the race to the bottom". Use your brains and compete!
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Sun materially offered nothing that couldn't be achieved cheaper elsewhere, and in this race-to-the-bottom commodity market, made it impossible to compete. Sun kept trying to do what they always did - engineer decent but conservative systems offered at a premium price. Remember, Sun thrived first in a time where the standard Intel offerings couldn't begin to compete with the multi-user scalability of Sun. They either couldn't recognize or couldn't adapt themselves to an evolved future wherein PCs dominated the sweetspot of the price-performance curve.
Oracle bought Sun because buying Innodb didn't kill MySQL. There's nothing else that Oracle can likely do with the other assets of Sun other than sell them for parts. I refuse to believe that Oracle has either the ability or the impetus to continue any of Sun's hardware or non-DB software.
That's pretty interesting. They certainly wouldn't be the first company to have it's left hand not know what it's right hand was doing as a result of bullshit CRM and sales software. Ironic that it's Oracle.
They already tried that along with every other big Unix hardware vendor trying to protect their own hardware that went bust. The message was clear even in the 90s which is why no one wanted to port their Unix to x86 and why no one has trusted Solaris on x86. Either SGI, Digital and Sun kept up and kept surpassing raw x86 performance to justify their high costs or they were in real trouble when the inevitable x86 based 'Unix' came along. They all went into denial when Linux came along and made that happen.
But how do you put in the research and development to make sure that SPARC keeps up with x86 performance and justifies its added cost? Sun farmed it out to Fujitsu because they could no longer put the development effort in and even Fujitsu cannot manage the costs of keeping up.
Sun focused far too much on hardware and Solaris without creating any firm advantages in either, apart from a magical pixie and arrogant belief that people would come back to Sun 'enterprise' hardware and software, and the leadership allowed deeply entrenched politics at the company to get in the way. I doubt whether Oracle will allow that to happen. They're a company that looks at returns and precious little else.
However, there is no way at all that MySQL will be allowed to acquire features that will let it compete with Oracle.
It's likely that a lot of MySQL users will consider this a feature. There's a niche for a simple, basic DB that's fairly fast and has a small footprint. If you don't actually need those advanced features that PostgreSQL and Oracle provide, there's no reason to pay for them (with money or memory or slower speed).
It's sorta like how the makers of word-processor software would love to eliminate the use of plain text, so we all have to pay them to use formatting features even when we don't need them. So far, they haven't succeeded at this, and it's fairly obvious (even to managment) why. There's no reason the same reasoning shouldn't be applied to databases.
In fact, I've worked on a few projects in which the management eventually gave up on the fancy database version, because our "preliminary test" setup that used the unix filesystem did everything that was needed, was an order of magnitude faster, required no memory other than the usual libc and kernel filesystem drivers. Why pay good money for a system that doesn't do anything extra, needs more resources, and costs more?
Of course, as the DB and WP folks know, there's a good market for their products. Some customers do need their extra capabilities. And I suppose it's no surprise that they would also push their products for situations where they aren't needed. More income is better than less, after all, even if it means conning customers into buying things that they don't need.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Many many small processors without a fast interconnect will give good database performance if and only if all the operations are wonderfully parallelizable, and don't require coordination.
This is somewhat hard to arrange(;)) A bank, for example, always debits one account when it credits another, so in the general case ties up two machines for every operation. If there is another transaction outstanding against either of these accounts, you've tied up three. Think about how well this scales in a busy bank branch and you can guess that the dominating cost is the coordination. This is true for most thing you *use* transactions for, pretty much by definition.
That works best on a machine with a really fast locking regieme, which in turn you need a backplane like a Cray. That's what you get when you by a Sun or IBM machine: hardware to make database transactions go fast.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
To Oracle, Sun is worth the value of Sun plus the value of IBM not having Sun. That is more than it is worth to anybody else.
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