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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.)
Oracle won't kill MySQL. MySQL's accessibility hurts Microsoft's database division too much. Oracle and MySQL are two different markets, anyway.
It is likely that shareholders owning 62% of Sun stock voted for the Oracle deal. This is slightly different than 62% of shareholders (for instance, if 1 person owned 50% of the company, another owned 12%, and 15,000 people owned the rest, 0.013% of the shareholders would have 62% of the vote).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
As a former partner with Sun, I strongly believe that Sun's insistence on using an Oracle out of the box solution to for its company wide sales to service system is what caused its demise. This software never worked and increased case handling times in the call center. That decreased customer satisfaction to such a point that customers started going elsewhere. I also believe Sun should have never gotten into the x86 server/workstation market. Instead they should have focused their energies behind their flagship SPARC lines and actually produced a processor of their own rather than buying Fujitu's technology. Overall I think Sun offers superior products, but their customer support system is rather terrible.
I was there in the past few years. Basically, why SUN went south can be summarized as follows:
- hardware company in a rapidly shrinking margin-wise server market
- commodization of software
- change of strategy every two months (open source/not open source)
- disregard of customers (preparing solutions no one asked for, announcing projects while still on a drawing board - see JavaFX, treating low volume customers as "trash" etc.)
- easy going development pace, slow responses to customers bleeding money caused by bugs in SW/HW, a lot of monetary interest in senior managment to outsource parts of the work and profit on it personally
- brain drain (I was amazed by the "talent" intake in the past few months), OTOH many great persons have just left the company
- old boys network in the company (beware Google)
Anyway, the feeling at SUN was that Oracle was a better fit than IBM, though the expectation is to have massive layoffs in October.
Larry is a good friend of Scott, perhaps it's just personal prestige to conquer independent empire with some benefits such as SW/HW stack, all-in-one solutions, Java platform control and patent portfolio, or just another step in the ambitions of Larry to conquer the world. I am not playing golf with either of them...
In the end, I must emphasize SUN was a really nice company, the ethical standards were higher than anywhere else and the feeling of freedom was awesome. It's especially tragic to see the product of enthusiasm and virtues of so many people in the past to fall into the hands of Oracle...
"and dump MySQL altogether."
How can this been modded up as "insightful"??? Everybody knows it's not "dump mysql" but "mysqldump"!!!
(/me ducks away)