Slow Oracle Merger Leads To Outflow of Sun Projects, Coders

An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems might have had a chance if the Oracle merger had gone through quickly, but between the DoJ taking its time and the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms, just plain dragging its feet, that won't happen now. As Sun twists in the wind, unable to defend itself, and Oracle is unable to do anything until the deal closes, IBM is pretty much tearing Sun to shreds. By the time this deal closes, there won't be much left for Oracle. This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[sunderland56]

Normally, silicon valley companies end like this:

• As the company grows, management makes engineering work on boring projects and support issues
• The top-tier engineers jump ship to newer, smaller companies for more interesting work
• The company limps along for a while with second-tier engineering
• The shell of the former company fades into oblivion and/or is bought out
• The new, exciting companies everyone went to become larger and more successful than the original

For example, SGI may have died, but nVidia and Mozilla (to name only two) are doing quite well, thanks.

Re:FUD article

[Red Flayer]

You discuss hardware and software.

Perhaps you are unaware that IBM is primarily a services company nowadays?

The hardware and software is a tool to sell services.

You know that's where Oracle is aiming for growth too, right?

For all the advantages you see for Solaris over its competition, IBM's service offering is miles ahead of Oracle right now...

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

We weren't in Silicon Valley, but our company ended like this: By 1999 we had grown to two offices and about 70 employees, had an award winning retail product and an online mall. We we're still private. After about 5 unsuccessful tries at getting VC, a Canadian company who processed credit card payments offered to buy us for ~$43M USD. They wanted our mall, so that they could make money in about 6 different ways from it. When the sale was announced but not complete, my stock was worth about $1.8M at their current stock price :) Unfortunately, they missed the point that our retail software was what generated the stores in the mall. As soon as the sale went through in 2000, they stopped development and sales of the retail product, laid off about 30% of us, and then gave the remaining people really stupid things to do for about a year while they slowly figured out what went wrong. At this point I was worth about $800K. :| For 6 months all I did was get paid >$100K/yr to drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and surf the web. Eventually there was a meeting at which they admitted that their business and our business (now basically dead) were irreconcilably different, and announced they were shutting down all US operations. I was on the street Jan 1, 2001, and my stock was now worth $1200 :( Incredibly, when a group of us that had worked on the retail product approached them asking if we could retain the source, trademarks, remaining stock, etc., with the intent of reviving it, we were told that they would never allow us to do this because it "would look bad to the stockholders". As if blowing $43M didn't look bad enough? D'oh!!