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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."
Stupid article - so three coders (JRuby team) quit, and Sun's losing in sales to IBM (which they were doing anyway before the merger).
When a company is taken over, the corporate "feel" usually suffers. I have seen a few companies that were taken over from the inside (I experienced the take-over itself in one occasion), and the employers were never happy with it. And as always, the best people have the best chances, so they leave first...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Perhaps, it's just that the European Commission is just slightly less beholden to corporations than their counterparts in the US.
As far as I can tell their slowness to sign on to other corporatist things coming from the US has been a pretty good thing.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end.
How should they end?
Spectacular bankruptcy like Enron?
Seems like most in silicon valley do a slow fade into oblivion and are eventually acquired for peanuts and never heard from again. 3DO, Transmeta, Borland, Quarterdeck, SGI, etc...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The summary places a lot of blame on regulators. But in fact, the article quotes IBM claiming the announcement of the acquisition is what drove people to IBM; that obviously has nothing to do with subsequent delays. As for talent leaving, the article provides one example of 3 employees who left because they were unsure of Oracle's commitment to their work. However, there is no reason to assume the EU or DOJ have anything to do with this. Oracle could have reassured them at any time, if they knew, and cared, which isn't a very realistic expectation for a small team in a big merger. What is motivating the story submitter to put so much unwarranted blame at the feet of the EU and DOJ?
Nah, if it were just that, they'd have said yes or no by now. It seems they really do like abusing american corps.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Evidence in the form of the number of actions taken against American firms, as opposed to actions taken against European firms would really help make your case. For bonus points, show that American firms don't actually deserve the 'abuse' by committing more crimes than their European counterparts. Without some sort of evidence, your post is simply pro-American, anti-European jingoism. Probably boiling down to either 'Capitalism GOOD, socialism BAD!' or simple flag waving nationalism, rather than any kind of logical thought process.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There seem to be two points in the article and summary. The one that makes sense is that the slowness of the merger is murdering Sun's business. The other is that the slowness is causing people to leave. I doubt the latter is true. People do not want to work for Oracle, fast merge or slow merge.
So, are you saying American businesses are too stupid to avoid bad business situations? You make it sound as if you think of Europe as our enemy, rather than our staunchest allies. I mean, how DARE they provide better health care for less money than we do and make our capitalist health care system look bad? How DARE they get 32 hour work weeks with minimum one month of vacation. Here we are, working our asses off, and we aren't any happier than them for it. The bottom 80% of our society aren't any richer for it, either. That's just not fair, and obviously, they are evil for not fellating their owning class like we do. Why, if they aren't stopped, our peasantry might just get uppity ideas on their heads and start thinking they should get a share in our increase in GDP.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Both dTrace and ZFS represent substantial contributions to the state of the art in the operating system world.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
In a cathartic orgy of violence in the third act, in which everyone dies except the narrator, who is finally revealed to be an obscure character who was shown briefly in the second episode and everyone forgot about in the meantime.
Oh, sorry, I was reading TVTropes.
If the EU is actually delaying anything over this, then they're either doing it for political reasons or out of incredible incompetence. MySQL is open source and has already been forked. So what if Oracle gets ahold of the IP behind MySQL?! They cannot close source MariaDB, Drizzle, etc.
The US just approved this merger about a week ago. An additional week is certainly no proof of malice. Even if it takes longer, it might be due to more intensive oversight, as the EU seems to simply take the job more seriously.
You could argue that in-depth oversight hurts businesses, but it's a common fallacy here to attribute it to Anti-Americanism, even though there's ample evidence that European and Asian country are often hit just as harshly as American ones. See for example the then-highest cartel fine against countries from Belgium, the UK and Japan.
Fleur de Sel
My two cents: It doesn't suck to work at Oracle. Pay is fair and above market, benefits are good, employees are treated fairly, and there are a lot of exciting projects going on to choose from as a techie. If you don't like what you're doing for a living, there are numerous opportunities always available in something more suited to your interest, and telecommuting is encouraged in most "talent" positions, so relocation is largely a non-issue. The employees I work with (admittedly, we're a rack-monkey and operating system nerd crowd) are generally optimistic and excited about the merger.
Yes, as part of the M&A process there have been layoffs from time to time. With the exception of hostile takeovers, they are fairly predictable in advance, severance is decent and fair, the door remains open if you decide to rejoin the company later, and as far as a huge Fortune 500 company goes, it's a really decent place to work. If you work in some of the larger locations there are nice benefits on-site for free or at really reduced prices (gyms, cafeterias, massages, to name a few), and there is a lot of employment flexibility.
Of course there are annoyances like paperwork, lengthy project approval processes, ITIL compliance, SOX compliance, and so forth. Welcome to working for any large company. But to say "People do not want to work for Oracle, fast merge or slow merge" is simply false. By and large, it's a good company to work for, and the low turnover rate and lengthy average employment time amongst extremely talented and well-educated people speaks to overall job satisfaction.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
"Silicon Valley legend"? Sun made it's fortune by taking BSD Unix and commercializing it, selling it pre-installed on boxes. Sure, most of the enhancements made to PCs over the years appeared years earlier on Sun workstations (e.g. CD-ROM drives, sound cards, and Ethernet), but ever since the rise of Linux as a viable alternative to Unix, Sun has been floundering about looking for a viable business model. Spark CPUs? Give me a break; no matter how good the initial design was, if you don't have the several billion dollars a year Intel is putting into R&D to improve the chips, you're fighting a losing battle. Java? Great idea, but you give it away for free, and never have figured out how to make money off of it. Now they can't compete in hardware with off-the-shelf X86 boxes, and they can't compete in software with Linux (being supported by their rival IBM). In short, they have no real business model and no real reason to continue existence. Oracle is doing them a favor by offering to buy them out. Oracle has been trying for years to sell a database appliance with Oracle preinstalled, but they keep running up against that "can't compete with off-the-shelf X86 boxes" barrier too. Sure, Sun invokes fond nostalgia for many, many Unix nerds, but face it -- it's dead, Jim.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You're blatantly wrong here. The reason the IBM - SUN merger didn't go through is because SUN walked away from the deal.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3813841/
You lose your geek card, please hand it over.
NEVER misquote Yoda.
My Babylon
I really think it's Capitalism at its best! If Sun had been minding the business store and its marketing plan had been sucessful it would not be being eaten by wolves today. It's not reasonable to blame the EU or IBM either. The EU is looking out for itself (and European citizenry), and IBM is doing its job by killing off the competition.
I'll take it. At least if it's France (#1), Italy (#2), Belgium (#21), or really anywhere better than the US (#37). Forget the talk show "rah rah rah U-S-A U-S-A" nonsense. If you think the US health care system is legitimately "the best", tell me by which measure.
"This is not how a Silicon Valley legend should end"
It's almost fitting considering how some of Sun's best customers were left out in the cold with bad CPUs and RAM, while Sun lawyers (waving signed NDAs in hand) were more prevelent than Sun Support engineers. Remember all the press about that? What, you don't? It's because it was silenced by Sun.
US health care system is fine. The US health insurance system sucks balls though.
Yuma, AZ...You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
If they didn't care about selling in Europe they could just ignore them and cease operations there. I don't see it being worth it to either oracle or sun for that to happen.
Misquoting Yoda cry baby Jesus makes.
How can the European Commission block the merger of two US firms?
The short answer is that they can't. The companies are free to go ahead and merge without receiving EU permission. They are also free to not sell anything in the EU or be fined heavily if they attempt to do so. I doubt that Oracle wants to give up this lucrative market.
Why do so many of my fellow Americans have trouble understanding this? Are you dense? Governments do this sort of thing. They actually want to have a say about what gets sold in their countries and by whom. And, frankly, what you think of the practice is irrelevant, unless you can get enough people to agree to convince our government to negotiate a treaty or declare war, since you have no voice in any government but that of the US. Suck it up...
That is all.
Slashdot user 1049312 tells Slashdot user 926 to hand in his geek card. I never thought I'd see the day.
Although really, the correct syntax is "Geek card you lose. Hand it over you must."
I am officially gone from
It's not really fine. Well, sort of. The health care system has major problems because no one can really afford it without insurance. In fact, if you try and purchase medical care, the hospital will charge you more than they would charge an insurance company.
Insert witty
..the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms...
Oh, horseshit. I've worked in American companies with European offices for years and have seen no such thing. Europeans are just as happy to take American dollars as anyone else. The EC countries do, however, have rather more stringent antitrust laws than the United States (and more consumer protections, more privacy laws, and so on). If you do business in a country, you have to respect their laws, just as European countries doing business in the US have to respect our laws (or our lawlessness in many matters). That Microsoft and Oracle -- two companies that are hardly well-loved here -- have had trouble in Europe hardly constitutes a pattern of "abusing American firms".
It may be that the real issue here is that Oracle, like Microsoft, gets off on anti-competitive practices, and as a result often finds itself up against laws against the same, in Europe as well as the US.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
By massive corporate profits, of course.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
If you think the US health care system is legitimately "the best", tell me by which measure.
People throw that study number around without actually understanding what was going on. Let me explain a bit about that study, then you can decide if you think you want to continue using the study as evidence of anything.
I've written down the criteria in this form-
Criterion (weighting %) : US Ranking, explanation.
Health Level (25%): 24
This is primarily ranking based on life expectancy.
Health Distribution (25%): 32
This is primarily based on child survival rates vs. wealth. You get a bad score if poor kids die while rich kids live.
Responsiveness Level (12.5%): 1
This is based on a survey of health care users about choice of doctor, access to care, quality of care, and outcomes. Generally, when people think about whether they have a "good" health care system or not, these are the criteria they are generally talking about. US ranked 1, Switzerland 2, Luxembourg 3, and Denmark 4.
Responsiveness Distribution (12.5%): 3-38
This looks at the scores of responsiveness above, and cubes the mathematical difference between responsiveness scores of disadvantaged groups vs. all other groups. In this category, the UAE which ranked 30th in responsiveness was ranked number one in distribution of responsiveness. E.G. the disadvantaged got roughly the same care as the advantaged.
Fairness in Financial Contribution (25%): 54-55
Again, measuring the distribution of % of household income going to health care across various economic segments.
Based on this weighting, the aggregate US ranking was 15th. This is the Attainment ranking.
The Performance Ranking is the number you refer to (France 1st, US 37th). It is a calculation which uses a formula much to complicated for me to understand, but essentially they made a model which calculates what they think the life expectancy in the country should be given the expenditures. That is, it's sort of a misnomer- it is not Performance, but Efficiency they are measuring. France scored best because the model created determined that their life expectancy is closest to the theoretical maximum predicted. People (rightly in my opinion) get worked up over this ranking because it's not really based on facts or performance, but actually a prediction of life expectancy. Japan ranks number 1 in the world in life expectancy, but 10th in terms of Efficiency. It doesn't make much sense.
I see several big flaws with this study, but feel free to ignore me if you're looking for ammunition to bash the US health care system:
1) You really have to wonder if life expectancy is the best way to be comparing health care systems. The vast majority of expenditures in the USA are on procedures, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, etc. that are not designed to increase life expectancy. Whether that is the right or not is up for debate, but it does explain why the US scores poorly in efficiency.
2) Distribution of care makes up the bulk of the ranking whereas quality of care and outcomes makes up 12.5%. The US gets bonus points for having the best quality of care when you go to the doctor. We get serious dings for having different quality of care for rich and poor. We also get serious dings for the way our population takes generally poor care of ourselves (smoking, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, etc.). If you think poor care by doctors is the reason for the obesity epidemic, then feel free to believe in this study. Me- I don't know a single person who truly blames doctors or the health care system for our lifestyle choices.
3) This study was done once (in 2000). The methodology was so poorly designed that it wasn't funded again by the WHO. It's not exactly the type of study you want to be throwing around as the definitive ranking on health care systems.
They don't need foreign approval to merge.
What they need to know is whether they'll be allowed to sell their products and services in that very large foreign market if they do merge.
The confusion, I think, is because it's a kind of mental shorthand to think of it as merger approval, when that is not actually what is under consideration right now.
I hope this clears it up a bit for you. There's no question of sovereignty here. There's only a question of money -- Oracle shareholders would not approve the merger if the EU would not allow merged company to conduct business there, since they'd lose billions.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I read the 'tearing sun to shreds' article and it sure was exaggerated.
The article title is "Defections Batter Sun Micro.".....whatever. Three jruby developers left, and they didn't go to IBM.
Next the article talks about 170 sun customers going to IBM. And then mentions that none of Sun's big customers have switched to IBM. I wasn't able to find the total Sun customer count...but I'll take a guess and say that 170 is less than 1% of their total.
I know that Sungard.com's Luminis portal for higher ed is mostly installed on Solaris, and there are 75+ installations of that one application alone. One app (Luminis), for one business type (Edu), is nearly half of this "massive exodus" away from Sun.... give me a break hehe.
The New York Times says:
Another issue that may have led the Europeans to take more time over the case is the way that Oracle has handled regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.
Oracle notified E.U. regulators of its deal in late July, more than two months after it had informed U.S. officials.
European merger watchdogs can take a dim view if companies spread out their notifications between jurisdictions over long periods of time, and they have said in the past that such tactics might be designed to pressure the Europeans to give the green light to takeovers already approved in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/technology/companies/04oracle.html?_r=1&hp
This is a nice analysis of the study, thanks.
However flawed, having lived in both France and the USA (as well as other countries) I have an opinion of course. I can attest that the level of care in France is pretty good (choice of doctor and general quality of care) as well as easily and cheaply accessible for all. I have a good friend being treated for cancer right now in France, and she is treated completely for free, with the best treatment available in the literature for her condition as far as I have been able to research, even though she is actually not French and currently unemployed. She will continue to get free care until she is cured (which, thank God, looks likely). That is pretty good in my book. This is not a isolated case, this is a policy.
Now in the US I have another friend who went through childbirth in a hospital L.A., a throroughly normal birth took place with zero complication, she spent 3 days in hospital with her baby, and was billed $15k by the hospital and $5k by her gynecologist. Her husband being currently not unemployed, her insurance took most of the bill but she still had a few hundred US$ to pay.
I'm sure everyone have their favourite horror story but here is another one on the US health care. Yet another friend of mine came back to college in Texas (A&M Uni.) from Ivory Coast sick with malaria. The college hospital did not find what was wrong with her. After a few days of very high temperature, she was transfered to Austin, where they suspected everything wrongly and were putting her on the list for liver transplant, until her parents turned up and told the doctors what her condition most likely was. After a few days of a quinine or equivalent regimen she was basically fine again and sent home. However her prolonged stay in hospital blew the ceiling on her insurance and she was left with a debt of many 10s of thousands of US$. With no other rescourse, she went to the TAMU lawyer and sued both hospitals for malpractice. This was settled out of court, and my friend eventually paid nothing, the lawyer worked pro-bono.
OK, these are perhaps anecdotal, but a bit more than that I think. My wife has had two kids in two different countries, neither being the US, and we never had anything to pay for childbirth. I'm pretty sure that if my malaria-affected friend had been treated in most western countries the doctors would have perhaps apologised for their incompetence and certainly refrained from sending her such an outrageous bill. I'm also pretty sure that you have to look far and wide in the US for a hospital that will give you top-level cancer care for free.
There you have in a nutshell why the US health system is poorly ranked. Having the best level of care in the world means nothing if one can't afford it, and if public health policies are driven by greed.
The US people deserve and can afford better.
SUN's problem was that they could not figure out What_to_Do, the reason for that was that the founders, Shah, Joy & Bechtalsheim all left and the stars of the second level of management were never sucessfully engaged, and the paren is exactly right, SUN, largely founded by those who jumped ship from DEC faithfully repeated DEC's most significant mistakes,
the Cult of the CEO, Olsen & McNealy
transfer control from Engineering to Marketing
getting into, and spending lots of money on, fights that are Just not Worth Winning, JAVA
SUN grew, and outpaced Apollo (domain) HP and the when HP bought Apollo's market share, both again.
But it did not take long for in-fighting and huberis to set in and bring SUN to where they are today,
so that Oracle is today's Compaq.
Oracle will kill both the SPARC and Java track as they exist today as neither can be monetized. It will be
very intersting if Java can succeeed on its merits, I hope not, Python is a far nicer language.
There are so many people working in the IT industry who are deficient in basic logic, it should scare you. We don't teach it in schools, it's little wonder so many people are so poor at it. We don't teach the basic logical reasoning fallacies, either. We are paying the price for this educational failure in so many ways.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I don't know how this became about health care, but considering the cost and quality improvements in every other industry that doesn't have governments' thumb on the scales, I think you should rethink your objection to health care as a commodity. Commodities by definition, have the price approach the marginal cost over time.
Heck, even food, which does have a good deal of governmental interference works very well using a commodity model. The poor in the US have a much larger problem with obesity than starvation.
Now, if you can tell us the reason why veterinary medicine is so much cheaper than human medicine for the same procedures and medications, you've got a start for telling us ways to improve the current situation.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
But they only act that way towards foreign countries.
FACTBOX-EU slaps 1.1 bln euro fine on E.ON, GDF Suez