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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"
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.
Compare that to fines levied against European companies and you will see that there is no difference. You were flagged troll for your content-free angry pro-American karma pandering. You thought you'd get a quick karma boost from anti-socialist, libertarian, and pro-American moderators, which you may yet get if you stop whining and present some actual facts. Cherry-picked anecdotes don't count, give us some figures to back up your butt-hurt position.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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
But $1.5B is in proportion to the fines given to some European companies. (And EU companies are fined by the EU, but it doesn't make the news in the USA.)
(PS Post in ~4 hours when all us Europeans are asleep, and the Americans will mod you up.)
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.
So? The EC fined Telefónica (a spanish telco) with 150 millions. And the fined EON (german) and GDF (french) with 550 millions each one for being a cartel. And the fined 11 european and japanese companies with 750 millions (including 330 millions for siemens, which is german).
And in my opinion, the EC is just doing what EEUU should do but doesn't.
You lose your geek card, please hand it over.
NEVER misquote Yoda.
My Babylon
"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.
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
..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.
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.