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Sun Microsystems To Cut 3,000 Jobs As Oracle Deal Drags On
afgun writes with news that Sun will be shedding 3,000 jobs, roughly 10% of their workforce, as they continue to lose money while waiting for EC regulators to approve their acquisition by Oracle. "Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said Sept. 22 that Sun is losing about $100 million a month as the transaction is delayed by the EU probe." James Staten, an analyst with Forrester, said, "The longer a cloud of uncertainty hangs over Sun, that drives customers into delays of purchases or into the hands of competitors. This is a very trying time for Sun and Oracle as they wait for an answer." A spokesman for EU Competition Comissioner Neelie Kroes said today that she "expressed her disappointment that Oracle failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition problems or a proposal for a remedy to the competition concerns identified by the commission," and that "a rapid solution lies in Oracle's hands."
Not quite. In the U.S. the primary concern of anti-trust review for mergers and acquisitions is if it benefits or harms the consumer. In the EU, the primary concern is if the merger adversely impacts competition in the market. The failed acquisition of Honeywell by GE was blocked by the EU after being approved by the U.S. The U.S. review stated that bundling of avionics and engines, with some oversight of aircraft leasing by GE would reduce costs for aircraft and, as such, would not harm the consumer. The EU ruled that the merger would provide GE an unfair advantage against European jet engine manufacturers and blocked it.
What the EU has been driving at is the assimilation of MySQL by Oracle.
Even as a Postgres user I'm willing to admit that MySQL is used in a much larger number of databases.
So the issue isn't that there is an alternative, it's that a significant number of people are using MySQL in production environments.
And believe it or not the EU considers that there is a serious amount of momentum for the end user if they are already using MySQL.
The concern they have is that MySQL would be abandoned by Oracle. Leaving a large number of people with concerns about what they are going to do for support.
If Oracle would spin MySQL or seperate MySQL from the deal, this thing would be over in a couple of days.
Currently what Oracle and Sun are saying is, if you don't let us have MySQL we are going to start laying people off and it's your fault.
. So now they are playing a game of chicken.
The only problem is that the EU usually takes into account these type of tactics and realizes that no matter what happens a large number of people are going to lose their jobs.
Here in the US congress would be crying about the job loss we were creating by not letting the deal go through.
I'm becoming a little more impressed with the EU's dealing with these types of issues. They seem to be a lot more business savvy compared to the counterparts in the US.