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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."
"The longer a cloud of uncertainty hangs over Sun, that drives customers into delays of purchases or into the hands of competitors...
I just don't see why Sun needed to use the cloud for uncertainty. Companies have been doing this for years without the cloud. Now they can't control it!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
So all the fuss is over mysql? which is free? How can there be a monoply on something free
Erm, she is called Neelie Kroes.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
This sig is intentionally left blank
I don't really get this. If you Oracle on Solaris is a good solution for you today, will it become a bad solution if the merger isn't approved?
Also, how do you produce "hard evidence that there were no competition problems"? Tell them you looked really hard but couldn't find any counterevidence?
I'm ambivalent about Sun and am definitely not an Oracle fan, but I don't really see the problems here.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why does Europe get to hold up a purchase of an American company by an American company? Or is that not the case?
Yeah, because when a company is tight on cash and needs to shed some people, they always dump the "top engineers" first.
I don't even know why Sun paid a billion for it in the first place. IIRC, most of the original people behind it have left and started their own companies around mysql open source forks, or gone to other projects. The supposed "ownership" Oracle will have seems mostly worthless. If they were rational they would have jettisoned MySQL at the first sign of EU resistance.
That said, I have little sympathy for the EU here. They're taking hundreds of millions of dollars out of Oracle/Sun's coffers due to the delays, then turning around and saying that the burden is on Oracle to prove it's innocence. If the EU is going to be so disruptive to businesses, they need to act quickly and with their own resources. I'm no fan of corporations, but the EU looks to be clearly in the wrong here.
SELECT * FROM oracle WHERE competitor = 'mysql';
Empty set, 2 warnings (0.01 sec)
If you've already sold the company then yes you do. And offer them jobs at your new startup of course...
I am a EU citizen and thus far I have been happy by what seemed to be common sence to me with the cases against Microsoft. However N. Kroes just seems to be absolutely fscking retarted instead of enlightened. Since when does a person or a company need to explain why it is doing good? I thought innocent untill proven guilty? What is this bullshit?!
Here be signatures
Does it do the public any good, if the regulatory agency kills the competitor being acquired, by delaying a decision?
By the time the acquisition is approved or rejected, Sun will be basically dead, and barely have any role as the competitor, anyways.
Surely this was rather predictable. Oracle need better lawyers who would have advised them. Where was their planning?
Why?
They aren't elected by locals losing their jobs, those probing the companies are appointed, and thus have no interest in rushing the decision.
Also a merger between the two companies will likely result in even more job cuts.
Did the US regulators have similar concerns? If not, why not? If they're genuine concerns - they sound like it - why is it just the EU that's following them up?
There generally seems to be a certain amount of frustration that the EU is holding up companies of US origin, although actually they have significant financial impact (and offices and presumably regional headquarters and subsidiary companies) in Europe too. Presumably Oracle and Sun *themselves* could have predicted these hurdles if they'd done their homework - is it really that outlandish to expect that merging two leading (albeit in different markets!) database companies would be a worry for the regulators?
Presumably Oracle and Sun would be welcome to merge if they had terminated their entire presence in Europe - they're not proposing doing that and one assumes it's because Europe is a big enough financial interest for them that they believe it's *worth the wait*. They may not have a choice, in practical terms, but one assumes they have years / decades of making money from their European dealings so it's not like the EU is just a plain dead weight for them.
This is the same EU that is cracking down on anticompetitive behaviour from MS and Intel, which generally seem to be popular moves with folks here. Would the tech industry really be in a better position if they reduced their scrutiny? Or if they applied it only to certain companies.
To me it seems a bit "convenient" that, in an economy where many jobs have to be lost anyhow (and as a merger is occurring, which may also naturally lead to job losses) people are blaming job losses solely on the regulators doing their jobs and not on sharp practice, opportunism or plain lack of co-operation from large multinationals operating in a cutthroat market.
Yeah, because when a company is tight on cash and needs to shed some people, they always dump the "top engineers" first.
Absolutely.
Engineers will make you money in the future, but sales & marketing make you money TODAY.
Apple will be able to cherry pick the top engineers from Sun and continue its relentless assault on every other version of Unix (and suck unix-alikes like Linux). GO APPLE!
Go zealots! Save that economy!
Top engineers left for greener pastures years ago. Few people with highly valued talent are going to stay aboard a sinking ship.
Top engineers cost more. You can keep two incompetent engineers or keep one competent one. Do you want to announce 3,000 job cuts, or 6,000?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Fuck EU.
Dragging the deal because of OSS product.
Stupid.
Haha, yeah! Fuck EU! Fuck America! Fuck the world! Let's be a bunch of angry teenagers and punch walls! I mean who in their right mind would cast doubt on the merger of the companies owning the two, by far, largest commercial OSS database products! And there is no chance in hell Sun/Oracle is using this as an excuse to lay off some unprofitable workforce! Fuck hormonal inbalance and puberty!
Kids...
I am the lawn!
To prevent a large monopoly from forming around a certain product, service or market? Seems like a good enough reason to me. Monopolies only benefit themselves (the companies that create them) and not consumers. In the EU, at least the government still cares about protecting the consumer. In the US, the companies run the show and the politicians.
Did the US regulators have similar concerns? If not, why not?
. . . like GM, Chrysler, Wall Street, Savings & Loans . . . etc. All looking for government bailouts.
Oracle's Ellison was willing to bankroll the rescue of Sun with his own money.
With so many other headaches on their plate, the government was probably just happy to see a solution for Sun that didn't require gobs of taxpayer money.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Quick someone buy this man a tinfoil hat
To prevent a large monopoly from forming around a certain product, service or market? Seems like a good enough reason to me. Monopolies only benefit themselves (the companies that create them) and not consumers. In the EU, at least the government still cares about protecting the consumer. In the US, the companies run the show and the politicians.
The unfortunate situation in this case is that the probe is using a "guilty until proven innocent" approach of things, thus causing 3K people losing their jobs. Where is the actual, sufficiently reasonable evidence that this merger will result in a monopoly? What other industries will get affected by it? IBM? MS? Large DB software writers? Server manufacturers? MySQL? Who are these potential consumers that must be protected by this evil merge of doom?
This shredding of 3K employees, probably translate to 3K households being affected, in an already affected job market. These are also white collar or almost-white collar workers who, as consumers to other services, will have to cut their spending. And that trickles down to blue collar jobs (in particular in the service sector), possibly affecting several other thousand households (not to mention the impact on the local economies where the bulk of the job shredding take place.) In market economy whether is in either side of the Atlantic, the less that white collar employees spend in their local economies, the more that it affects those that are under a lower income bracket.
So much for protecting the consumer. I agree that monopolies must be stamped out, but this is ridiculous.
Larry doesn't mind; the EU delay gives him a scapegoat for the layoffs.
Those of you fixated on MySQL: Sun sells hardware, software licenses and contract support to enterprises that use SQL Server, DB2, SAP and other direct competitors of Oracle, meaning the some DB2 users (for instance) will find themselves relying on Oracle for support of certified DB2 platforms... MySQL may be the least of whatever "competition problems" the EU has in mind
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Oh, nonsense. An organization the size of Oracle had to know that a merger like this would attract regulatory scrutiny. Every single news story about this has brought up that regulators would be looking at this one carefully. This shouldn't be a surprise that it's getting attention. Also, anyone who's paid attention to the Microsoft battles with the EU should have been aware they the EU competition regulators are much stricter than the US regulators.
Basically, for Oracle to pull this deal, they had a responsibility (I'll even go so far as to call it a fiduciary duty, since it's apparently costing them lots of money) to be ready for this scrutiny. This story seems to indicate that they weren't.
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.
But they aren't Rational. Rational is owned by IBM.
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Also a merger between the two companies will likely result in even more job cuts.
Sun has no way of surviving on its own at this point. So Sun is either acquired, or everyone at Sun loses their jobs, ala SGI. By the time this regulatory investigation completes there will be few left to cut.
The fact that you have little sympathy for the EU here, without any stated reasons - it is coming from the guts, is exactly why Larry managed to use this nonsense to hide their own evil reasons for the layoffs, by using people who bend forwards and follow up on the nonsense. Stop being Larry's instrument. You look clearly wrong here. And hey, I provided actual argumentation, unlike you.
MySQL is just a front end to a back end storage system. Perhaps the goal is to start peddling a commercial MySQL installation, compatible with current MySQL installations, but has an Oracle DB backend for more enterprisey features!
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Oracle failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition problems
I thought the accusers have to come up with the evidence in a court case?
Presumably Oracle and Sun *themselves* could have predicted these hurdles if they'd done their homework - is it really that outlandish to expect that merging two leading (albeit in different markets!) database companies would be a worry for the regulators? ........ Would the tech industry really be in a better position if they reduced their scrutiny? Or if they applied it only to certain companies. ...... To me it seems a bit "convenient" that, in an economy where many jobs have to be lost anyhow (and as a merger is occurring, which may also naturally lead to job losses) people are blaming job losses solely on the regulators doing their jobs and not on sharp practice, opportunism or plain lack of co-operation from large multinationals operating in a cutthroat market.
Yup... it brings back memories from the recent past when all kinds of people were whining, pissing and moaning about how evil regulators stood in the way of Wall Street in it's quest to make the world a better and wealthier place with innovative financial products and free market fundamentalist dogma. In the middle of this stirring chorus of people chanting "deregulation" in perfect harmony.... BAM.... alluvasudden we had our selves a global banking crash. Now those same people are asking: "where were the regulators?" It just goes to show that humans are funny critters with short and selective memories. IMHO Oracle is getting to be every bit as much of a problem due to their size and market dominance as Microsoft is and you could add quite a few other companies to this list of corporations that are getting way too big in various different tech markets (Apple, Google... the list goes on) without hearing any objections from me.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Read TFA more carefully! What Sun ACTUALLY has said is that the cuts are already part of a 1 year plan. Their complaint is that by holding up the deal, the EU is delaying FURTHER CUTS that they can't make until they are sure there will be Oracle personnel to fill those roles.
That is, they really wish the EU would hurry up and OK the deal so they can fire more people faster.
Other than that, Sun's problems are related to the delays in the deal only by coincidence.
The EU has listed specific concerns and is perfectly happy to move the process forward as soon as Oracle addresses them. It has not done so. Yesterday, right here on /. we read one suggestion (spin off MySQL) that would certainly take care of it.
As for U.S. regulators, it's no surprise they've already OKed it. They'll crack the sound barrier getting the rubber stamp out if your market cap is big enough.
I don't know the law in the EU, but in the U.S. supposedly all corporate charters are contingent on the corporation's existence being in the public interest. The government doesn't even seem to pay lip service to that here, but it is the law. Perhaps the law is the same in the EU but someone is actually upholding it?
If they were rational they would have jettisoned MySQL at the first sign of EU resistance.
The fact that Oracle didn't do exactly that is really the strongest indication that Oracle really did have some anticompetitive intent with the acquisition. I can't really see what (nefarious schemes to kill it off would most likely be unsuccessful, as would locking it in, etc), but then I could never really see what Oracle could get out of the acquisition.
They're taking hundreds of millions of dollars out of Oracle/Sun's coffers
Would Sun magically stop bleeding if the merger completed? Maybe if Ellison went 'k thanks oh btw you're all fired' on the first day. But really, in the short term I don't see the schedule of the merger really affecting the scale of the losses. The uncertainty of Suns customers wouldn't be ameliorated by having Oracle finalized as an owner, so pretty much the only thing that'd change would perhaps be the interest rate on some loans.
It simply isn't the EU that's causing the losses and they'd be there either way.
And there is no chance in hell Sun/Oracle is using this as an excuse to lay off some unprofitable workforce!
I think there's very little chance of that. Everyone knows massive layoffs are an inevitable consequence of most large-scale mergers, so no one is going to hammer Oracle too hard if they lay some people off when the merger is complete. Given that, they have little to gain by forcing Sun to lay people off right now. Also, there's no doubt that other companies, especially hardware manufacturers, are doing everything they can to exploit the uncertainty and poach Sun's customers. IBM and HP have both admitted as much. So, while the $100 million a month figure may or may not be exaggerated, Sun is definitely losing customers, and therefore revenue, at a very rapid pace these days because of this delay.
Also, until the Change in Control takes place, the companies are still required to operate as two separate entities. If it was discovered Oracle was exerting enough control over Sun to order them to shed employees, Oracle would be in a heap of trouble with regulators on both sides of the pond.
In case it wasn't clear enough for you, here are my reasons:
1) EU places the burden on Oracle to prove that the deal will not harm competition. That's not just.
2) Oracle has no real control over MySQL anyway.
3) Sun is quickly withering into a worthless husk of its former self the longer this deal is delayed.
Let me try to reconstruct your argument:
1') I don't state any reasons for disliking the EU.
2') Oracle is laying off these workers due to (unstated) evil reasons.
3') Oracle is using people like me who "bend forwards" to mask the evil reasons behind these layoffs.
I'm not sure what you're conclusion is supposed to be, but regardless, it's a horrible argument. (1') is clearly false as my reasons have been elucidated. (2') doesn't even make sense since Oracle doesn't even have control of Sun yet. I'm not sure what the evil reasons are supposed to be, but regardless, a lot more people are going to lose their jobs the longer this drags on. (3') isn't true in the slightest. I have no love of Oracle and would never recommend their products to anyone. I am not particularly happy to see Sun buy Oracle but I'm even sadder to see a somewhat open source friendly company like Sun wither away due to the delays of the EU regulators.
People use MySQL because its free, simple and easy. If they wanted an expensive Oracle DB they would be using..... Oracle.
There is a near certainty Oracle is looking to mess with MySQL one way another or they would have spun it out of this deal already and it kinds of looks like the EU knows it. Oracle can't exactly kill MySQL since its open source but they sure can mess with it in to the future and force a migration to a fork and a new brand name which is usually messy. I doubt Ellison has any love loss for MySQL considering A) he is ruthless and B) MySQL and other open source DB's have cost him billions over the years.
@de_machina
I don't see how the EU dragging its feet one way or the other is helping anybody but Sun's competitors. I suppose the theory is "competition" will be promoted by poisoning a weak competitor. There's no "yes/no/x stipulations", there's just feet dragging.
It's not the EU that is causing these job losses, it's Sun's piss-poor management that caused them to need to be bought out in the first place.
--"insert clever quote here"
Exactly right. Chances are Ellison is loving this since he can blame the carnage on the EU, he gets SUN to take all the charges for the layoffs, and he gets rid of people he would have fired the day after the merger closed anyway. Only interesting question is if Schwartz and SUN decided who got canned or if Ellison and Oracle are deciding. Chance are SUN at least consulted with Oracle on who got the ax.
@de_machina
Sun and Oracle hardly have a monopoly on anything on their line cards.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Those jobs (and more) were already lost once they decided to sell.
1) The previous commenter is correct (making slashdot incorrect); the EU Commissioner in question is NEELIE KROES, not "Nancy Kroes".
2) Now why would the EU be interested in slowing down the progress of two AMERICAN companies in joining their efforts, hmmmm???
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
There *are* US regulators??
you had me at #!
And there is no chance in hell Sun/Oracle is using this as an excuse to lay off some unprofitable workforce!
I think there's very little chance of that. Everyone knows massive layoffs are an inevitable consequence of most large-scale mergers, so no one is going to hammer Oracle too hard if they lay some people off when the merger is complete. Given that, they have little to gain by forcing Sun to lay people off right now. Also, there's no doubt that other companies, especially hardware manufacturers, are doing everything they can to exploit the uncertainty and poach Sun's customers. IBM and HP have both admitted as much. So, while the $100 million a month figure may or may not be exaggerated, Sun is definitely losing customers, and therefore revenue, at a very rapid pace these days because of this delay.
Also, until the Change in Control takes place, the companies are still required to operate as two separate entities. If it was discovered Oracle was exerting enough control over Sun to order them to shed employees, Oracle would be in a heap of trouble with regulators on both sides of the pond.
They are losing money by choice. Oracle is obviously not too keen to provide substantial data regarding the antitrust claims, and meanwhile Sun could have sold off MySQL months ago. Whatever seven years of famine will follow this merger will be caused by none other than Oracle and Sun themselves and the power to end this charade is solely in their hands. Don't listen to the media bullshit, these are proper businessmen we're talking about, they knew the consequences before they played their hand. You don't get to be executive in Sun or Oracle unless you have a good bit of business understanding, although most people would like to fantasize so inside their cubicles.
I am the lawn!
Those jobs (and more) were already lost once they decided to sell.
Speculation. Could be true, could be false.
What we know is that EU is dragging its feet in letting an otherwise legitimate merger to occur. It is also a fact that Sun is bleeding as it's waiting for the merger to be approved.
Without knowing anything else, it is reasonable to assume that the continuous monetary bleeding caused by EU feet-dragging on an already economically hurt Sun is one of the main causes (if not the primary one) for jobs cut just announced.
You could argue that these jobs were already lost, and that might be true. Hell, it might be the simplest explanation. But simplest =/= correct or pausible. Considering the facts at hand at this moment, it provides a logically compelling picture of the financial harm that this situation is causing Sun.
It's not the EU that is causing these job losses, it's Sun's piss-poor management that caused them to need to be bought out in the first place.
Causation dude. Sun's piss-poor management caused them to be bought in the first place. EU's feet dragging is causing further financial harm on already screwed up company for no valid reason. Learn to separate your arguments dude.
The US is a Common Law country, for the most part, and almost all European countries use Civil Law/Roman Law [with the exception of England, Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland, but not Scotland]. The systems are very different in all aspects. From the power of judges to the nature of precedents.
The EU is very active with regards to competition law due to the nature of the institution. The European Union is NOT a federal government, and each member country is still a sovereign country.
The EU and associated institutions legislate, monitor and adjudicate only on matters that are of importance to the whole community. Trade is centrally regulated with the goal of creating one large market for products, services and employees/employers. These are implemented locally within in each national system of law.
However due to the fact that each country may have different or other sets of laws and regulations related to products, take food safety as an example, if these laws stop/hinder products from other EU countries they may be in conflict with central EU treaties. Each country is looking to protect its own industries and jobs while at the same time hoping to win in other markets.
So because each member country is always looking for an advantage, they all work to make sure they are not getting treated unfairly. The result is an army of watchers intent on keeping the playing field *exactly* equal for all regardless of origin.
-----
Branches of American companies in Europe are not treated any different than European companies, the EU and it's member states don't care about the origins of a company - only the jobs, taxes and advances it makes possible in *their* country. That's why it's extra amusing to see angry Americans crying over the treatment so called "American" companies get in Europe.
why is it just the EU that's following them up? Because the US govt is just a branch of the corporates.
you had me at #!
More to the point, provide a migration path. Once you've got that Oracle license, why not migrate all of your MySQL apps over to using it? Oh, they all use weird MySQL extensions? Never mind, you just need the new MySQL personality for Oracle which emulates all of MySQL's 'features' (even the data loss!) and lets you consolidate everything onto a single Oracle appliance.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You are a very, very stupid person. Do you even know how much of Oracle and Sun's revenue comes from Europe? Or how many thousands of people work for them in Europe?!
They're VERY happy to make a lot of their money in Europe, and if they want to continue they have to follow local laws!
The same applies to large European companies doing business in the US! Recent examples include the Nokia's purchase of Nortel.
The top engineers don't get dumped, they leave. If you have the choice between staying with a sinking ship, with uncertain job prospects after a merger, and say going to work for Apple, which has more job security and stability at the moment, what would you do?
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Imagine you are a top engineer working for sun. I know it's a stretch, but try and hang with me here. Now imagine that you knew Sun was going to cut 3,000 jobs. You probably would, at the very least, spruce up your resume. You also might start actively looking for a new job. At the very least you'll probably actually answer the phone when the headhunter that has been bothering you calls again.
The problem with top engineers is that they generally have the skills and contacts that it takes to move fairly easily to a new job, but "fairly easily" still takes a bit of doing, and the more time you have beforehand, the better. So when things begin to get dicey at a company the best employees are often the very first to jump ship. After all, why go through the uncertainty of a round of layoffs if you don't have to?
In fact, right now only the very worst of Sun's employees are not actively looking for a new job. Only the folks that know that there is no way that they'll land a comparable job somewhere else are dedicating their resources to hanging onto what is clearly a sinking ship. Everyone else is moving towards the lifeboats.
I don't suppose it has anything to do with Oracle owning Peoplesoft, which competes directly with SAP (a European company)?
Afaict what tends to happen is that they start with early retirements, that means the oldest slice of your workforce, possiblly the most experianced too. OTOH they were people you would probablly lose in a few years time anyway due to normal retirement.
Then they tend to go for "voluntary redundancies", basically anyone who leaves gets paid extra for doing so. This means all your most employable people go find another job. Even if there is no payment for leaving people who can leave are likely to do so because they can get a more secure job elsewhere.
Only if both of those fail to cull enough people do they go for compulsary redundancies.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Had Sun/Oracle filed on correct time, they would probably have received the green light months ago. Instead they waited until the merger was approved in America to file in Europe, and it seems that the commission didn't like the appearance of being strong-armed into agreeing to the merger.
It gets even funnier when you consider that the Commission and the other European institutions are very large Sun/Oracle customers... both hard/soft and service wise.
"I don't even know why Sun paid a billion for it in the first place"
That's it. Fire the 3000 employees closer to whoever made this stupid decision.
Their marketing team should go too.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
It's not the EU that is causing these job losses, it's Sun's piss-poor management that caused them to need to be bought out in the first place.
This goes up to fundamental problems in their business model, I think.
Over the last decade or so I've noticed a common thread in the IT business - when businesses suddenly start saying they're re-orienting themselves around a "services" model, it draws only one picture:
(1) They no longer have a viable product to sell,
(2) They haven't invested sufficiently in R&D over the long haul to keep themselves technically relevant, and
(3) They've bought into a race-to-the-bottom, price-driven market, and have effectively given their margins away to companies living in countries with a better $Local_Currency:dollar ratio.
(I do not believe this applies to the FOSS model, because community driven projects have always been services oriented, not transitioning to that model - they work to a different beat.)
Sun's product set consists of a set of high end servers (acquired from Cray originally iirc, not internally developed), the "Java" brand and associated software test suite, a version of Unix that is very good but competing with a free product, and a lot of very nice and clever people who nonetheless are competing with equally good brains from overseas that have the advantage of a depressed local currency.
What's not to like about this model? Sun is obviously able to convert air to money, to have a cash flow at all.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
"Monopolies only benefit themselves (the companies that create them) and not consumers"
Well, we can debate if the fruit of monopolies has benefited consumers:
Xerox:
Ethernet
Press->Interpress leading to Postcript at Adobe
Laser Printers
Graphical User Interface
AT&T:
C and C++
UNIX
Laser
Transistor
IBM:
FORTRAN
DES
Fractal Science
Magnetic Disks
DRAM
As usual "common sense" depends on your point of view. So far the only thing that has happened in the Microsoft case was a big transfer of wealth from MS to the EC and forcing MS to create a new version of Windows nobody buys.
All this because of fear that MS might someday be a big player in the server market.
"Yes, the problem is that the rank-and-file know exactly which half could be cut."
Sure, the other half.
"For the economy to recover, those people will end up having to find something else (productive) to do."
It finally dawned on me why some conservatives refer to the rich as "the most productive individuals". Being productive is all about consuming resources and expending energy and who does that better than the wealthy?
"I don't even know why Sun paid a billion for it in the first place."
Perhaps Oracle thinks they can come up with another private antitrust case against MS that's worth more than a billion. Wasn't that why AOL bought Netscape?
They haven't invested sufficiently in R&D over the long haul to keep themselves technically relevant
As opposed to say, Dell? You're serious? This is Sun Microsystems for crying out loud. Not invested in R&D??? They routinelly used to invest a disproportionate percentage of their revenues in comparison to other companies. And they weren't technically relevant? Puh-lease.
Sun's product set consists of a set of high end servers
When was the last time you visited sun.com? 2001? Their low end line is relatively good and comparable to other similar vendors in terms of price.
Oracle didn't buy them just to fire them all and sell the building(s). Possibly some stupid stuff will be axed, but their long term technological strategy was and is sound. Maybe under Oracle's aegis they will be able to sort it out, hopefully.
Piss-poor management leads to being bought leads to this mess with the EU leads to job losses.
... job losses. If you take out the piss-poor management, none of the rest would have happened.
This is collapsible. Piss-poor management leads to
QED
--"insert clever quote here"
If you assume that MySQL is an important Sun asset that was a significant factor in Oracle deciding to make the deal, then they wouldn't jettison at the first sign of regulatory resistance, especially if they anticipated that there might be some of that.
If you assume that the various critics are right, and MySQL is mostly a threat to Oracle they want to kill rather than maintain, then the uncertainty about the future of MySQL created by the EU's regulatory attention, and the damage it can do to MySQL in the market, is valuable to Oracle and serves the exact same goal that the critics think Oracle would be seeking to advance by buying Sun then killing MySQL. Plus, it lets Oracle blame it on the EU.
So, I fail to see the justification for your conclusion that "if they were rational they would have jettisoned MySQL at the first sign of EU resistance".
There's a certain irony that a company is being driven into bankruptcy (yeah they are a way from that, but that is where the trajectory points) by a process accusing them of being so dominant the market cannot operate fairly. It really can't be both ways.
But really, in the short term I don't see the schedule of the merger really affecting the scale of the losses. The uncertainty of Suns customers wouldn't be ameliorated by having Oracle finalized as an owner, so pretty much the only thing that'd change would perhaps be the interest rate on some loans.
It simply isn't the EU that's causing the losses and they'd be there either way.
Sun's losses have everything to do with the delays in their acquisition by Oracle. What's happening is that Sun's future is now uncertain. Sun is either bought by Oracle or they go out of business. Businesses hate uncertainty. Sun may still be in business next year, or maybe they won't be. That's not reassuring. So businesses are dumping Sun's products left and right, even faster than they were before. It is likely that there would have been serious financial and market share losses anyway, but the EU delays have made things much worse than they otherwise would have been.
This whole thing is ridiculous and the US needs to take action.
Oh dear, what will U.S. do? Take off every F-22, for great justice?
While OS X Server is real underrated state of art UNIX which can do amazing things, Apple isn't and can't be a "server" competitor unless they allow OS X Server to run on "generic" x86.
While not widely known, OS X server can be used as a client, you can even play all the games on it even with better performance. So, they can't make "blade only" Apple OS X server. It would mean the end of "OS X working only on Apple hardware". I mean it is not AIX.
Forget everything, Apple can't compete in "support" department for servers. There is Big Blue there, Dell there, HP there and of course, Sun with decades old agreements and happy customers who expects same kind of service.
Of course, if you consider the things you can do with distributed computing (Xserve), spotlight (server version), it is sad but industry hates brand hardware without any competition. Java's (especially J2EE) success and mainframes coming back to life is also related to that trend, people choose Java because it will work anywhere, any CPU and even any OS with minor modifications.
My read is Oracle is using the threat of job losses to hold the EU's feet to the fire. No matter what kind of up-front work they've done it's a long, drawn out process. By threatening to cut jobs, especially jobs in Europe, Oracle hopes to apply political pressure on the regulators. Politicians don't like to be in a position where they might get blamed for job losses.
What kind of engineers do you think are left?
All the competent engineers left Sun already.
Politicians don't like to be in a position where they might get blamed for job losses.
Actually they don't mind too much (especially during recessions) so long as the job losses fall somewhere else than their constituency. Since EU commissioners are nominated by their home countries and serve 5 year terms, they're difficult to pressurize in the way you're thinking (and national governments find it very convenient to let the EU force them into unpleasant actions; shifts the blame nicely...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Actually it's our favorite monopolist, who's been identified on Groklaw as one of the complainants.
And MS now employs Monty Widenius(sp?), and is making a push before the EC against the GPL: see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091021164738392
I see it as astroturfing the EU: dredging up simulated public support for a bogus problem to distract the commission from it's own bad behavior. With luck, they can distract the EC until the current head leaves, then make a deal for reduced penalties...
And, of course, get back at Sun for all the uncomplimentary things Scott's said about them!
Me? I want the deal to go through, in part because Sun and Oracle customers often hire capacity planners (;-))
And also because Microsoft doesn't deserve to get away with it.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
They didn't expect Microsoft to complain to the EC about a non-credible risk to a product that MS competes with...
After the fact, one can see why MS wanted the EC and Ms. Kroes to be distracted from enforcing their rulings against MS. Beforehand, though, one wouldn't really predict that MS would astroturf the EC over MySQL, of all things!
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Sun is generating the kill list internally and submitting it for vetting by Oracle. Roughly 10 to 15% of people who would have been axed weren't because of consultation with Oracle.
Anon for job security reasons.
Wow, Xerox had a monopoly on computers, huh?
You've managed to completely ignore the fact that those companies had monopolies in a different market. Xerox had a monopoly on photocopiers, not computer networks and/or other hardware. AT&T had [has] a monopoly on telephones, not computer hardware. IBM had a monopoly on big iron, not programming languages or the other crap — and I would point out that FORTRAN was mainly to make their servers more attractive over competing/previous-generation machine language programming systems.
Find companies that continued to innovate after acquiring a monopoly in their target market, compare it to the list of companies that don't, see which is longer.
I doubt Ellison has any love loss for MySQL considering A) he is ruthless and B) MySQL and other open source DB's have cost him billions over the years.
Or so he would love for you to believe.
Use of MySQL does not mean that those users would have used Oracle if MySQL (or other) was not available. They could have easily turned to any of a dozen other commercial database products.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
We called it "brightsizing" at UPS back in the mid-90s.
All your bright employable people head for the exits.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
The "top engineers" bail out quickly because they don't want to work in a project team where moral is low due to employment uncertainty.
Happens in every company - they'll either work for competitors or set up their own consultancy.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
False alarm.
The BBC's story has been amended to read, "has promised not to sell off MySQL to get the deal approved".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ask any head hunter how easy it is to poach people from Sun - NOT.
I know people that work both at Sun and at Apple and I can quite confidently say that there would be some cultural mismatches.
There are a lot of talented people still at Sun because they enjoy being at Sun, despite the rocky ride that has been the last n years and despite the numerous approaches from head hunters. People I've spoken to have said they'd want more than a 15% increase in salary if required to jump ship because the value of the Sun culture and workplace environment.
Can you spend 2 months telecommuting from interstate because you want to spend time with your mother before she dies? How do you put a value on that? Some bay area companies (hint: VMWare) do not allow any telecommuting.
No, this is the cost of doing buisness in Europe, for any company. Be it American, African, Asian, European etc.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
What can Oracle do now? No one will spend anywhere close to one billion for MySQL.
In effect EU regulators are asking Oracle to burn one billion dollar.
Excellence is an attitude.
So, the EU Comissioner asked Oracle for "...hard evidence that there were no competition problems..." Gee, I wonder why they were unable to produce evidence of a negative quality? Was Oracle expected to investigate every possible competition problem and assure this fool--er, person--that none were valid? If this quote is accurate, it would seem to make a strong argument for biased treatment of this merger.
It is no coincidence that Oracle has said precious little regarding MySQL (and also regarding Solaris and OpenSolaris)
MySQL is the most popular database for web deployments, if you think there is no conflict to be investigated then you are either naive or malicious, only you know.
Governments can't just decide to ignore their own rules and regulations if jobs are at stake, such attitudes would lead only to corruption and undermining of the rule of law.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sun's dire economic predicaments have been brewing since the collapse of the dotcom bubble.
Sun, for reasons we could spend days discussing, failed on the execution of their tactics and put themselves in a position where all the good work they made may disappears or be substantially changed very soon.
That lack of good business execution came way before the Oracle takeover and the EU investigating monopolistic concerns.
it is also worth nothing that official government bodies of any kind should do their job as they are tasked to do. The EU is not dragging their feet, they are clearly stating that they have requested documentation from Oracle and this has not been forthcoming. How this is the EU's fault is left to be explained to people that are more acquainted to explain false jumps of logic.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sorry, but the people that decide if a merger is legitimate or not are working on it.
We are glad and very flattered to know some people around here have access to all the pertinent facts, but we would prefer that you go back to deciding the issue rather than waste your time ranting in Slashdot.
Wait, unless you have no grasp of all the facts and are assuming too much while knowing too little.
In any case your claim is ridiculous, there are legitimate monopolistic concerns (most glaringly the situation of MySQL) and it is just unfortunate that Oracle and Sun don;t move faster in order to provide all theinformation the EU competition authorities need in order to deal with this faster.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Well, we can debate if the fruit of monopolies has benefited consumers: [list of inventions/achievements follows]
Have you ever stopped to think about how luck was a great part of how successful much of these inventions were? And how it might not have been caused by the inventor having a monopoly in a certain market?
So -- UNIX was invented at the right place, at the right time. Why? Because the whole world saw the need for a relatively easy to use multi-user, multi-tasking operating system.
Agreed, it's a totally hypothetical/academic question, but nevertheless I often ask myself: is there really a causal relationship here? Or do I just want to see one?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Sun may still be in business next year, or maybe they won't be.
And with Oracle, they may be committed to their current lines, or they wont, and the prices may skyrocket, or maybe they wont. Maybe you'll get some support. Or maybe any support will be fired (but hey, here's a metalink account).
For any customers that want reassurance, Oracle simply isn't it. Ellisons sales pitches don't really help, either he's not that up to speed on what he's buying, or he's being less than forthcoming. I'd bet the latter (especially in light of his calculations for turning a profit in a year), but neither is very reassuring. Words are cheap and nobody's going to commit to buying computers today on the promise of future investments in R&D.
So personally I don't really think it affects the loss of customers either way. Uncertain owner or uncertain future, both are equally good reasons to opt out of going along for the ride.
MySQL's creator and the EU are concerned about the future of MySQL in Oracle's hands. It's amazing that somebody on ./ still manages to give this story an astroturfing twist.
I'm surprised to hear that MS employs Widenius. Can you back that up?
I don't even know why Sun paid a billion for it in the first place.
easy .. to screw Oracle over (who was in turn screwing over their customers to turn more licensing revenue on CMT, HT, containers etc) .. if you look at statements McGnarly made just this past spring (before the IBM deal fell through) you'll find his references of Oracle as a cheap heroin dealer - which falls in line with their misguided tactic to try and take on the oracle empire .. of course now that they've accepted Larry's "drug money" - i don't understand why they don't just spin the whole thing off again .. unless they can't afford to, or there's no other tinkerbell investors who believe enough with their wallet ..
Maybe if the leading commercial DB company did not indirectly buy the leading OS DB company, this whole thing would have been done with ages ago?
It's not as if the EU hadn't jumped up and down yelling "Sell MySQL" all the time. If Elliot wants to play hardball.. Well, the EU can play it better.
The real problem here is that the EC wants to have it's hand in everything. There is no such thing as a monopoly except that which is granted by a sovereign government. Yes there are highly uncompetitive markets, but you still always have a choice not to buy something. I'm sick and tired of governments getting in the way of things that they have no business butting into. It's not their company...it's private (non-municipal) and they need to stay away.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
I think it's safe to say that if C and UNIX had not been created it's doubtful that languages and OS's filling the same needs would bear much of a resemblance to them. Both C and UNIX are pretty idiosyncratic.
I was answering the claim that monopolies haven't benefited anyone else and I showed evidence to the contrary. There's always luck involved in invention.
The inventors of a new technologies always have a monopoly at first by definition even if the market size is tiny.
The claim was that monopolies didn't benefit anyone else. I don't see any relevance to whether an invention by a monopoly is directly related to the core business or not.
I suspect the reason why these major monopolies were able to create so much was because they had money to burn due to their monopoly status. Smart companies do research to the extent they can afford it. You never know what you will discover or invent that might help your business.
If common sence was depending on personal point of view it wouldn't be called common, now would it?
Here be signatures
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Widenius sits on the advisory board of the Codeplex Foundation, the non-profit sponsored by Microsoft: http://www.codeplex.org/board-of-directors.aspx
As far as I can tell, Monty is employed by his own company, Monty Program AB. I did not find any indication in the groklaw article that Monty is employed by Microsoft.
There is of course the link with MS. I suppose that, in the eyes of some, he's just as much a traitor as de Icaza.
This is a bit OT (as it has nothing to do with Monty), but I just read this:
Software freedom activist Richard Stallman and others are trying to block Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. Why? Because MySQL is covered by the GNU Public License (GPL), and the purchase has exposed a flaw in the GPL that Stallman says will cause a “major setback” to the development of the free database if the acquisition is allowed to go through.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=1426&tag=content;col1
Will this impact the 'Yes' camp in any way?