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Oracle To Invest In Sun Hardware, Cut Sun Staff
An anonymous reader writes "There's been much speculation as to what Oracle plans to do with Sun once the all-but-certain acquisition is complete. According to separate reports on InfoWorld, Oracle has disclosed plans to continue investing in Sun's multithreaded UltraSparc T family of processors, which are used in its Niagara servers, and the M series server family, based on the Sparc64 processors developed by Fujitsu. However, Larry Ellison has reportedly said that once the Sun acquisition is complete, Oracle will hire 2,000 new employees — more people than it expects to cut from the Sun workforce. Oracle will present its plans for Sun to the public Wednesday."
I wonder what the motivation here is. Oracle isn't exactly known as a warm and fuzzy employer. Every time I've had to deal with Oracle products, it's painfully obvious that the people they have intentionally design their software to be difficult to support...and then they hire armies of low-skill consultants to "help" customers install their systems.
(And yes, I understand enterprise-grade software is complex. However, needing someone to guide you through all the quirks in the products or documentation just to get a proof of concept going is sad. I think SAP may be the only worse company in this "doesn't work out of the box" category.)
My guess? Larry is going to wipe out the current long-tenure Sun employees who know everything about Sun's products and replace them with low-skilled, low-salaried n00bs. My further guess would be that these employees would be in lower-wage countries as well.
IBM has been doing stuff like this for a while, from what I've heard...including offering people permanent one-way transfers to India along with the appropriate salary cut. Every time one of these crazy schemes comes to light, I really wonder what I should do with the rest of my career...I have at least 30 years until I retire!!