Explaining Oracle's Sun Takeover — "For the Hardware"

blackbearnh writes "Brian Aker, former Sun MySQL guy, and current proponent of the Drizzle MySQL fork, gave O'Reilly Radar an update on where MySQL is at the moment. During the interview, he was asked to speculate on Oracle's original motives for acquiring Sun. 'IBM has been moving their pSeries systems into datacenter after datacenter, replacing Sun-based hardware. I believe that Oracle saw this and asked themselves, "What is the next thing that IBM is going to do?" That's easy. IBM is going to start pushing DB2 and the rest of their software stack into those environments. Now whether or not they'll be successful, I don't know. I suspect once Oracle reflected on their own need for hardware to scale up on, they saw a need to dive into the hardware business. I'm betting that they looked at Apple's margins on hardware, and saw potential in doing the same with Sun's hardware business. I'm sure everything else Sun owned looked nice and scrumptious, but Oracle bought Sun for the hardware.'"

Comments

Hmmmm.....

[feepness]

Not for the lulz as I originally supposed.

Re:Hogwash

[Third Position]

Ugh - make that "Oracle originally only made an offer for Sun's software assets.

Re:They are fleecing their customers !

[Billly Gates]

"The charge what the market will bear. You're just mad that you didn't think of that first."

The market will not bear this. Witness the rise of Linux. 10 years ago slashdot was a different place. If you dare say anything bad about Sun you would be modded into an oblivon similiar to bashing macs today. Solaris was God and linux was nice but a toy. Today bashing Solaris gives you mod karma.

This all changed 10 years ago because Sun charged $10,000 for a sparc 1 workstation and $1,000 more for each 128 meg module. At the same time 10 years ago a Redhat Linux 5.2 box from a generic pentium III could run circles around it for only $1,000. Why pay $25,000 for a SGI or sun workstation when a $1,500 could now outperform it! Gcc started to replace sun studio and java ides like netbeans and eclipse started taking over the $$$ borland Jbuilder and Visual C++. Database software is now finally catching up with postgreSQL. You can argue that mysql is getting better too I suppose. With the database software formally reserved to big iron we have no reason to use Solaris/Oracle except on all but the biggest data warehouses.

Vendors got greedy and monopolies and ogopolies created their own demise with cheap free solutions. Hostage with pricing can only go so far until alternatives become competition and customers will now be happy to jump ship.