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Oracle Ordered To Pay $3B Damages To HP (bbc.com)
Oracle has been ordered to pay HP $3 billion in damages by a California jury over HP's claim that Oracle reneged on a deal to support HP computer servers running on Itanium chips from Intel. Oracle said it will appeal. BBC reports:The court battle over the contract was settled in 2012 but the damages HPE was due have only now been agreed. HP was split into two in 2015 with HPE taking over the running of its servers and services business. In court, HPE argued that although the 2012 legal judgement meant Oracle had resumed making software for the powerful chips, its business had suffered harm. It argued that Oracle took the decision in 2011 to stop supporting Itanium in a bid to get customers to move to hardware made by Sun -- a hardware firm owned by Oracle. Oracle said that its decision in 2011 was driven by a realisation that Itanium was coming to the end of its life. It also argued that the contract it signed never obliged it to keep producing software in perpetuity. Intel stopped making Itanium chips in late 2012 and many companies that used servers built around them have now moved to more powerful processors.
It is however Oracle's fault they signed a contract to support Itanium then didn't.
HP is done. Dividend out the 3 billion, sell the server business, drive a stake through the heart of what's left of EDS and close.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
HP owned Alpha and PA RISC, both respectable established architectures. Alpha in particular gets a lot of praise.
So why did HP dump them for Itanium? Simple answer: Because it was going to cost too much to stay competitive.
HP couldn't afford to keep designing their own processors. Designing high end processors is expensive, and the costs were escalating. HP would need to spend hundreds of millions (if not over a billion) dollars on R&D. And the spending never stops. Processor designs have a limited lifespan -- you've only got a few years before the competition leapfrogs you. HP realized they couldn't sell enough servers to cover those costs.
Itanium turned out to be a complete disaster. "cluster fuck" doesn't even begin to cover it. But that doesn't mean HP was wrong to ditch Alpha and buy processors from a processor company. You need to make decisions about these things years in advance. We can look back now and say that Itanium was an eipc failure, and wonder how HP could have been that dumb. But that's not how it works. At the time the decision had to be made, it wasn't unreasonable.
P.S. Despite being direct competition to Itanium, HP was an early supporter of the AMD x64 architecture. HP sold lots of servers with AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors, and helped push commodity servers to 64 bits.
P.P.S. I don't know anything about the legal merit of HP's case against Oracle. I do know that Larry Ellison and Oracle deserve to get kicked in the nuts as often as possible. So I'm happy they have to pay $3B to HP.