Oracle Finally Decides To Stop Prolonging the Inevitable, Begins Hardware Layoffs (theregister.co.uk)

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Oracle Finally Decides To Stop Prolonging the Inevitable, Begins Hardware Layoffs (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on Friday September 1, 2017 @02:00AM from the so-it-begins dept.

Shaun Nichols, reporting for The Register: Oracle is starting layoffs that will hit its hardware division, The Register has learned. Current and some soon-to-be former staffers have whispered that the database giant is shipping out packages containing the paperwork for ending their employment. The workers have received alerts from FedEx that the packages, which will need to be signed for, are en route for a September 1 delivery. "One of my co-workers emailed that he received a notification from FedEx of a label created by Oracle America, Inc," writes one anonymous employee. "I just checked and a label has been created for my home address. This is in the US. Looks like Friday is it for Sparc MicroElectronics." The layoffs are hardly a surprise, given the performance of Oracle's hardware unit as of late. In the last financial year, Oracle reported hardware revenues of $4.15bn. By comparison, in 2016 the unit logged hardware revenues of $4.67bn. In 2015 it was $5.2bn, and 2014 saw $5.37bn.

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but don't forget kids! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-09-01 02:15 · Score: 0, Insightful

Electrical Engineering is a very lucrative career!
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/archit...
Now fork over all that cash to the cult, I mean university and you'll get a piece of paper worth marginally more than toilet paper.
1. Re:but don't forget kids! by Anonymous Coward · 2017-09-01 03:38 · Score: 0, Insightful
  
  Neither.
  Trump's ideas/policies are not in place yet.
  Yet while Obama was around things were bad for 8 years. Real bad. Everything was window dressing, pumping stocks with inflation, and faking numbers. But real private sector was full on conservative low risk mode.
  Now that a somewhat pro-business change has happened this pro-business future is priced in. So now we see risk taking, investment and hiring - betting on the future a bit more, etc. Labor participation still stinks and 8 year bull markets (not bull economy, just market) tend to get tired.
  On top of that FANG is holding everything up. I think the bull will correct soon, by late 2018.
  Obama was toxic to investment and risk taking and only the mega monopolies, oligarchs and large companies did ok during his tenure, small and medium business suffered horribly.
2. Re:but don't forget kids! by __aaclcg7560 · 2017-09-01 04:32 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Yea, like the compromises with the AHA? Oh wait, there weren't any. Democrats did that all on their own.
  
  You mean the 200+ amendments that were sponsored or co-sponsored by Republicans that were included in the final bill? Since the Democrats had enough votes to pass the AHA, the Republicans voted "no" and ate their cake too.
  
  The new administration signals a more promising environment for business, and it's showing in the stock market.
  The eight-year-old bull market is starting to show its age. What's going to happen when the stock market corrects itself and the economy will goes into a long overdue recession in the next two years?
  I'm building up a cash reserve in my brokerage account so I can buy stocks all the way down in the Pence recession.
3. Re:but don't forget kids! by dgatwood · 2017-09-01 05:12 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You mean the 200+ amendments that were sponsored or co-sponsored by Republicans that were included in the final bill? Since the Democrats had enough votes to pass the AHA, the Republicans voted "no" and ate their cake too.
  Forget the amendments. The entire design was a compromise to win Republican votes. The Democrats wanted to set up a single payer system, and the Republicans nearly ruptured an aneurysm, so they walked it back to a design that the Republicans said they would be willing to vote for, and then they still didn't.
  The Republican party are amazingly skilled manipulators. The Democrats compromise, allowing the Republicans to trick them into adding flaws into bills, and then the Republicans turn around and use the flaws that they introduced to help them attack "the Democrats' bills" so that once they gain enough power, they can put in something entirely different without having to compromise. It's utterly disgusting.
  To be fair, the Democrats attempt this sort of manipulation, too, but they're nowhere near as good at it.
  
  --
  Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Re: The Most Shocking Thing by Strider- · 2017-09-01 03:10 · Score: 3, Insightful

Yes, but if you get rid of the people, that capital equipment is worth a whole lot less because you got rid of the knowledge and skills to work with it, and likely sent a lot of that expertise to potential competitors.

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...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
People with more money than brains... by Anonymous Coward · 2017-09-01 03:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

And a nepotic or incestuously cozy relationship with the Oracle Salesguys.
I actually knew someone in the medical tech field whose company had a few dozen sparc servers left a few years ago. They even had a few later model sun/oracle fire servers as storage arrays.
However their last big licensing/sales renegotiation resulted in them getting Oracle x86_64 storage appliances instead and pulling out all of their sparc hardware, over concerns exactly like this.
Guess this is proof they made the prudent choice.
Honestly though, sparc was killed by oracles mismanagement rather than any performance limitations. If they hadn't kept trying to charge a 'big iron' premium and had priced their silicon slightly more competitively between Intel and IBM they could have retained or increased marketshare. But leaving their roadmaps hanging, charging fresh out the fab prices for multiple year old silicon without revisions, you name it, and it is no wonder Oracle's hardware sales have dwindled. If the customer doesn't trust that you'll be there in 10 years it is a bad bet to throw all in, especially on premium priced hardware requiring proprietary software.
The Sun buy is a failure by Tailhook · 2017-09-01 03:36 · Score: 3, Insightful

No one is buying SPARC. Solaris is fading away. OpenOffice is forked and everyone runs the fork. About the only thing of value Oracle has after buying Sun is Java; $7.4 billion for a language they can't really monetize. ZFS I suppose... another thing 90% of its users don't pay for.

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Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Ellison couldn't have done a worse job with Sun by Anonymous Coward · 2017-09-01 05:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

Ellison is a fool. I don't care if he's rich.
First, when buying Sun, a legend in the industry and the origin of countless software and hardware technologies everyone now takes for granted, he decides to exterminate anything with the Sun name on it.
SunSolve.Sun.com, an enormous wealth of technical and debugging information, gone in an instant.
Docs.Sun.com, an even bigger wealth of research and documentation (ever gone through their Blueprint docs? Phenomenal)... also gone. Yes, they pretended to copy everything over to Oracle, but they didn't. The vast majority was purged, what was left was filled with perpetually broken links, and they ignored any requests for docs that other (remaining) docs referenced. The wealth of info lost here is astonishing.
When a group published the Blueprints, Oracle went after 'em and shut 'em down.
Idiotic.
Next shot at his own foot was to pull out of OpenSolaris without so much as an announcement.
OpenSolaris.org? Shut down and purged from existence. (I managed to grab a tarball of their Solaris AD integration that predates the mismatched crap in Solaris 11 and got it working in Solaris 10, and in Solaris 11... works better than their official solution).
By this time they were well into the self-destruction phase where they were treating Sun engineers like absolute crap under their boots, so they drove the majority of them out. When internet legends are leaving your company en masse, you've done something really, really stupid.
Another shot to his foot was to eliminate the free license for education and personal use... every University still teaching Solaris immediately switched to Linux. Now those entering the market are trained in Linux (and have a poor opinion of Solaris, much of which is beyond what is deserved). WTF did he think would happen?!?
As if he has infinite feet, he takes another shot and removes all entry-level SPARC servers... you used to be able to get a T2000 for ~$2k. After this *($# move, their cheapest hardware was ~$40k! If I had his ear, I'd tell him "listen dipwad, it didn't work for IBM or HP, why the heck do you think it'll work for you?" (in reference to his "we only want the richest customers" approach). If you're thinking "but IBM & HP are doing well...", you're missing my point. I'm talking about their Unix systems. I haven't seen AIX in many years, and I haven't seen HP/UX in at least 2 decades.
Fast forward... they're still (up to recently) putting amazing R&D into Solaris & SPARC, but they fail miserably to properly market them. Solaris 11 is nothing short of astonishing. I love Linux, but it's barely approaching Solaris 10 tech at this point... and Solaris 10 is archaic compared to Solaris 11. The newest SPARCs are absolute monsters, and are actually starting to get slightly more affordable again (I saw a 64-core, 256-thread, 64GB RAM entry level machine for $9k early this year), but when you go to their sales pitches, they can't let go of their grudge against IBM! Every single benchmark and price comparison is against IBM's AIX hardware (which they apparently actually still make). I asked about x86 comparisons, as it was pretty obvious by some of the numbers that they could actually compete against Xeon offerings (which was actually mentioned by Ellison!) and they got pissed like I was heckling them!
Morons, the lot of them, but this all boils back to Ellison's ego. He's a moron, plain and simple.