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Oracle Finally Decides To Stop Prolonging the Inevitable, Begins Hardware Layoffs (theregister.co.uk)
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.
Well, they should have seen it coming!
Of course, this is terrible news for the people losing their jobs. Nobody wants to have their livelihood taken away. But in other ways this is a good thing.
It shows the tremendous work these people did in creating extremely powerful hardware. But we're also seeing improvements on the software side, too. Virtual machines and cloud computing have vastly increased the utilization of the hardware we do have. It's no longer a case of a company having 20,000 servers, and collectively they're idle 85% of the time. Now the same company has perhaps 1,500 powerful physical servers running 20,000 VMs, and the physical hardware is idle only 5% of the time.
The switch to VMs has also put more focus on writing efficient code, and using efficient programming languages like C++, Go and especially Rust. Native, highly optimized binaries are back in favor, after we've seen the alleged benefits of just-in-time compilation never pan out. Fewer computing resources, and much less energy, is needed to run this highly-optimized software written in efficient and effective modern programming languages.
This vast increase in efficiency, both at the hardware and software level, will unfortunately mean that some people will become unemployed. But the overall effect is a net win for society, the economy, and the environment. We're now doing a lot more with a lot less.
Oracle Linux: you squandered solaris, one of the great operating systems of our time, and did everything you could to make it a complete pain in the ass to own. Now you expect to slap an Oracle sticker on RedHat Linux/CentOS and ancicipate people will care? You do know that all the well-defined chicanery in the oracle unbreakable linux distro is easily recreated in any distribution a customer could desire, right? and that these distributions dwarf your kernel contributions and community? if customers choose to do 'oracle' in say, Arch or centos, they not only get to skip the 5 hours on the phone with your tech support, but they get to skip the outrageous quarterly fees for the privilege.
MySQL: Shes dead, jim. All your best and brightest jumped ship a long long time ago to projects like Maria and Percona and now the only people who still use mysql are the ones that havent migrated off redhat 5 yet. In short, the customers that are either transitioning to windows or hired someone to move them to something else.
zfs: now this ones a bit of a controversy but stick with me here. What sun did to ZFS was great, but its licensing was crippled intentionally. You've had every opportunity as its owner to do something about that and you havent. There isnt much indication you will, so why not GPL or BSD it fully and concentrate on what you do best: shaking down customers for license fees. In the absence of competent licensing ZFS has been attacked on all sides from Redhats LFS and resurgent life support commits to the XFS tree, as well as BTRFS, which already handles disk pools, dedup, and cow and in a few months will handle multi device raid. So if you take any interest in ZFS stop hobbling the community.
oracle cloud: no one has heard of this, its hardly advertised, and is dwarfed by ec3 and other more competitive providers. just...stop.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The EE degree isn't the problem. It's taking out student loans to get a MBA and not being able to find a job to pay off the student loans. I have several friends who graduated with EE in the 1990's, decided to get their MBA after getting laid off during the Great Recession, and now do IT support because they can't find a higher paying job. It's a bit of shock to go from $200K per year to $50K per year.
What is better? To have one person making $200K per year paying $48K in taxes to support four persons barely surviving on $12K per year or four persons making $50K per year?
#DeleteFacebook
I have heard of other companies doing this funny accounting and failing before. Typically they do not account for sales they wouldn't do otherwise had the hardware not been there. So they should, IMHO, account for the SPARC hardware sales and services, Solaris OS sales and services, and Solaris OS dependent applications (e.g. Solaris Oracle DB) sales and services which they are in the position of being able to account.
Otherwise they might be cutting something they think doesn't make them a profit, and end up throwing the baby with the bathwater. Fact is hardware today doesn't cost as much as it used to. With 3rd party foundry services, you only need a CPU design team, which can be as few as like a dozen people or even less. Most of the cost will actually be in taping out first silicon, i.e. creating the masks to fab the first prototype, actually.
retiring on a total savings of *maybe* half a million at best at age 30 or so (after taxes and at least some semblance of living expenses)? Yeah that isn't going to pan out...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Had Sun open sourced Solaris sooner perhaps Linux would never have gotten a foothold in the market. Then again they would have also lost their competitive advantage. So being this late in the game, I think they would have been better off keeping the kernel on internal development, and switching all the tools to as many open source components as they could, much like Apple did.
As long as they designed the hardware to have higher RAS, or density, than what can be achieved with off the shelf x86 solutions, I think they would have had a market. Unfortunately Oracle simply does not understand the hardware market, and late stage Sun didn't understand the market, period.
Oracle should just focus on their services division, like the cloud services, and task their hardware division to produce hardware that works well in that environment, and then sell that product to the wider market to people who prefer to have everything in house.
I had a meeting with my manager and someone from HR the last time I was laid off.
You're telling me they announce lay offs by mail? What happens if I ignore the delivery?
Seems like a bad way to deliver bad news...
I had a meeting with my manager and someone from HR the last time I was laid off.
You're telling me they announce lay offs by mail? What happens if I ignore the delivery?
Seems like a bad way to deliver bad news...
Someone probably paraded some bullshit statistics in front of management that claimed the chances of an ex-employee going postal was minimized if you deliver a firing via postal worker.
How ironic.
If they were making 200K a year, modestly saving should have had them retired in 5 years.
That only works if you retire to Mexico, build a mansion (by local standards), marry an underage sweet thing and bequeath all your possessions to the village.
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.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Now that Obama is gone and his policies are going in the dust bin of history, we are seeing 3% growth rate in the economy.
We're getting 3% growth because of Obama's policies. Trump policies, if anything ever gets passed by the Republican congress, won't go into effect until next year.
Some got pissed - which I couldn't understand why.
One friend is mad at me for making more money than him in IT support. Never mind that I never took out student loans for my education and I've been working in IT Support for many years longer than him. Having in an EE and MBA doesn't mean squat in IT support when you don't have a track record of getting the work done.
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.
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.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Yet while Obama was around things were bad for 8 years. Real bad.
Thanks to the Republicans who spent eight years dragging their feet. They're still dragging their feet because it's easier to say "no" but saying "yes" requires compromises. Not with the Democrats, but with themselves.
The real argument is that they have been on a consistent decline, and are attempting to increase profitability by decreasing costs. In a downward spiral that's usually the harbinger of an eventual end since a decrease in personnel usually leads to a decrease in sales and profit, which begets a vicious cycle.
If they're lucky, they'll be able to trim some fat and stave off the shutdown, but given the declining revenue ... the writing is on the wall despite the stunning numbers involved (4 BILLION? Oracle can't figure out how to make a profit on 4 BILLION in sales?!?!).
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Today I learned that Oracle apparently has (had?) a hardware division. I'm amazed it's lasted this long, honestly. As crappy as their overpriced, proprietary software is, I can't imagine *also* trusting them with hardware. Sucks to be one of the workers, for sure, but you have to expect it when you choose to work for such a monolith. The faster we get to Oracle's demise, the better for everyone.
They bought Sun Microsystems waaaaaaay back. That hardware was rock solid for the most part when it was Sun. I'm unclear as to it's actual reliability after the purchase.
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.
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.
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.