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.

Comments

other inevitabilities they can consider.

[nimbius]

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.

Re:other inevitabilities they can consider.

[Anonymous Coward]

when people were excited to get a Solaris SPARC workstation.

They weren't excited because it was a SPARC workstation. They were excited because it was a Solaris workstation. For much of the 1990s, and even into the early 2000s, Solaris provided perhaps the best workstation OS experience around. It had the best desktop environments, it had the best userland software, it had excellent development tools, it had a lot of advanced functionality, and compared to its contemporaries it was very pleasant to use. Although Solaris workstations weren't exactly cheap, they were relatively affordable to serious users.

Yes, part of Solaris' appeal was due to its tight integration with the hardware, but the hardware itself was largely irrelevant to most users. It was the Solaris experience that they wanted and desired.

NeXT systems running NeXTSTEP were a real competitor to Solaris and SPARC workstations, but NeXT systems were prohibitively expensive for even many deep-pocketed business users. It wasn't until Apple came out with Mac OS X that this technology started to become accessible to a winder audience.

Solaris also started facing more competition from Linux and the BSDs at the low end, which by the early 2000s had started to mature. Interestingly, we've actually seen a lot of regression lately within the Linux sphere of influence, such as systemd, GNOME 3, GTK+ 3, PulseAudio, and Wayland. FreeBSD has managed to avoid these shenanigans, while actually incorporating some of the best parts of Solaris, such as ZFS.

Solaris' success was typically far more about the software than the hardware it was running on.