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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 18 2012 @ 05:24 PM EDT |
Oracle are perfectly capable of doing stupid things without
encouragement from any other parties. They have a history of
screwing with OS projects.
Not to say that MS wouldn't be pleased to see Android cut
down to size (In a controlled way that might allow them to
take some market share.)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: sproggit on Wednesday, April 18 2012 @ 05:41 PM EDT |
"I smell M$ in this somewhere. Problem is,
where?"
I am no fan of Microsoft, but in this instance
I believe you are wrong to attribute this to Steve B. & Co. If Steve was
willing to throw a chair across a room when Steve Lukovsky announced his
intention to quit for a job at
Google, you can be pretty sure that he'd throw a room full of chairs through
a greenhouse full of windows if someone did the dirty on him for
Oracle.
The enmity between the two companies is legendary.
I
do appreciate that Microsoft and Google are going toe-to-toe over a number of
different markets, but that doesn't mean that MS had a hand in this. When they
intervened in SCO vs IBM it was because they had a strategic need of the lawsuit
[Vista was late and turned out to be a turkey] and because SCO represented no
competition or threat to them. The same cannot be said of Oracle. MS would like
nothing better than to displace Oracle out of corporate data centres the world
over. Even more importantly, you must have read in testimony today that Oracle
contemplated entering the mobile handset marketplace - which would have put them
in direct competition with Microsoft.
If you have concrete evidence of
Microsoft supporting Oracle in this one, well that's different. As it stands,
however, I think that this entire deal stacks up differently.
Oracle
needed to keep Sun afloat because more instances of Oracle RDBMS run on Solaris
than any other OS - pretty much all the others combined. If Sun had imploded
there was a real risk that Oracle clients would have gone to UDB on AIX, or
Posgres/MySQL on Linux. Some of our other posters have postulated that it was
MySQL that prompted Oracle to take an interest, but I am not convinced.
But there are some even more interesting aspects to this. Turn the
question around a little and try it this way:
When Oracle did the deal,
they paid $7.4 Billion for a company valued at $5.6 Billion. The
$1.8 discrepancy was Sun's outstanding debt, which Oracle had to swallow.
Umm, what? Why would Oracle pay $1.8 Billion - or 32% - over the odds for
Sun? How about this for a quote:-
"“More Oracle databases
run on the Solaris Sparc than any other system,” said Ellison, noting Linux was
second. “We’ll engineer the Oracle database and Solaris operating system
together. With Sun we can make all components of the IT stack integrated and
work well.”
Regarding Java, Ellison said it wanted Sun so it could own the building
blocks for its middleware. Oracle’s middleware is built on Java and the
applications giant said it will continue to invest in the
software."
Or how about this piece
at The Register, which not only doesn't mention JAVA in any way, shape or form,
but also concludes with the interesting statement:-
"Ellison
and McNealy were two of the prime movers behind the anti-Wintel coaliton which
pushed the Network Computer. This was launched with much hoopla back in 1995.
It's nice to know they've finally got there."
which rather
neatly aligns with the theory that perhaps Microsoft aren't involved in this in
quite the way that you suspect they are.
The articles give us more
useful insight, however. Ellison/Oracle paid $7.4 Billion for a company that
was in significant decline and which had a book value of $5.6 Billion. Have
a think about that. How are they going to "monetize" Sun? Let's
see:
Sell more hardware? Umm... tough - the engineers started leaving
in droves.
Sell MySQL Licenses? Umm... tough - the source code was out
on the internet and as had happened elsewhere, any attempt to play dirty with
MySQL would simply have resulted in it forking in exactly the same way that
happened when Oracle got a bit pushy with OpenOffice. [ And who hears about
StarOffice any more these days? ]
Well, seriously [ I am not trying to
be a smart-alec ] what does that leave in Sun's assets? As this 10Q, lodged with the SEC, shows, Sun made an operating loss of
$168 Million in the three months ended March 29th, 2009. The loss was
$2 Billion in the 9 months ended March 29th...
Sun's assets
were:
1. Hardware and hardware maintenance.[ I include storage
here].
2. Solaris and software maintenance.[Depends entirely on the
hardware...]
3. MySQL. [ Available for free; perhaps limited paid support
].
4. OpenOffice. [ Available for free as LibreOffice. They killed the goose
that laid these golden eggs ].
5. JAVA.
Now please tell
me, if you were a sceptical commercial investor [say a fund manager] that you
are convinced that Ellison made a good deal when he bought Sun?
I
don't think so.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Paranoia - Authored by: PJ on Wednesday, April 18 2012 @ 05:53 PM EDT
- Paranoia - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 18 2012 @ 07:52 PM EDT
- Chess - Authored by: sproggit on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 01:49 AM EDT
- Chess - Authored by: PJ on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 02:05 AM EDT
- Chess - Authored by: bilateralrope on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 03:39 AM EDT
- Chess - Authored by: JK Finn on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 06:02 AM EDT
- Paranoia - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 19 2012 @ 02:48 AM EDT
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 18 2012 @ 06:27 PM EDT |
I doubt Microsoft is involved here. But Apple's encouragement is quite
possible. Apple and Oracle are friendly, and Steve Jobs wanted to do *ANYTHING*
to squash Android. Android is a DIRECT competitor to Apple's iSTUFF, just as
Linux is a direct competitor to Microsoft's operating systems.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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