#comments

So I guess the big noise these days is Oracle buying Sun up for $7.4 billion. Man, Sun gone, SGI gone… it’s a real end of an era. *sniff*sniff*. Let’s have a moment of silence for the death of my formative computer years.

Ok.

While I think this makes a ton more sense than IBM snatching up Sun, I still kind of think it was a bit of a mistake. I think the writing was on the wall for Sun since they decided to change their ticker symbol to JAVA. They just don’t know what to do with themselves. They had all this free software and I guess they couldn’t quite make the transition to a service company to capitalize on that. Or something. Furthermore, I don’t quite get why those businesses are worth $7.4 billion to Ellison.

Hardware

Their hardware business gives Oracle a full stack to sell. I guess. They can sell turnkey machines that they own every element of. Is that a win? I suppose, but does that mean they’ll have to support a dieing hardware effort with a platform that becomes increasingly simply one to sell to people who want to run Oracle? Moving off their own chips to intel didn’t save the business, freeing solaris x86 didn’t help, I just don’t see how this is going to help. I haven’t heard anything about that super storage system they were touting awhile back.

I mean, it’s on a downward trend and selling Oracle on top of it, well that’s not going to put a blip in sales. I suspect on this front, IBM, Linux, Microsoft and pretty everyone else will continue eating Sun’s lunch till they starve to death. And that’s sad because I really liked, well, I liked SunOS, if not Solaris overly much.

MySQL

As for MySQL… well I guess it will probably be business as usual for this database. Their purchase of INNOdb years back didn’t end in a mysqlocalpyse as I thought it might, so I guess that’s good. Perhaps it fits in with their consulting practice and what not if MySQL expands significantly.

On the other hand I wonder how existing customers will deal with this – I suspect there’s a raft of Oracle clients who actually don’t much need Oracle but got it because it’s the big name brand on the market and you don’t get fired for picking Oracle. But now that MySQL’s there, too, and maybe you get fancy Oracle support for it – well, they can save thousands of ducats moving to the free database with the commercial license. This is good and bad for Ellison and I wonder if they’ll make some kind of move to deal with that cannibalization or if, Apple like, they’re ok cannibalizing their own business before someone else does.

On the third hand, it’s probably satisfying for Oracle to be able to compete with Microsoft directly on yet another level. So, I guess that’s good. Still, I’m not sure that MySQL has an impact on Oracle’s bottom line in either the short or medium term.

Java

I hear a lot of talk about how it’s so important for Oracle to own Java since they’re using that as their language of choice. I don’t understand this. When did it become important for a company to own the language they’re using? Do companies worry when they adopt C++, or Ruby, or Python or Perl that they don’t own the language? Do analysts penalize them for not having ownership of it? It doesn’t make any sense to me.

It’s a free language with plenty of 3rd party tools for free or pay. Sure Microsoft owns .NET and they use it – but they also build all the developer tools for it and make all kinds of money selling that. Java’s already not in the bag so Oracle’s not going to make money that same way.

I mean, I guess I see some minor benefits and bragging rights about this, but I don’t see $7.4 billion worth of benefits at all. This is even assuming that Oracle continues its track record of being great at integrating acquired companies and doesn’t lose a year or two of forward motion digesting the Sun (as Ballmer’s hoping for).

What am I missing?