Archive for the ‘takeover’ tag
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Oracle and Sun, sitting in a tree…
You heard then?
This is one of those deals where all and sundry outside of the industry ask “Who is buying who? What now?”, whilst those inside the industry faint with disbelief, anger or joy.
To the man in the street this story could be headlined “Supplier of over-priced RDBMS and related services purchases supplier of over-priced hardware and services”. Most people have never seen a Sun computer or had to install or manage an Oracle database. They might have heard of these companies, but don’t know what they do. Somebody once asked me if IBM was still trading – if IBM is thought of like that, imagine what this duo’s impact on the masses is.
Except every time you deal with your bank, your utility companies, pay by debit or credit card in a shop, use your mobile phone or apply for Government benefits, you are using Oracle and Sun technology somewhere along the way. Almost every single time.
The conspiracy theorists of the last 15 years have pointed their finger at Microsoft and screamed “monopoly” every time they could. Microsoft’s deployed technology is almost an irrelevance now. Everything from J2ME on your phone and MySQL behind your Wordpress site, all the way through to your HR department and bank IT systems are now all under one technology roof.
Is this a good thing? Is this something we should attempt to stop? Truth is, I really don’t know. Neither does anybody else. I seem to be one of the few people thinking about it like that.
Right now most people are worried that this will kill off MySQL but that isn’t going to happen. A few with heads in the sand argue this changes nothing. A very small body of people are just glad they can breathe easy now and wash their hands of a problem child.
In other words, people’s fears are likely unfounded, their denials are silly and a few people got out of a stock position they were glad to be out of.
And now all this technology is sat there under one management structure. What will they do with it? Will it flourish? Will it flounder? History suggests this is likely to be an awful deal for all concerned with innovation and a great deal for shareholders. Time will tell.
