Some personal thoughts about the Oracle/Sun deal
My retired father reads business news quite often a day and as his son happens to work at Sun, he reads everything about Sun. So everytime i visit my parents there is a discussion about all the stuff happens at Sun as far as i doesn´t disclose any secrets. BTW: He already knows my opinion about the journalists. After the announcement of the deal i´ve got a call from him. Camouflaged by a different question, that could wait for some hours, he asked “ “What do you think about this deal?”. I know he was curious. Well … i didn´t really thought about it at that moment. My first thoughts were more like “Thank godness. It´s not IBM.” and i was working on my presentation for Graz on Saturday. I wasn´t fond of the perspectives of working for IBM. I really thought about founding my own startup with some of my tea-cooking ideas (those, i didn´t disclosed in the blog ;) ) for the case there would be an announcement of an IBM/Sun merger. I really think: Better red than blue. Much better. Obviously i started to read everything available about the deal like the mail from Jonathan or the press releases or comments by journalists. By the way: There was someone who forwarding the mail from Jonathan directly to Slashdot. WTF …. My feeling in the gut thinks positive about this deal: When you really think about an IBM acqusition of Sun, it would more like taking out a competitor. When the deal with Oracle can be closed, there will be interesting opportunities instead. I don´t know where this journey will lead Sun and at the end me. But i know this will lead to interesting developments in the market. IBM has now an stong competitor. Maybe it´s a sign that the open systems market starts to mature. I know … nothing really definitive from my side … but i assume, that my opinion will be more refined in a few days. Some additional comments:
- Some bloggers and twitterers wrote "Oracle will take out Mysql". Well ... at first ... Oracle DB and Mysql addressing pretty much different markets. At second: Mysql is GPL and you can´t put it back to closed-source. Third: There is money to make with mysql in markets unaccessible by Oracle DB (pretty much the complete small web database market). And i don´t think that they were upset about the existence of Mysql ... just about the fact, that they can´t make money from it ;)
- Some bloggers and twitterers wrote "Oracle has no interest in HW". Well ... is it just me or is CMT a perfect match to many OLTP workloads and now they have a real interest to tune their products to CMT and develop more auto-parallelization technologies for situations where CMT isn´t a good fit at the moment. With this CPU knowhow in their hand and with the intimate knowledge of Oracle Sun/Oracle could build kickass database machines and Larrys dreams of a database machine would be more realistic.
- It´s interesting that everybody talks about "Oracle will kill ..." or "Oracle will fire ..." but i didn´t saw any tweets and few blogs "Oracle will create/enable/extend ...". Looks like most people doesn´t have any ideas of making new business. Economy isn´t just about "slash ´n cut away". It´s about creating new opportunities. Even without really thinking hard about it, i have several ideas of new business opportunities.
That´s only my personal opinion. The announcement is just a few hours old. So let´s wait for the moment when this deal is finalized and closed.