A legend is a legend

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(Update) Many people (such as DBANotes) think IBM is the ultimate loser in the Sun/Oracle deal. I think the deal is not necessarily bad news for IBM. Here is my rationale. IBM did not win because:

1) Anti-trust concern. Sun and IBM together will have a very high share of both UNIX server and storage tape markets.

2) Oralce CEO Larry and Sun CEO McNealy are very good friends (source: WSJ).

Negatives for Oracle:


1) Many smart guys already left Sun before the deal;

2) Oracle is not familiar with hardware business. It’s familiar with Solaris though.

I think the main thing Oracle was looking for is Sun’s customers in Telecom and Finance industries. Also the deal shows consolidation is the trend in IT. Both Oracle and IBM did quite a few deals in recent years.

(Original) The Sun/Oracle news came as I listened to morning news on NPR (market place morning news). The news was just one sentence partly because local NPR station was running fund drive; partly because it’s Monday morning.

When I had some more time to think about this. The Network is computer (Sun’s motto in dot com days), we are the dot in dot com. The Java language (which was very hot in the dot com days, and yours truly also joined the fray to learn in graduate school), the Solaris machine I used in college and work. Remembered using Workshop (changed Sun One Studio later) debugger once, the gdb debugger, the DBX debugger…Among two UNIX systems (HP-UX, Solaris) I debugged from time to time, Solaris is a less lenient in terms of memory handling. While HP-UX will fill in zero/null values for unitialized values (which is not necessarily a good thing, because it obscure things), Solaris will just throw up on the user. Also the MySQL.

Last but not least, had to admire Larry on his speed: received words for talk on Thursday eve., closed deal on Sunday evening. 7.5 billion deal in 3 days?

Scott is also the winner. I thought when IBM quit, CSCO did not express interest, and Sun would become Yahoo 2.0. Did not expect Scott pulled out Oracle from his hat. I am sure he has Oracle in mind as he rejecting the IBM bid.

A legend is still a legend…

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