Re: OraSUN MicroDatabases

Andrew Sinclair wrote:
> Oracle (-1.3%) will buy Sun Microsystems (+36.8%) for US7.4B, $9.50 per
> share. SUn rejected IBM (-0.8%) offer of 7B earlier.
> 
> Was it about the money, or do they really just want to avoid being
> humiliated by being brought out by the competition? Save Sun, loose MySQL.
> 
> Not that it is my place to speak about such things, IBM would have been
> an ideal union. They both build the same stuff and both could have
> capitalised on consolidation / efficiency.

Ah, but they don't build the same stuff - and that's a large part of the 
problem.

If IBM and Sun merged there'd be a considerable amount of overlap 
between their business units who do the same sort of stuff, but do it 
differently.  For a start, there's the whole competing commercial UNIX 
platform issue - Solaris vs AIX.  Then we have Sun with their pet 
platform (SPARC) vs IBM's pet platform (Power).

You know, it'd get pretty ugly pretty quickly.  The standard approach is 
usually to consolidate features and then convert one customer base to 
the other platform.

Ugh.

On the upside, with an Oracle merger, Oracle and Sun were in fairly 
complementary parts of the market working with the same sorts of 
technologies.  There is the advantage that only MySQL gets alienated by 
Oracle Server (possibly a good thing) and Oracle and Sun already had a 
fairly healthy relationship as complementary vendors.

On the downside, maybe this means we'll start seeing more ludicrous 
licensing schemes on Sun products.

C.

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