Why Oracle bought Sun: to control the systems business | Hacker News Reader

Why Oracle bought Sun: to control the systems business

willprice.blogspot.com

29 pointsRyanMcGreal8 comments

The author refers to the company Oracle by its name exactly zero time -- instead he uses the stock-ticker symbol ORCL. Why? This habit strikes me as an exceedingly arrogant attitude: "I'm so much of an market insider, my pieces must read like a finance website" -- especially given how he fails to refer to Sun, IBM, SAP, Motorola, Apple and also indirectly to Microsoft and Dell, without mentioning their ticker symbols. He's surely going to have some unpleasant conversations with investor relations.

OTOH, it's a good signal that people who care about silly things like technical innovation and pleasing customers can safely ignore such articles.

FTA:

> [Larry Ellison's] goal is to leverage Sun to create systems - billing systems, airline reservations systems....where engineers optimize the integration not customers and service providers. He envisions building the successor to Tom Watson Jr's IBM, which he views as the most successful enterprise company of all time.

In other words, it's all about vertical control. Oracle wants to be the IBM of the 1960s ... the IBM that was eventually sued for anti-competitive practices, incidentally, because customers were locked into their closed, top-down computer systems.

Why Oracle bought Sun: to control the threat from MySQL

MySQL is hardly a threat to Oracle's RDBMS. If you need Oracle enough to pay their asking price, MySQL is not a substitute.

...IBM, which he views as the most successful enterprise company of all time...

Hmmm, sounds a little like closing the barn door after the cows left.

Just like IBM missed the microcomputer in their rear view mirror, many enterprises are doing the same thing today.

The days of enterprise practices like best of breed, best practices, six sigma, work flow optimization, economies of scale, and consolodation are numbered. To be surpassed by nimble competitiors with great software, deployed and leveraged quickly.

These days you can launch a profitable startup faster than many enterprises can approve a capital expenditure request for toilet paper. Which way would you want to steer your ocean liner?

I was talking to the director of IT risk at one of the top 5 banks in the US yesterday, and they seem to be moving in the direction Oracle is talking about away from multi-vendor systems. Based on SAP, Oracle, and IBM succeeding in this space it is hard to argue there ISN'T lots of money to be made. With most people in the small business area either on some kind of Microsoft stack or FOSS based stuff, the big blue chips are the only ones buying from these companies and it is best to cater to their needs.

I was thinking about this today, wondering if it's the start of one of those market pendulum direction changes. We had the vertical "systems" provider in IBM. You bought everything from them, hardware, 3270 terminals, printers, networks, software, everything.

Then we moved into the era where you bought everything from different vendors. Servers from one vendor, networking gear from another, software from everyone and anyone, and people start to realize "gee this is a f-ing mess, can't I just get one company to do all this for me" and that's where Oracle wants to step in and be able to say "yes".

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