

Why Oracle bought Sun: to control the systems business - RyanMcGreal
http://willprice.blogspot.com/2009/09/living-history-larry-ellison.html?different_take

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mseebach
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.

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

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RyanMcGreal
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.

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dailo10
Why Oracle bought Sun: to control the threat from MySQL

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ams6110
MySQL is hardly a threat to Oracle's RDBMS. If you need Oracle enough to pay
their asking price, MySQL is not a substitute.

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edw519
_...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?

~~~
krschultz
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.

~~~
ams6110
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".

