I always assumed it was Oracle buying Sun and Steve Jobs NOPEing far away from the prospect of putting an Oracle filesystem at the heart of their then-largest product. Oracle is really good at using their products as beachheads to vampirize large companies. I hesitate to even imagine what would have happened to Apple had they gone forward with ZFS.
Actually the opposite is true, Jobs and Ellison were notoriously great friends - they were from the same generation, the "pirates" usurped by Gates. They just made sure to swim in different seas, as big sharks do.
Apple simply gave up on Sun, seen as a losing bet, and abandoned Java too.
The Apple/Java story is still interesting. I now personally don't care much about Mac OS and Java anymore, but I remember me being pissed when Apple abandoned shipping Java, Cocoa bindings, native LaF for Swing and other integrations around 10.7 and leave the field for Oracle, after SJ had promised to deliver "first-party, best-of" Java dev experience years earlier. Oracle had also published a dev build for the Oracle RDMS on Power-based Macs, but then denounced the Mac as a serious platform. Maybe a back-deal or bet was in effect here, or Apple figured they'll never get into datacenter and enterprise anyway?
Steve was once asked about Apple's commitment to Java by one of the engineers working on it. SJ called Java "a big, fat pig." It was on its way out of the OS within the year.
I also got pissed off, but I do get the reasoning behind it.
Apple only bet on Java, because the hype wave was still going strong and they were quite unsure how well the Mac developer community would be willing to embrace Objective-C.
So for a while they kept both languages on the platform to see which one would get the uptake.
When they saw that the developers had no issues with Objective-C, the decision was clear.
That's interesting, to me it seemed the other way round - it was good for Oracle to be responsible for their runtime. The integration was always a really terrible fit and without it, Oracle could ship current versions of Java. The Apple/Java thing was just a bad idea with a long lifetime and somewhat sluggish death.
They were friends, but there was a lot of rumors going around that Jobs didn't want a business relationship with his friend. The strange part is that Ellison was put on the new Apple board when Steve took over[1], and the multiple stories of Ellison wanting to lead a takeover bid of Apple and Jobs stopping that cold.
Jobs and Ellison being friends doesn't preclude Jobs NOPEing away from a position of extreme vulnerability wrt Ellison. Quite the opposite, I'd imagine.
That sounds more like a just-so story than some fundamental similarity in overall business approach. And what would a 'heavy investment in litigation' even look like? There's a chart of (absolute) R&D numbers here.
> That sounds more like a just-so story than some fundamental similarity in overall business approach.
And yet both companies' business strategies are primarily known for those things, and both companies spend more of their money on those things relative to R&D than their competitors.
> what would a 'heavy investment in litigation' even look like
The fact that Jobs would even threaten such a thing shows how similar he is to Ellison. The only reason he backed down was that Palm would have taken Apple to the cleaners in the countersuits.
And yet both companies' business strategies are primarily known for those things
I don't think they are and really, it's the thing I'm asking you to defend which I don't think you can do very well by just repeating it.
As to the other thing, ok, Apple was involved in a lawsuit? Lots of big companies are involved in lawsuits. What you are saying is that Apple and Oracle's business strategies are marketing and suing people and that they are known for this. That doesn't sound right at all.
> What you are saying is that Apple and Oracle's business strategies are marketing and suing people and that they are known for this. That doesn't sound right at all.
The reason I repeated what I said is that you keep repeating what I said incorrectly, even after I emphasized the part that you left out. The key phrase is relative to R&D.
> As to the other thing, ok, Apple was involved in a lawsuit?
Is that what you got out of it? The (maybe too subtle) point is that Apple is so quick to litigate that it even threatened to bring lawsuits against another company for not participating in its illegal wage suppression agreement. Jobs would rather spend money on lawyers than on poaching engineers away from competitors or paying his own engineers enough to stay.
Again, lots of big companies are litigious. The salary-fixing thing involved a veritable who-is-who of big SV companies. Good thing? No. But Apple doesn't stand out more or less than the rest with its badness. Your claim isn't that Apple did some lame thing but that Apple and Oracle make that bad thing a central part of their business strategy.
