> The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business relationship ... The concerns of developers are just not material at the level of that conversation
Sadly, this is why Oracle could buy Sun and not the other way around.
Sadly, this is why Oracle could buy Sun and not the other way around.
We don't want to take apart our office furniture and make it work more efficiently, or modify it and resell it to other businesses as part of a breakthrough interior decorating package. We want to sit on it and put our laptops on it and use it to get the other "real" work done.
So if you're in the road construction business and you need a HR system or a procurement system or whatever, you call some pricey consultants who call Oracle and you tell your accounting people to explain the problem and ask them how much its going to cost and you tell your IT department and accounting to spec it and do it and you fire them if it's not all done in six months and go back to your real work which is managing your highway building project out in Tallahassee.
Is it the name?
And last time I checked, all 3 companies mentioned are bigger in market cap then Oracle.
What strikes me is ... how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different?
Because it does not matter to the shareholders what kind of culture Oracle has. The only metric that mattered was how much money Oracle was willing to pay for Sun vs another bidder.
Using any other criteria would just launch a nasty shareholder lawsuit against Sun's soon to be departed management...
So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?
Oracle has claimed they bought Sun for their hardware (e.g. so they could do vertical integration selling like IBM), but that remains to be seen if it is true or not.
Combining that with Oracle's applications turns Oracle into a complete solution provider like IBM & HP.
Solaris is open source, but Oracle has dropped support for the open source version and isn't going to open source all new features.
Sun also owned MySQL, which gives Oracle a great foot-in-the-door at a whole industry segment where they weren't a player before.
What makes you think he had a choice. The CEO isn't the only one, who gets to decide where a company is sold to. Infact his/her vote often counts for very little.
I'm sure the millions of dollars he got helped him make the decision.
In a public company the CEO typically can only recommend to the Board that an acquisition go through. The board can then put it to a shareholder vote.
The real question is "why did he recommend it?" and the answer is because the company had no other options if it wanted to survive.
Oracle, on the other hands, sells only to other businesses. At this point, their reputation for being "enterprise grade" is so well established, they could probably sit still for a decade and still retain a fair amount of their customers. I don't think Microsoft, Apple, or Google could say the same for their businesses. Well, maybe Microsoft could, but certainly not the other two.
"Do no evil" is some other company's motto. That is actually being sued by Oracle.