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Comment by Autre | Hacker News Reader

Though I'm glad for this desicion, I can't help but wonder: what's in it for oracle? The puny 5% of desktops running mac os?

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Money. They're in for the money.

a) Even if it is only 5%, it is almost pure profit for Oracle. Many big companies would like to expand 5% for almost free.

b) The decision maker might run mac. No mac support, no sales. (One of my customers is like that). This is similar to the "American’s with Disabilities Act" which requires accesibility even though less than 5% of the users are disabled.

c) 5% is the average. Many companies aren't average, e.g. universities and research based companies.

Your point (c) is the most important, in my opinion. I work in computing theory research at a major UK university, and well over 50% of the desktops I see used are Macs, and about 80% of the laptops. Many of our undergraduates also use Macs. A working Java implementation is quite important for this area - both for Apple, to ensure we keep buying them and Oracle, to stop people just saying "Well, we don't use that much Java anymore, let's just drop it".

You don't think that Apple has a bright future building computers? This deal wouldn't have made sense 5 years ago, but Apple is an important force right now and is poised to be a huge part of the future.

The fact that iPad and iPhone don't run Java right now isn't relevant. They very well might in the next 5 years. Things change fast!

My guess would be that that number is much higher for developers (at least not .NET developers). Just look around at conferences. Heck, just look at this: http://james.gosling.usesthis.com/

It's actually closer to 10% if you look at the most recent numbers and discount machines that are not actually part of the market in any reasonable sense (e.g. nobody's going to be installing your software on their old cash register).

Support contracts?

Ellison gets another checklist on his sales brochure and will now continue to get a christmas card from his buddy Jobs.

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