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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Google should have done everything they could to buy Sun or at least buy the Java IP and Engineering team. Heck they could have bought them out fully and sold the uninteresting parts.

That would have been better for two reasons - Oracle is screwing up bad with the JCP and it's going to hurt Java - May be Google could have been a better steward. Secondly Google relies so much on Java not only for Android but also for many other things - it is almost idiotic not to buy the IP.

I guess they had their reasons to not pursue - I can't imagine what those were.

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As I recall, IBM had an offer out for Sun, and Sun fell into Oracle's hands quite suddenly when IBM and Sun management couldn't agree on terms. It might be that Google was expecting that IBM would get Sun, and that they were OK with that, given IBM's generally more, shall we say, less frenzied approach toward monetizing its intellectual property...

Good point, Oracle paid $5.6 billion for Sun, Google could have afforded that, they just offered $6 billion for Groupon. OTOH, that seems like a lot of money to pay just for Java.

but $6B wasn't a lot for coupons?

It wasn't coupons, but a coupon business model.

It wasn't coupons, it was a sales team. Groupon has customer-facing sales down to a science, especially when compared to Google.

Perhaps Google used that $6B to buy 600M $20 Amazon gift cards from Living Social? Just to spite Groupon. 100% profit! :)

Groupon has 2000 employees, most of whom are sales reps. That's what Google was bidding on.

$3,000,000 per employee, most of whom are sales reps? They can get 2,000 employees for much cheaper than that. They were going after the user base and ridiculous profits.

How much is Oracle suing Google for? If Oracle can get anywhere near $5.6 Billion from suing Google this could end up being one of the biggest tech blunders since AOL/TW.

This is a movie plot notion of how M&A works. In reality, just because you have the assets on hand to buy another company, doesn't mean you can just go ahead and buy the company. First, you have to convince your own board, and then your public shareholders, that the acquisition makes long-term business sense.

Oracle bought Sun on a business model that saw them recouping the price of the acquisition not in proceeds from lawsuits but in shoe-leather sales to Oracle and Sun customers (which overlap intensely). Oracle already had the infrastructure to capitalize on that channel with Sun products.

Google had none of that. Had Google bought Sun, the first thing they could have expected would have been a shareholder revolt. The money isn't theirs to spend; it belongs, in large part, to Google's shareholders.

Somehow I think this lawsuit will cost Google somewhat less then the 8 billion dollars it would have required to buy Sun outright.

This is bad, but I still don't yet believe buying Sun would have been the better option.

Sun cost 5.6 billion after accounting for Sun's cash.

Money in / Money out is the smaller picture. Having control over the Java IP, future direction, security from anybody suing you - that is priceless.

Not exactly priceless - the upside has to be worth more then the 5-7 billion spent for it to be worth it for Google.

Security from people suing you is probably the most compelling reason you gave here - I see no reason why Google would want to control Java IP and future direction when they can write all the software they need to in house to built on the Java platform to meet their needs.

So is 5-7 billion worth security for people suing you? I guess we'll see, but this is likely the biggest lawsuit related to Java they will ever face, and you can bet they won't make this same mistake again. Unless then pay out several billion dollars, which is unlikely given the tendency of these large technology firms to cross sue and settle with cross licensing agreements, I'd say Google's decision not be buy Sun is still sound at this time.

Just my two cents, I am watching just like the next person from the sidelines, this should be interesting.

Google does a fair bit of language and VM research - Go language, Python/LLVM and I think having Java in their pockets would give them a good amount of leverage - they don't have to rely on Oracle providing a updated JVM under favorable licensing terms for example - lot of Google Enterprise stuff is Java based. If tomorrow Oracle decides to go OpenSolaris route for OpenJDK - that would be bad for Google as they don't have their own "Java" VM.

But even if you just consider the suing part - this is potentially not just limited to Google but also their OHA members. So if Larry sues everyone in OHA and handset makers couldn't afford to pay what Larry asks - that could end up hurting Android.

It's more than that though. This article specifically says that HTC and Motorola have also been sued for patent infringement. Even if Google can afford to pay for these types of lawsuits, this could really hurt them strategically in working with telecoms and other vendors in the future. Anyone wanting to build a new tablet/phone will have to consider this as a huge risk. Could have much bigger strategic aspects than just the IP

It would've been the better option for the rest of us though...I'd feel much more comfortable (even excited) with Google at Java's helm...

> Oracle is screwing up bad with the JCP and it's going to hurt Java

i was far from all this politics, but made a few google searches - is this about ASF leaving JCP? then, as far as i understood, these issues are all related, to Harmony, suing etc.

so maybe Java wouldn't be hurt? just specs would be changed more tyrannically...

(java my favorite language, don't make me sad :)

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