Oracle loses bid to upend HP’s $3B win
reuters.com
reuters.com
In all seriousness, HP can do that to get some out of court settlement money from Oracle, as Oracle clearly does not want to continue supporting the platform.
In reality Oracle is off the hook given that Intel is stopping Itanium production.
(I know that's not HPE's business, but whatever)
The most memorable version on the internet has to be this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2115s watch for about 4 minutes.
What people don’t typically think about though is how massively successful oracle is because of these strategies. They work really well.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Yes I know, the greed came first.
Oracle goes around looking at the lock-in potential and acquires based on that, then they ride that startup product's reputation for as long as possible until they just leave it to rot. They also try to bundle in existing Oracle products (e.g. Oracle DB) almost giving it away to get your foot in the door then dumping on you.
Unfortunately a lot of companies find themselves in a business relationship with Oracle, even after never having purchase an Oracle branded product.
And for-profit companies are greedy per definition..
So why do court cases cost them so much in legal fees? Do they outsource representation for these big cases, or do they just extrapolate a lot of the costs from payroll, or what?
im not involved in legal stuff, but i think part of the reason is the system of common law. this makes past related cases as important, if not more important, than the letter of the law. so in order to mount an effective legal case, you have to research your case and every other case like it in history (!)
more simply, its a high demand, low supply, high stakes job. drives up the price.
also, the job is just complex. you need to have good PR, a network of expert witnesses, an understanding of psychology to both select and then convince the jury, technical understanding of everything related to your case (computers, firearms, recording devices, medical devices, police procedures, jurisdictional boundaries, etc etc), on top of the normal business stuff like brand recognition to maintain business relationships, etc.
[1] https://www.thewrap.com/gunmaker-includes-thousands-of-rando...
Source: am litigator.
It would be interesting to know how big and litigious a technology company would have to get before it made sense to develop their own litigation capability. Or would that run afoul of some legal profession expectation that "prestigious firms" are required, no matter the size of the tech company?
Most companies also want to maintain a healthy separation between internal and external counsel so that they can keep certain kinds of communications privileged and avoid awkward situations where an attorney who is both an employee and legal advisor to a company might be subpoenaed for a deposition (basically any time a lawsuit happens, any corporate employee with knowledge can potentially become subject to deposition as a fact witness). You basically never want your in-court lawyer to be deposed for any reason.
That said, there are some companies who look into this kind of stuff for smaller matters - small corporate disputes, collections of accounts receivables, and whatnot - oftentimes are now being done in-house even if they involve some in-court matters. It still doesn't seem to make sense for big files though.
With some of these big companies, litigation almost seems like its part of their day-to-day though.
Mind most of the lawyers in any corporation are responsible for "daily business" like contract negotiations with customers or routine operations in HR or deal with acquisitions or whatever the company does.
Only few deal with actual court cases. Now many of those court cases are very specialized and you don't keep all those experts on payroll, thus you go out contracting specialists. To some degree you also want to have a firewall by using external people who can dig up dirt without you doing it directly. However also the lawyers on your paywall don't work for free but produce cost ...
They have to do this to get specialists and many top experts work at firms. (Vs generalists who work in house)
No wonder big companies settle out of court so often.
still generating revenue but not seen as influential within tech.
Cloud services and license support is the top bucket, unclear what all the entails.
They own a LOT of business oriented very pricey software (Netsuite etc)...
(Disclaimer/Source - I've been a PeopleSoft admin/architect/ops working for IBM for 20 years; PeopleSoft was bought by Oracle in 2005; all opinions my own etc:)
They made other plays - there is Oracle Linux as rebrand of RHEL; a few rebranded/purchased virtualization as well as hardware products; etc etc
Surely there comes a point where even paying triple the standard rate, you can't get more engineers working on dusty old code while remaining profitable and their customers' best offer.
The answer is partially in the question.
For large enterprises where large part of IT is a strict cost centre - the "boring" areas of HR/Pay, Financials, CRM, ERM, SCM, etc - predictability, support, longevity, reliability are far more important than sexiness, new technologies, or even immediate cost of license compared to cost of change and uncertainty.
You can get all of those with postgres too.
CIO of large company sees value in having "one neck to choke" for their HR Application, Proxy Server, Web Server, App Server, Database Server, Enterprise Service Bus, Search Engine, Monitoring Software, etc. A simple licensing and support model with streamlined contract model as opposed to 27 bespoke contracts with "never heard of them" consulting/support companies for each level of the open-source stack which "nobody owns" (https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort...).
At ground level, we may not see value in the same way; we may complain and moan about it; about vendor lock-in, license cost, slow pace, etc etc etc. I certainly did, for decades :).
Longevity, ditto: https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/
https://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lsp-tech-chart-069...
Market share by revenue is likely biased towards Oracle vs market share by usage/installs. I’m under the impression that those migrating towards other DBMS’s are partly doing so to get away from the high pricing of Oracle. So even if usage of eg RDS Aurora and Oracle are the same, it would show Oracle as doing really well. If I’m correct, and the underlying user base for Oracle is declining, then their numbers can only go down in the long term.
But, they have a great money printing machine today, loads of enterprise sales expertise, and the buffers (read: time) to deal with this change. So, although I don’t think they’ll become irrelevant, I wouldn’t say they’re doing particularly well either (from a trends and market direction perspective)
but they are already kind of there, they own NetSuite which is the number 1 cloud ERP
they also own Oracle ERP which is another top 5 cloud ERP
they own peoplesoft/jd edwards and all their clients
they next to SAP, own the enterprise apps market and unlike SAP, they seem to be serious about competing with AWS ans Azure, Oracle OCI, see to get niece reviews
So how long will it take for Oracle to be irrelevant, if OCI and NetSuite continue to move in the right directions, for as long as people have money
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/revenu...
My guess is they will hang on for a long time as the reigning king of on-prem. They aren't hurting yet, because the companies that are losing ground in on-prem are losing it both to AWS/Azure, but also losing the on-prem ground to Oracle. Eventually, the continued downward spiral of on-prem will hit them. But on-prem really never goes away. Oracle will just become the king of a much smaller hill.
And the information revolution is just beginning for most of the 4 billion citizens on the planet.
"The Itanium product line was highly profitable for HP, generating over $2 billion in annual profits in 2010"
And, also "84 percent of Itanium servers ran Oracle’s database software."
So, even though Itanium was pretty well dead for new sales to new customers 2010, they were still selling enough of them to make $2B in profit (not revenue) the year prior. That is, sales to customers that were sort of stuck on Itanium/HP-UX, and not yet ready to switch to something else.
Certainly, an EOL announcement for Oracle on Itanium would have kicked some Itanium-Locked-In customers into action faster than they would have otherwise.
I'm not sure how to translate $2B/year profit on Itanium hardware into lost sales due to the Oracle announcement. But, $3B doesn't sound outrageous in relative terms. Sounds like 1.5 years of H/W sales ending earlier than projected due to the stark message in Oracle's EOL announcement.
The compilers never fully delivered on that. X86-64 just beat them with process size and clock speed on a less elegant architecture.
ARM managed to be worth the trouble since it solved a real problem of power useage which got it the installed base, at which point it was worth the trouble of supporting.
It turned out nobody knew how to build effective compilers for them, so nobody bought them.
> And Intel just wrongly killed the project.
What's the point of a processor you can't program efficiently? What do you think Intel should have done? Just kept making them regardless of the fact nobody bought them?
It's a funny sign of those times. People really thought at one time that we were leaving a huge amount of potential instruction-level parallelism on the table. There was a DEC-WRL paper in the early 90s that said in the future (i.e., now) we'd be disappointed with 15 instructions retired per clock. But in the future we presently occupy we're all glad to have IPC of 0.8.
I love this graph of Intel's projected vs actual Itanium sales. They certainly believed in Itanium for a long time: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/52858-picking-up-the-chi...
Also related to the 3.06GHz P4 launch were rumors that Intel has secretly included x86-64 support in the new P4 in the form of disabled circuitry on the chip’s die. Such circuitry is allegedly the product of Intel’s skunkworks Yamhill project, which is intended to give Intel some flexibility in responding to the potential threat posed by AMD’s upcoming x86-64 “Hammer” line of processors.
Intel has repeatedly denied the existence of Yamhill, insisting that the only 64-bit instruction set they plan to support is IA-64. So will we see Yamhill publicly unveiled in 2003? It’s possible, but not likely.
https://www.theregister.com/2002/01/25/intels_yamhill_itanic...
The ARM revolution has been a long time coming, but it was given a big boost by the use of the chip in phones, a market that Intel failed to break into (I have one of the rare x86-Android phones, a Zenfone 2). I can't imagine Itanium would have been any better at scaling down to fit into that market.
Intel had no choice but to kill it; it was outclassed by ARM64 and had a slowly shrinking customer base.
It did have some "interesting" things like advance loads and associated speculation support, programmable branch predictors, rich prefetching and cache hinting, highly predicated execution. Which were intended to all combine and make out of order execution unnecessary.
In practice they were very difficult to use well, didn't solve all deficiencies of in-order execution, and were often inefficient and difficult to implement. Itanium remained stuck at low frequencies and performance was tied to things like heroically fast (and therefore unfortunately tiny) L1 caches.
And if you do have an out of order design, then many of those interesting aspects of it were much less useful.