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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

You see different versions of the four horsemen of the internet but the one I remember (and I can find lots of references to on the internet) is: Cisco, Sun, EMC, and Oracle. And, indeed, Oracle is the only one continuing to perform whether you like them or not and whether startups use them at this point.

With respect to Cisco specifically (and Intel) there was also a huge optical networking bubble.

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While Oracle definitely benefited from the dot-com era, my impression was that, unlike the other three, its core business has always been banks and other large enterprise companies.

That core didn’t suffer much during the dot-com crash so Oracle was in a good position to do things like vacuum up the pieces of Sun.

Don't disagree. That was the common metaphor? But Oracle was less embedded in the internet ecosystem even if Sum was enterprise too to a large degree--though was trying to be more startup/internety given their roots.

Linux ate Sun, I ran a sun lab, had a few sun workstations at home, but really preferred my linux/BSD boxes. BSD/Linux ate into Cisco. You could buy multiport ethernet cards, throw it into a linux PC and have your own router/firewall that offered more features than Cisco. MySQL would have eaten into Oracle, but their stupid MyISAM got in the way.

MySQL would never have eaten Oracle. Oracle had /has a huge installed base of corporate/government customers who are risk adverse to switching out their database for fear of breaking critical systems.

No one building a business today would ever choose Oracle, but their hold on legacy customers is pretty strong. They will probably die a slow death as their customer base dwindles if they can’t pivot.

They are fairly similar to IBM

> They are fairly similar to IBM

This feels unfair. When was the last time for example that Oracle manufactured a CPU?

Apparently in September 2017, when they introduced the SPARC M8.

They discontinued development though. It was meant as a lighthearted comment. They are indeed weirdly similar in some ways.

Maybe Oracle will start developing quantum chips.

Yup, Linux ate Sun and Sun shot Java in the head hiring Jonathan Schwartz

I don’t care what anyone or the courts say: Android stole Java and Google and all the ex Java people it hired know it

Imagine the outcome if Java was licensed correctly and Schwartz didn’t just give to Eric

On one hand, you're probably right. On the other, I'm pretty happy Larry Ellison doesn't own Java.

Well Oracle bought Sun so it’s tough to see your argument but I love the EMC addition. I know many who retired from there and are still retired . Their sales team printed money

That acquisition came later because dot-bomb (and, yes, the rise of Linux) helped crater Sun. It's not my argument anyway. It was a popular theme at the time even if the company names have been repopulated in many later tellings.

I worked for EMC very briefly (like for a few months after close) via an acquisition.

APPL? Relevant to the discussion above on similar names.

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