Old article, but still relevant. Re-live the pain.
https://www.alphr.com/networking/15702/did-oracle-really-want-suns-hardware-business/
6 replies (most recent on top)
I don’t necessarily agree with your view of the Sun downfall and the cause. I do agree that IBM would have been worse ,O was hitting the skids before the SUNW acq, and O was/is a lousy place to work.
I had colleagues that hired on at O during the Sun years, and boomeranged back. The stories they came back with were just as bad then, believe me, and that was at least 5 years before OCI.
I’m working now at a tech co were people leave, then boomerang back. It’s a good sign.
Sun and Beta format. Both were better technologies, but time passed them by!
"This article was spot on except for what they call Sun's Weaknesses."
I agree with this. The decline of Sun started when the dot com bubble burst, and after that nothing they did really worked out. There was a time when they were "the dot in dot com" or whatever the stupid slogan was. If the model of running everything on Unix servers and workstations had stayed as prevalent as it was in the Nineties, Sun would probably still be around because they were the best at that, both in the hardware and the Solaris OS. But all their attempts to diversify failed.
It may be true that LE was mostly just interested in Java, but to be fair he did make a pretty good stab at utilizing Sun hardware and he did try to make Sun storage products viable. Speaking as an individual contributor who survived the merger, most of us were greatly relieved not to be acquired by IBM, the graveyard of acquisitions. If the integration of Sun hardware didn't work out in the long run it is not surprising, because most companies do not succeed in branching into new territories.
As for those commenters who seem to think the Sun acquisition somehow ruined Oracle, that's just nonsense. Oracle acquired Sun for pennies on the dollar and swallowed it with hardly a blip in profitability. As far as I could tell, Oracle was kind of a lousy place to work before the Sun acquisition, and that didn't change.
As for technical vitality, I would argue that the decline of Oracle started at about the same time as the decline of Sun. Yet somehow, Oracle has managed to keep going and propping the stock price up for all these years. LE may not be a nice guy, but he managed to do that through strongarm sales tactics, stock buybacks and pure smoke and mirrors. The death of Oracle has been predicted for at least ten years but it still hasn't happened. You have to give Larry credit for that, although I am glad to be retired and out of his sphere of influence.
I’d like all of Oracle to be 100% Larry free.
Oracle: ki----g off decent products by inattention and out of control monetization.
Amazon’s Corretto works fine and still free. Also 100% Larry-free, probably it’s best feature.
This article was spot on except for what they call Sun's Weaknesses. Those weaknesses went far deeper than they reported. They were more diversified than this article indicates, but did literally nothing with those assets. (Think Sunray, AKA Sun Virtual Desktop, Sun Linux, and yes there was a version of Linux developed at Sun, the late entry into x64, and SunCloud which never got out of the Alpha stage and was starved for funding). As far as software assets go, LE only wanted Java, (yea look how well that turned out) and couldn't have cared less about the rest. Sun almost went to IBM but it got nixed by management because well, management was going to get the axe en masse. The Oracle deal was far more Golden for management.