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Oracle Staff Report Big Layoffs Across Solaris, SPARC Teams (theregister.co.uk) 239

Posted by msmash from the classing-EOL-of-products dept.
Simon Sharwood, reporting for the Register: Soon-to-be-former Oracle staff report that the company made hundreds of layoffs last Friday, as predicted by El Reg, with workers on teams covering the Solaris operating system, SPARC silicon, tape libraries and storage products shown the door. Oracle's media relations agency told The Register: "We decline comment." However, Big Red's staffers are having their say online, in tweets such as the one below. "For real. Oracle RIF'd most of Solaris (and others) today," an employee said. A "RIF" is a "reduction in force", Oracle-speak for making people redundant (IBM's equivalent is an "RA", or "resource action"). Tech industry observer Simon Phipps claims "~all" Solaris staff were laid off. "For those unaware, Oracle laid off ~ all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL of the product."
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Oracle Staff Report Big Layoffs Across Solaris, SPARC Teams More

Oracle Staff Report Big Layoffs Across Solaris, SPARC Teams

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  • Rule #1 (Score:5, Funny)

    by UndyingShadow ( 867720 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @10:41PM (#55139239)
    "Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison." -Bryan Cantrill

    • Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @10:51PM (#55139267)

      "Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison." -Bryan Cantrill

      Larry can be very cold hearted, but I can't fault him for this. Sparc/Solaris was a great choice in the 1980s, a reasonable choice in the 1990s, and a bad choice ever since. There can't be much more than a handful of legacy customers left. I am surprised that it took this long to finally die.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        After Solaris was open sourced, there seemed to be a time when the use of Solaris could potentially expand greatly. Once Ellison closed the code again, there was no hope at all. Ellison should be blamed completely for this.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Tailhook ( 98486 )

          This. Solaris could have gone far, but for the people that owned it.

          • And next in the cross hairs, Java. It seems that everything they touch becomes a lock in type technology to their specific design. Yea, their database is good, but that is about it. Everything else they touch seems to become a cluster-f$#k that eventually dies. But who is to say that this was not their plan all along.
            • Actually, the Graal project that Oracle is funding for Java is pretty cool. And the only thing bad about handing JavaEE to the Apache Software Foundation was that Oracle should have done it sooner.

              Java is painful to use, but it's around for the long haul - especially since Oracle couldn't remove OpenJDK even if they wanted to. The JVM, though, is a really useful platform, and Oracle has not yet managed to screw that up.

      • Then why the fuck did he buy it? Maybe his company could have done less of a dick move by just selling the Sun properties that they were not interested in, like Solaris, so they could be given an actual, proper chance. Fuck Oracle.

        • Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @02:43AM (#55139693)

          Then why the fuck did he buy it?

          To kill MySql, which was a long term threat to Oracle's core business.

          Maybe his company could have done less of a dick move

          Without dick moves, Oracle wouldn't be Oracle, and Larry certainly wouldn't be Larry. Being a dick is his core competency.

          • Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)

            by thesupraman ( 179040 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @03:29AM (#55139753)

            MySQL? A Threat a real database? Umm. No.

            PostgreSQL perhaps, but not MySQL.

            Just because its popular with 'toy database' applications (where the db is really just slightly glorified read only storage) doesnt mean it is a threat or oracle - different horses for very different courses.

            • Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @04:04AM (#55139821)

              MySQL? A Threat a real database? Umm. No.

              A threat to real database needs, no. But a threat to real database sales, yes, at least in the eyes of people who see any alternative as a lost sale. Sure, MySQL is mostly a replacement for a structured file, but that's still one replacement for a structured file that Oracle wasn't paid for.

              It's not much different than the kind of mind set that would claim that a 10 year old a yearly allowance of $1200 copying a bunch of MP3s is a loss to the music industry of $12 million.

            • Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Insightful)

              by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @05:26AM (#55139941) Journal
              PostgreSQL is less of a threat to Oracle than MySQL. If you start building a system with PostgreSQL, you have a reliable database with a decent query optimiser and you'll end up putting a lot of logic into the database. Once you grow to a big enough size that you might be able to afford Oracle, they send along salesmen and convince your least competent C?O that your data would be a lot safer if you migrate to a proper database and they provide migration tools to do this. They can probably demonstrate some speedups from their custom filesystem and query optimiser. On the other hand, if you start with MySQL, you end up using the database as little more than a key-value store and put most of the logic outside of the database. It's much harder to demo a place where Oracle is an improvement because your bottleneck is the application logic that's doing a load of redundant database queries, not the database itself.

              • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                by Anonymous Coward

                Not sure if you've noticed, but Oracle have spent the last 2 years pulling volume discounts from under some pretty big companies. My entire multinational has set a deadline to remove all use of Oracle, and I know we're not the only ones migrating from Oracle to Postgres

                • Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Interesting)

                  by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @06:13AM (#55140001) Journal
                  I didn't, but I'm not surprised. Last time I spoke to someone at Oracle, they said that the revenue from the DB was up, but they had very few new customers. Their real problem is Moore's law and friends. In the early '90s, payroll for a moderately large company took a serious database on high-end hardware to manage, with several hours of compute time to complete the payroll calculations each week. Now, that same company is maybe 10 times the size, but you can buy a computer more than 100 times better in terms of RAM, storage capacity, storage speed, and processor speed, for a few hundred dollars. On a modern machine, you don't need carefully optimised queries and carefully designed on-disk data structures - you can probably fit the whole thing in RAM and run the computations in Lua and still get the whole thing done in a second or two. At one end of the market, most customers can now run their systems with cheap commodity hardware and software. At the other end of the market, companies like Facebook and Google have more data than Oracle can easily handle and couldn't afford Oracle license fees even if there was a viable Oracle product for them to buy. The middle is gradually shrinking.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by Kjella ( 173770 )

                    On a modern machine, you don't need carefully optimised queries and carefully designed on-disk data structures - you can probably fit the whole thing in RAM and run the computations in Lua and still get the whole thing done in a second or two. At one end of the market, most customers can now run their systems with cheap commodity hardware and software. At the other end of the market, companies like Facebook and Google have more data than Oracle can easily handle and couldn't afford Oracle license fees even if there was a viable Oracle product for them to buy. The middle is gradually shrinking.

                    Well for companies like Facebook and Google you don't care that the social feed or search index is only kinda updated by computer standards or that different people see slightly alternate versions. There are a lot of markets where you don't have that luxury, that ticket is either sold or not sold. But yes I agree those kinds of transaction processing markets don't scale the way computer hardware does, my local cinema got roughly as many seats as it had last decade. Stadiums and arenas don't get bigger. Even

                  • I've actually seen a few of our line of business applications (Hyland Onbase as one example) migrate to Microsoft SQL simply because of arcane licensing from Oracle. I know this is heresy here, but MS-SQL actually performs better than Oracle and is cheaper, but of course some vendors require you run Oracle :(.

                    On Oracle licensing - it's one of the few cluster of servers we have that has to be on physical machines because it was deemed cheaper.

              • PostgreSQL is less of a threat to Oracle than MySQL. If you start building a system with PostgreSQL, you have a reliable database with a decent query optimiser and you'll end up putting a lot of logic into the database. Once you grow to a big enough size that you might be able to afford Oracle, they send along salesmen and convince your least competent C?O that your data would be a lot safer if you migrate to a proper database and they provide migration tools to do this.

                Here is the big question. WHY would any SANE programmer put business logic into the model layer? That would tightly couple your database engine to the other layers of the application. Once a more viable solution is available, it may have already become too cost prohibitive to migrate to the next technology. We see this now with a lot of mainframe centered companies. Don't get me wrong, most mainframe based companies have a very highly tuned and efficient solution, but as technology changes, where does

                • Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Informative)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @10:18AM (#55140673)

                  WHY would any SANE programmer put business logic into the model layer?

                  To uniformly enforce rules when accommodating multiple applications accessing the same data.

                  Another reason is that the database will usually be the longest living part of the software architecture.

                  In terms of things being tightly coupled, defining a set of stored procedures for data access hardly makes the application tightly coupled. Using raw SQL tightly couples your application to the schema. If the schema needs to change for database reasons the stored procedure layer could prevent you from having to modify the applications.

                  Yes, there are other ways to accomplish the same thing but it's not an insane decision.

                  • The issue I have with putting the business logic into database is that error handling is horrible. It will not give you anything useful about what went wrong.

                    That is why everything has an intermediary layer or service for checking submissions and returning human readable information about what is missing or incorrect.

                • Business logic !== logic.

                  You put logic into the data model that's tightly-coupled with the model. If this is code that must change when the data model changes, then it should live with the data model. It can then be re-used by different applications, and it helps isolate those applications from changes to the data model.

                  The "re-use" bit is really key. If you have multiple applications, with different teams of developers, all accessing the same database, then you can assume that none of the application t

            • MySQL? A Threat a real database? Umm. No.

              PostgreSQL perhaps, but not MySQL.

              Just because its popular with 'toy database' applications (where the db is really just slightly glorified read only storage) doesnt mean it is a threat or oracle - different horses for very different courses.

              You need to understand that the "toy" database is deployed much more than Oracle today (including small companies like Facebook, Pinterest, Github). Not bad for a "toy". Doesn't matter if it is a "toy" or not, it's being used by major systems that would have been running Oracle. The good news is that Oracle's expensive attempt to kill MySQL forced the creation of MariaDB (used by Google and many others) and other alternatives, and we all know that Oracle's ploy against HP produced a huge interest in Post

            • Most companies start with a 'toy database' for their 'toy application' and then have the application and the database expand in volume and features used as the business grows. And for an awful lot of companies, the growth never passes the size in which Oracle or something like it becomes necessary.

              Oracle didn't want to kill MySQL. They wanted to make it easier to sell potential customers on the transition.

              If your goal is to make money, it is an obvious path to take.

              • That just means they didn't understand MySQL. Its many idiosyncrasies lock you to it. Its users are commonly ignorant of anything better, or they wouldn't be using it.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by hey! ( 33014 )

            I suspect the one thing which Oracle wanted from Sun was control of Java. Not necessarily for nefarious purposes (although a more ruthless company I have seldom encountered); it was just intolerable given the commitment they'd made to Java to have it in anyone else's hands.

            MySQL was a great project, but there is no way it threatens Oracle's database customer base.

            Oracle has an aggressive lock-in strategy for its database customers; to that end not only does it offer myriad proprietary ways of doing things,

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Cederic ( 9623 )

              Yeah, back then every single Oracle acquisition target was writing software in Java and the language was controlled by Sun and IBM.

              Oracle couldn't afford IBM.

        • Then why the fuck did he buy it? Maybe his company could have done less of a dick move by just selling the Sun properties that they were not interested in, like Solaris, so they could be given an actual, proper chance. Fuck Oracle.

          To sue Google for Java patent infringement in Android. But that plan has failed.

        • Re:Rule #1 (Score:5, Informative)

          by MouseR ( 3264 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @09:17AM (#55140409) Homepage

          He bought it mainly because of Java. Oracle has a huge investment in Java and there was no way in hell he could afford to let it die or, worse yet, let it go to IBM.

          Solaris was a nice bonus because Oracle also had lots of investment in that hardware/software platform for it's own servers. From where I sit, I saw a gradual move to Oracle Linux over the years but I can not say wether that is responsible for dropping Solaris/Spark.

          There was a time I had a Solaris virtual box. Mostly unused but was useful when I needed to install a particular server instance for the applications I was doing at the time. Nowadays, I have an Oracle Linux virtual machine on which runs one of our development tools, for our App development. Other members in the team have their own Oracle Linux virtual machine to host dev or qa instances of the server for our App development use.

          Haven't seen an OpenSolaris box in years, but I know one of our training center in MDC has (had?) a few boxes on there. Not sure they are still there. Been ages since I walked in that office.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by MouseR ( 3264 )

            Forgot to mention: those are my thoughts and impression. Not an official Oracle statement. I claim not to know the inner workings of management decisions.

          • Same story here, really. At a previous employer, I fed and cared for a metric ton of ldoms* running on Sparc T-3 iron, as well as other (slightly older) Sparc pizza boxes running a ton of zones. The big reason they existed was to test the product on the Solaris/Sparc platform under various incarnations (from Solaris 7 to latest/greatest, which was IIRC 11.x at the time)... and that was about it.

            Anything they actually cared about (business-wise) sat on Linux and/or Windows boxen.

            * for those who were unaware,

      • No idea about SPARC.
        However Solaris is running everywhere.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by hord ( 5016115 )

          You probably still have large SPARC sales due to legacy applications requiring it as part of the stack. This is changing, but I used an ERP that only gave requirements for Sun SPARC/Solaris with Oracle databases and this drives purchasing decisions. We tried for years to convince them to switch to Linux with all kinds of performance metrics. You lose your support contract when doing so, however.

          Now that stuff is moving into the cloud, SPARC has no real reason to exist. It was already pretty crippled com

      • SPARK and Solaris was still the mainstay at the last large research institution I worked at up until a year ago when the first rumblings came out...

  • VirtualBox (Score:4, Interesting)

    by that this is not und ( 1026860 ) * on Monday September 04, 2017 @10:57PM (#55139293)

    Has there been any word about VirtualBox? That is pretty much the only former-Sun softwarevI use on a regular basis. Since the Oracle purchase of Sun I have wondered why Oracle was keeping it alive.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      I hope they don't kill it. I love it. I do remember they were still hiring and updating.

    • Re:VirtualBox (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @11:44PM (#55139395)

      VirtualBox is difficult to explain. Oracle has never seriously tried to monetize it. They've never inflicted a Java installer on VirtualBox users. Most of it is still Open Source and they haven't driven off the entire user base to some fork. They haven't done any of the damage this sociopath or a corporation does to everything else they acquire.

      I pointed this out to a moderately clever person once. He suggested that perhaps Oracle forgot about it. Maybe there is a small team of dedicated developers quietly enhancing their work, filling out their TPS reports and successfully avoiding notice.

      • So you are saying that the VirtualBox team are the equivalent of Milton Waddams?

        Just hope that Oracle doesn't bring in "the Bobs".

      • Sun's goal for VirtualBox as to make it a gateway drug for their Xen + Solaris + proprietary management tools stack. The idea was that VirtualBox would make it easy to create small numbers of VMs for managing infrastructure, but when you got to a larger scale you'd want to buy the bigger system. Now that Oracle has started dabbling in the cloud provider space, they may start caring again for the same reason.

        • The idea was that VirtualBox would make it easy to create small numbers of VMs for managing infrastructure,

          Too bad it never did. KVM took over that job. VirtualBox makes it easy to create one or two VMs, but you don't really want to get into more than that.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • More information the Layoff (Score:4, Informative)

    by plopez ( 54068 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @11:27PM (#55139363) Journal

    In case anyone wants more insider info. https://www.thelayoff.com/orac... [thelayoff.com]

  • A problem of Sun's making. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by upuv ( 1201447 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @11:45PM (#55139397) Journal

    Lets face it Sun made mistakes. These mistakes made it ripe for take over and plundering by Oracle.

    The biggest mistake was Linux. When Red Hat launched no one took it seriously. Red Hat legitimised Linux in the eyes of industry. Companies faced with massive expansions of internet equipment simply could not afford the iron from SUN / HP / IBM. These small start ups went to Linux. One such startup was Google. All of a sudden massive new companies emerged on a platform that was not enterprise iron. Overnight Dell become a major player in the server room.

    What did Sun do about this? Nothing. Even when faced with new unit sales that were almost zero compared to just a few years before sun still did nothing. Sun released Solaris for x86/64. But completely forgot to get 3rdparty shops and it's on internal application development teams to port to it. They only thing that ran on the x86/64 Solaris was open source software. Stuff that was already running on much cheaper x86/64 gear. Sun limped on for a few years making the occasional uplift sale for existing gear in the field.

    Then Oracle pounced. Suns mistakes led to this point. They sold for far less than they were worth. Why? The market lost all faith in Sun's ability to generate a cash flow. Thus the negative impact on asset value.

    Oracle saw something it liked very much. Java. Oracle instantly went on a predatory path of trying to extract money out of Java. We all know how well that went. Oracle just recently announced that they are looking to open source the Java EE specification. This predatory cash grab caused some other interesting market changes. The explosion of new languages resulted and they got market share. Ruby on rails in my opinion would have never had as much success as it once did with out Oracles legal threats over java usage.

    Oracle also needed to save it's DB division. At that point Oracle DB pretty much was only ever deployed on pricey Sun gear. Also Sun owned the control of MySQL. Which was growing at an astonishing speed. This threat needed to be squashed at all costs. In my mind these were the real reasons for Oracles purchase of Sun.

    There were some other assets that Oracle was looking to sell off. But in the end Oracles taint reduced their value to zero. OpenOffice comes to mind.

    I still remember the day when Oracle purchased Sun. There was an audible groan in the office. Execs around the world were scrambling to find alternatives to many products. Sun certified engineers instantly saw there pricey certificates devalue in an instant.

    The only reasons Oracle has kept Solaris and SPARC alive for so long are:
    1. Uplift purchases still come in. But not many. These can be counted in 1000's world wide. Basically nothing.
    2. The platform became part of the Exadata/Exalogic platform. ( An an holy creation in my mind. )

    • Re:A problem of Sun's making. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @12:56AM (#55139557) Journal

      The biggest mistake was Linux. When Red Hat launched no one took it seriously. Red Hat legitimised Linux in the eyes of industry.

      I disagree. The root problem was that single-thread performance of Sparc lagged Intel x86 around the time the PIII came out. Linux made adoption of x86 possible for many applications, but few of them would have moved to x86 without the big performance and cost benefits of adopting it.

      Sun tried to compensate with more cores, but that only made Sparc more expensive and many applications were not written to take advantage of multi-core hardware.

      • Re:A problem of Sun's making. (Score:5, Informative)

        by bungo ( 50628 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @03:05AM (#55139723)

        This is very true.

        This wasn't just Sun's problem, IBM had similar issues with the AIX Power servers. The price/performance of Java on x86 was far better than anything that Sun or IBM could offer. They were still stuck with the mindset of selling expensive mid-range type systems. They could offer better scaling, with more cores in a single box, but when you could have a distributed application, with many small servers, the old vendors couldn't compete.

        Once Redhat went public and management were able to convinced that Linux was a real alternative, instead of buying 4 AIX servers of $75k each, I was able to get 12 Linux x86 servers for $4k each (rack mounted, so a little bit expensive). The price for Sun SPARC servers were cheaper than the AIX servers, but still way more expensive than x86 servers.

        The Linux servers were multiple times faster for the Java applications that they had to run, for just over 1/2 the price of a single AIX box.

      • The root problem was that single-thread performance of Sparc lagged Intel x86 around the time the PIII came out

        Depends a bit on the SPARC, but the real problem was lack of volume. You could still buy faster SPARCs around that time, but they cost an order of magnitude more for a 10-20% performance improvement. If 20% means a lot to you, then you're going to start looking seriously at SMP and often a little bit of refactoring could buy you a 20+% improvement with a dual-processor system, which cost only a little bit more than double the price of the single-processor system.

        • I don't recall when this happened, but my (small) company was looking at buying another machine to run simulations.

          One manager wanted to buy Sun, but I was sceptical.

          We benchmarked the Sun machines against an x86 (PIII, I think) and the x86 was twice as fast (for half the cost). Note that we were running a single-threaded closed source application (ModelSim, I think).

          Price/performance wise the x86 machine was 4 times better than Sun. We could not refactor and the difference was so compelling that we never b

    • Re:A problem of Sun's making. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @07:25AM (#55140125) Homepage Journal

      I see it differently. MS killed desktop UNIX by being good enough. Desktop UNIX was better, but Windows NT 4 on commodity hardware was (perhaps just barely) good enough, and far cheaper. This impacted all the UNIX vendors, as it killed off a significant revenue stream.

      Sun was losing the performance battle badly with SPARC. This was painfully obvious with the Sun Blade 2500 tower. The CPUs were no faster than the Blade 2000, and it had a quarter of the RAM bandwidth as a cost-saving measure (they reduced memory from 256 bits wide to 64 bits wide so you could install RAM DIMMs individually rather than in groups of four). They were still trying to charge premium prices for SPARC, but x86 and POWER were walking all over it in performance. They managed to score some wins on highly-parallel workloads with the UltraSPARC T series (Niagara), but it was always specialised and Suns AMD64 boxes performed better on most workloads.

      Sun was spread far too thin on the ground and faced with falling revenues. They tried open source as a strategy, but open sourcing something provides no value on its own. They couldn't maintain/enhance their OS (Solaris), compilers (SunPro), Java, and everything else. They were floundering, occasionally coming out with an interesting product, but no consistency.

      Ruby on Rails was framework-of-the-month already by 2006, years before the Oracle purchase. The explosion of programming languages would've happened anyway, it's a result of all the people who studied computer science after the first dotcom bubble. J2EE had already been co-opted by Apache and Red Hat, and let's face it, hardly anyone even uses J2EE. Most of the time Spring is a lighter-weight substitute, you only really want J2EE if you need distributed transactional consistency.

      Sun were lucky to sell out when they did. They really didn't have a viable plan, and taking the money and running probably was the best thing for the shareholders. They'd already open-sourced most of the stuff that had any value, so it wasn't going to matter too much how Oracle mismanaged it. Oracle were stupid to buy Sun, as it was already pretty obvious there wasn't really much worth buying.

      Yeah, I miss Sun, but the Sun I miss had already faded long before the Oracle purchase. I just didn't want to believe it and willingly went into denial.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by upuv ( 1201447 )

        Oracle did not buy tech from Sun hardware or software.

        Oracle bought customers and revenue streams. Or the potential for revenue streams in some cases.

        Oracle knows that it can not keep support more and more software and hardware platforms. Oracle never mismanaged anything internally. They would have never intended to a lot of it going past the 2,5,10 year marks for various tech. They did mismanage or failed to anticipate market and client reaction. Case in point the Java non-sense where they tried to claw

    • I agree that Sun made mistakes, but I see 2 major mistakes that you overlooked in your otherwise fine post.

      1) I don't have the numbers to back this up, but the internet bubble had to have had a catastrophic effect on their finances. Almost all of those startups that went bust were using Sun equipment and there is no way that equipment was fully paid for by the time those companies went bust. What looked like a huge sales win for Sun suddenly rebounded on them when the market got flooded with excess e

  • So what did IBM do different with their POWER machines? Someone must be buying them because they keep on making them [wikipedia.org].

    • A few things things. The first is that they always had a larger market than SPARC, so their economies of scale were a bit better. The second is the HPC market. IBM doesn't put many PowerPC chips in supercomputers, but they charge a lot for the ones that they do, which helps offset R&D costs. Third, a lot of game consoles used PowerPC chips. These weren't the same designs as the high-end POWER systems (since POWER3, POWER implements the PowerPC spec and is just a marketing term for the expensive Po

  • Only real question is (Score:5, Insightful)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @11:47PM (#55139407)
    Why did they wait so long. We all knew this was going to happen. Oracle wanted the intellectual property not the actual projects or the people.

    • Re:Only real question is (Score:4, Interesting)

      by upuv ( 1201447 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @11:58PM (#55139441) Journal

      The big reason they waited so long was they wanted/needed to migrate existing customers onto exa or cloud platforms. If they just killed it quickly they would effectively be loosing those customers, probably forever.

      Also OracleDB was one of the only reasons to buy SPARC anymore. Database shops hate platform change in general. No one ever got fired for buying SPARC for the DB environment.

  • Obviously Oracle is clearing the decks to make room for something. The cash bleeders in the company are being sold off or shut down.

    This leaves some big holes in Oracle. Things that helped prop it's DB business are now basically gone. Oracle has publicly gone all in with the cloud. Privately I think they have other plans.

    So who is Oracle going to try and buy? Is it Red Hat?
    RHT 19.07B
    ORCL 209.399B

    They could do it easily. They could buy control for 10B.

    Or would they go after a global cloud provider? Like D

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I started on Sun SPARC and I'm sad to see it gone some time soon. But I'm also surprised it took that long.

  • ...is not just "Oracle-speak". Ask any civil servant.

  • They should have stuck with BSD, it's dying but less quickly. :)

  • Ego?

    I knew it was bad when they bought Sun. After the first tech support disaster, and that was for a nice server, with paid NBD warranty, I started referring to dealing with them as self-abuse.

    Institutionally, I'd say they didn't know what to do with a hardware company, and weren't ready to compete with Intel chips, and probably didn't really realize the kind of financial investment that a hardware company, with their own non-Intel chipset, meant, and their ROI accountants had the vapors when they looked.

    D

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