I don't care tbh, I never even heard of Oracle until now.

What rock have you been living under?

It may be a game changer in the business or it may be nothing. A lot depends on how Oracle deals with the Sun assets. So IBM is right, at this point nothing has changed but... 6-12 months from now? IBM could be in trouble or... Oracle might not be able to handle the new markets and may lose big time like AMD did with the purchase of ATI. AMD STILL hasn't recovered from the dent that put in their processor lines.

They're just one of the biggest database companies in the world. I happen to be running a version of Oracle right now. It's working properly right now **crosses fingers**

Maybe it's just me, but I'm under the impression that for about a year ATI is keeping AMD afloat. I know the merge wasn't easy, they were trying to unify (and still are) their process and structure, but in the end the ATI division did much better than AMD in the last year.

What's changed? Oracle has no experience in the hardware market and there is no "magic combo" that will come out of this that IBM has to fear. In fact IBM gets to take advantage of the uncertainty of the Sun platform to sell more servers. Everything else stays the same. They compete against Sun on the hardware platform just like they did before.

In the long run, say 24+ months, Oracle will have a chance to use Java to its advantage. This is the real concern for IBM but is far enough out that they can deal with it. This merger is more of a risk to Oracle than it is to IBM.

The only "magic" IBM could "fear" on the WH side is Oracle licensing in regard to Sun CPUs (Oracle license is on a per CPU/core basis). Other than that Sun isn't that big of a player in the HW business IMO. However, IBM already invested a lot in Java, that might be the more stressful aspect.

Oracle is already taking advantage of Java, it can be used as a stored procedure language since Oracle 9i (even latest Oracle 8 using some "add-on"). On a side-note, I'd like to remind people that Sun acquired MySQL last year so Oracle is now an even bigger database player.

I DON'T

@Zenthar The problem is AMD was a Processor competitor to Intel. Before AMD took on ATI (and to buy them they had to take out a HUGE multi-billion dollar loan) they were a pretty steady competitor. It was a fanboy choice of AMD or Intel, the specs were pretty close. then ATI... boom AMD becomes a non player again in the CPU market, they lose market share by the day...

It is only now with them working on the Global Foundries product and trying to hit the 28nm line before Intel and skipping the whole 32nm generation that AMD MIGHT have a chance to catch back up.

Why are they excited to get their hands on Java? It's a useful technology, but I wouldn't think it would suit the needs of a high end product like Oracle. Symantec based their antivirus management console on it and look how well that played out for them. Unusable almost describes it.

Mmm, that is anecdotal evidence (the way it is presented at least), like saying the decline of piracy is causing global warming. What caused AMD's drop isn't their ATI acquisition, it's Intel's tremendous come-back from the P4 architecture with C2D and Phenom I's inability to follow the steep improvement. One could even say was never that good, it was only Intel being bad.

BTW, I'm no fanboy, my last 2 CPUs were AMD, now on a C2D and I switched back-and-forth between NVidia and ATI for the past years as well.

The way I look at it, is you had a company in Sun, that was over-bloated and unprofitable... but holding valuable patents and technology. The way most of Sun's software was currently marketed, was retarded, but that doesn't mean that Oracle couldn't turn things like Java into powerful money making products for them.

I don't think Oracle's remotely interested in a lot of Sun's other pieces, but they'll tear Sun up, and sell those pieces to HP or other interested buyers. (HP, would probably jump at the opportunity to acquire some of Sun's Data Storage hardware tech, and the like).

When you look at the details of the deal, Oracle will pay for most of Sun with their own money, gain back the rest when they gut Sun, and sell scraps to a company like HP, and then they basically get Java and MySQL for free.

IBM doesn't care? Good luck with DB2 now, fuckers.

Java has it's pros and cons, unfortunately the Swing GUIs are probably a big "con" and is what most people perceive.

I believe IBM has a stake in Java development so I'm assuming there was some kind of agreement in there that would help protect IBM from being hurt by any leveraging of the JAva platform. So i doubt they have any reason to worry about that part.

The rest will have to wait still for all the official paper work to go through. A large acquisition like this has to pass the SEC scrutiny i'm sure it will draw so it will probably be a year at least efore Oracle will really even be able to use any of Sun's assests for any kind of market stance. so for now, nothing really has changed.

Mmmm, one aspect I just though of: Solaris/OpenSolaris. IBM still has AIX, and Redhat used to be the "reference enterprise Linux OS" for Oracle ...

Sun is more important for Oracle than for IBM.
I have some doubts now about this aquisition which time will bring the answer... some:
- Will Oracle keep or sell the Sun HW division?
- What will be HP (and other traditional partners) position about Oracle, now that it also sells servers, storage, backup robots and operating systems?
- What impact on profit and stability this huge aquisition will have on Oracle business?
- What will Oracle do about the Open SW? (think on OpenOffice).
- How will Solaris affect the Oracle SW development and products?
etc, etc, etc.

If the Sun hardware division gets sold off, it just bolster Intel's quest for monopolization as SPARC might not live on which can be a problem. Less architectures means less competition in the end.

I'm still supporting AMD the day until Intel loses its monopolistic grasp on the market. I support AMD not because it's better, it's because it's the only competition left and I support competition.

IBM would have outsourced all of the Sun jobs. The Oracle purchase is better for Sun employees.

What do you think will happen to mySQL after this ??

i disagree, oracle will eventually figure out how bad of a deal this was and will be carving sun up and looking for buyers for the different parts as it tries to salvage things. what does oracle know about hardware, operating systems, ect. buying a company does not given you the wisdom of what do to with it. oracle will be letting go of a lot of sun employees as it looks to cut costs, sun as very wasteful and oracle is like 30% profit margins. so it will look to cut the waste, all those open source projects that don't make money, all the hardware ect...

You do know many Oracle products run on Java right? It's also a PIA if you're using multiple Java products at the same time. Hopefully they can finally fix this. Why do you think I'm not big on their reliability?

Yeah, Oracle will just fire them and eliminate the position entirely.

Goodness folks... will folks stop talking about whether AMD will get to 28nm before Intel. The answer is it is a 100% lock, an absolute certainty.

Intel is not DOING 28nm, it is a half node... the progression on the CPU-side is 32nm then 22nm. IBM is announcing a foundry process which CANNOT be used for AMD CPU's as it a Bare Si process, not an SOI one! Much like AMD 'beat' Intel to 40nm (because Intel doesn't do half nodes and they go from 45nm to 32nm), the same non-event will occur on 28nm.

Technically illiterate folks need to stop drawing conclusions on information they clearly can't understand. IBM thrives on this when they do these ambiguous announcements.

I think Oracle can revive sun hardware by in example focusing the development to more "mainstream" end products.
Think next-gen consoles or mainframe like systems for "smaller" (50-500 users) busyness scaled cloud systems.
The SPARC architecture really is great and while there is a lot of work to do specially if you want to go mainstream i think it is possible to get them back in the mid-end workstation segment, terminal segment (think cloud) and basically any segment where they make use of computer system for a specific purpose.

Same goes for solaris which in itself is a very good and stable operating system.
It could have so much more uses and if affordable not only on the high end workstations servers and mainframes.

Oracle not only bought the existing stack of hardware and software but also all future possible development and this is exactly where sun always had a strong leg.
Innovation and years of expertise might become a revolution.

lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala

From hp's perspective... Hardware.. Nothing has changed, they are correct.

Whether run from Oracle or Sun, the hardware is not really a concern to HP.

What has changed, and why I believe Oracle bought sun in the first place, is the software involved.

sun makes hardware? I thought they only made software

Oh really?
I'm pretty sure if Oracle keeps the HW business they will try money with it, competing directly against HP and IBM, probably giving some extra advantage on Oracle databases and other SW when runinng on Solaris or its own storage.
Besides that, IMO, Sun HW will be a stronger player with Oracle management (and money...) that standalone.
There goes the HW independence... :-(

But yes, i also agree with you the aquisition interest relies on the SW development, of course.

We care this is worst thing happened ....
all SUN Software Will Be for commercial USE only ..that's mean Just for biggest company ...
Nice Move SUN.

IBM used to be a rather closed company as well, but part of it turned around. Oracle could use Sun's assets and know-how to become more like that. Only time will tell.

That'd be great actually! It'd kill of that heap of junk called java.
As a chrome user I know what a pain in the ass java is ... multiplatform my ass, it can't even run on a different browser on the same platform - and most of my java based games don't work on my n73 anyway - because there's something wrong with the java on it.

Anyway, I don't think oracle would do me this favor and take java out of the equation.