RE: Re: Err... & RE: The hardware business
".....Where's Matt Bryant when you need this level of argumentation?" Patience, Grasshopper. The cunning fox waits for the bumbling Sunshiner to dig themselves a hole before piling the soil in on top of them. As Mr Heathcote correctly points out, Apple don't make their own chips and never have, so Mr Ellison is obviously planning a mass blitz of fanboi type marketing whilst dumping SPARC in the background. Or maybe he was referring to the fact that Apple don't have an enterprise server business as to what he aspires to, Apple don't make enterprise offerings, and what few servers they do offer are using Intel's CPUs. Either way, it is bizarre for the CEO of an enterprise software company to want to make their new (and recently failed) enterprise hardware business into a consumer-orientated software and hardware bizz like Apple. SPARC is not a good fit for iBones or iPlods, and a CMT chip in a Mac? Yeah, right!
As for CISCO, they have spent years raking it in using over-priced networking kit against precious few competitors. That virtual monopoly has taken a big hit from cheap Chinese LAN switches and an even bigger hit from hp's ProCurve. Their first attempt to sow up SANs has been kicked in the pants by Brocade, and their second attempt with FCOE - which was supposed to leverage their installed LAN/WAN base to dominate SANs - looks to have just opened their accounts up to attack from Brocade leveraging their installed SAN base instead. CISCO are at the same point Sun were nine years ago - diversify or die! Sun didn't diversify, they believed their own hype and look what happened. The big cash lump in the bank won't keep CISCO going forever at the rate they are losing marketshare, hence the move into servers, though that is a risky choice given it is such a competitive arena.
Bringing ARM or MIPS into the argument is moot - Oracle don't make those either.
RE: The hardware business
"They don't want to subsidize a competitor, but they don't really have a choice....." Actually, it is Oracle that don't have the choice. Sun makes a tiny minority of the server hardware that is used to host new Oracle apps. There may be a mass of old SPARC kit running old Oracle DBs, but those are ripe targets for hp and IBM Xeon kit running Linux and Windows. Looking forward, for Oracle to continue making money they need as many new installations as possible, and that means being nice to hp and IBM as they own the lion's share of the server bizz. There is nothing to stop hp and IBM simply putting more money and effort into competitor solutions such as DB2 and Websphere, or JBOSS and MariaDB, etc, etc. When hp and IBM were planning to announce full support for Linux back in the nineties, many said that Microsoft would punish them. As it turned out, M$ needed them just as badly, and the result is that hp and IBM are both leading Linux and leading M$ partners. Sun railed against both M$ and Linux and simply died.
"....Customers chose Oracle over SQL for a reason...." Yes, as a user of large Oracle RAC instances I can agree there are times we would only use Oracle. But nowadays it is mainly the enterprise high end, and M$ SQL has already surpassed Oracle DB as the most common database in our business and in the market as a whole. We use M$ SQL widely in what could be referred to as the second-tier and departmental environment. M$ SQL is getting more capable with every release, and there are instances where we use SQL Server 2008 where we would previosuly only have considered Oracle. As regards the rest of the Oracle stack, more and more of that business is being eaten up by opensource's offerings or Microsoft's. I have previously wondered how Oracle could diversify, and buying a failed hardware bizz does not seem the best of ideas. And I suspect Larry secretly agrees - first time round he asked hp to buy that side of Sun.
Personally, I find the whole idea of Larry bigging up the Sun hardware bizz quite bizarre, and if I was an Oracle shareholder I would consider it alarming! It was largely the hardware bizz that killed Sun, simply repeating the same mistakes with added Oracle licences is not likely to appeal to those shareholders. The line about SPARC/Slowaris being cheaper to own is just laughable. For a start, those Sunshiner admins price themselves rediculously high compared to your average M$ admin; the Sun management options are a joke compared to Windows; and then there is the fact the hardware costs ten times as much to give the same level of performance with the business apps people actaully want to run. And let's not forget Linux, which has been cheerfully gutting the SPARC/Slowaris bizz for years by being both cheaper, faster and easier to manage than Sun's offerings. Maybe he's hoping all the waffle will make IBM, hp or Fujitsu put in a bigger offer for the dross he needs to jettison.
/I never thought I'd say it, but now I'm pointing and laughing at Larry.