Sun And Oracle: Ballmer Never Saw It Coming
Now that the dust has settled from Oracle’s purchase of Sun, what does Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer think of this deal? Here is his answer:
‘I need to think about it. I am very surprised.’
I am not surprised that he didn’t have an answer at hand (or at least some spin). After all, with this one purchase Oracle now controls the Oracle experience from end to end and they now have the ability to lock everybody else (read: Microsoft) out. Plus a lot of people run Oracle’s stuff on Sun hardware anyway. This now gives Oracle a ton of power in the marketplace. Ballmer likely came to that conclusion and is privately freaking out. That’s why he’s at a loss for words. I bet that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison must be enjoying this seeing as he reportely hates Microsoft with a passion.
Meanwhile, I hope that Microsoft employees have removed the chairs from Ballmer’s office for the sake of protecting the walls from damage.
April 21, 2009 at 11:49 pm
Well, perhaps…Oracle has to do a lot of sanding and joinery to fit Sun into itself. Microsoft has a fairly congruent stack: Windows OS, Server 7/Desktop 7. Sharepoint application development + .Net.
Oracle/Sun are in the same bind that each individually was….Sun offers Solaris, but also dabbles in Linux. Oracle offers “unbreakable” Linux but only for their databases. MySQL is the only load balancing cluster available…that would then seem a good reason for Oracle to suppress rather than promote it (which favors Microsoft tangentially).
Java becomes Oracles .net — which doesn’t bring in revenue.
Oracle mainly makes its money from databases…Microsoft from Office and databases.
But that fight is not really changed by the Sun acquisition very much.
What I’m saying is that Sun and Oracle were never able to let go of non-congruent parts of their stack to take on Microsoft one on one….and I see no sign that Oracle will make the sacrifice for the long run either.
Meanwhile. all the OSS projects can be forked as you say and continue to hamper the big vendors.