62% of Sun's Stockholders Vote For Oracle Deal 152
Moon Workstation writes "In an special meeting held at Santa Clara, CA, 62% of Sun's stockholders voted for the acquisition by Oracle. As a result of this Sun's stock will be taken from the stock market as of Friday. The acquisition is still waiting for approval by the US Department of Justice and anti-trust offices in other countries. The planned acquisition is source for rumors and speculation about the future of different Sun products, like OpenSolaris, CPUs and others." (MySQL among them.)
Bye SUN... I will miss you. (Score:3, Insightful)
It is truly the end of a era. At one time, SUN was the epitome of enterprise class hardware. Now it will be reduced to Larry's little toy.
To quote netcraft: SUN is dying.
SUN is dead.
Thanks, Larry.
GO MONTY! (Score:5, Insightful)
Release ZFS as GPL (Score:4, Insightful)
You all know you want it.
*OR*.... (Score:3, Insightful)
*OR* everyone will just wake up to the fact that PostgreSQL is superior in pretty much every way now (including performance and ease of maintenance) and dump MySQL altogether.
Oracle and Sun are perfect for each other (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I think Oracle and Sun are perfect for each other business wise. Two companies that have some good products, often don't even realize the potential of what they have, have no real vision other than getting big contracts signed, and couldn't market their way out of a wet paper bag.
Now that there is even a hint that something might change, I halfway expect managers to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off spewing crap like "Solaris is going to be desupported!" or "Sparc servers are 'going away' soon". (I went through this with Oracle Forms when Oracle dropped the Win32 client ARRAGGG!)
It would just be nice if they could make their intentions 100% clear on what specifically they plan to do with Sun's products.
That's quite surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
I really would have expected more than 62% to vote for the acquisition. Having 38% abstain or vote against it... I will be surprised if some of the nay-sayers didn't file a lawsuit to prevent it from happening.
No 62% of stockholders did not vote for this. (Score:1, Insightful)
Stockholders, representing 62% of the voting shares, approved this this merger.
Lets use voter for democracy please. If it isn't yet a good way of using the term, it should be.
But, good English dictates that it was not 62% of the voters. There could for example be two 2 people holding 57% of the shares, and 1,234,984 people holding another 5% of the shares. Lets be accurate about what kind of decision was made by whom and how.
BTW there could have been and may be another couple of billion dollars of shares, that have no vote.
Re:Sun Microsystems: What are your theories? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why has Sun Microsystems not done particularly well in the last few years
Um, just as a guess, because they didn't invest in hardware research and gave away all their software? "Services are where it's at" say companies who can no longer compete technologically. Weren't the Sun E-series supers acquired from Cray Research?
Note to all in this business: if you decide against investing in R&D, don't be surprised if you're left with nothing but "services" in your portfolio and diminishing margins. Someone I respect called this "the race to the bottom". Use your brains and compete!
Re:Sun Microsystems: What are your theories? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sun materially offered nothing that couldn't be achieved cheaper elsewhere, and in this race-to-the-bottom commodity market, made it impossible to compete. Sun kept trying to do what they always did - engineer decent but conservative systems offered at a premium price. Remember, Sun thrived first in a time where the standard Intel offerings couldn't begin to compete with the multi-user scalability of Sun. They either couldn't recognize or couldn't adapt themselves to an evolved future wherein PCs dominated the sweetspot of the price-performance curve.
Oracle bought Sun because buying Innodb didn't kill MySQL. There's nothing else that Oracle can likely do with the other assets of Sun other than sell them for parts. I refuse to believe that Oracle has either the ability or the impetus to continue any of Sun's hardware or non-DB software.
Re:Sun Microsystems: What are your theories? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty interesting. They certainly wouldn't be the first company to have it's left hand not know what it's right hand was doing as a result of bullshit CRM and sales software. Ironic that it's Oracle.
They already tried that along with every other big Unix hardware vendor trying to protect their own hardware that went bust. The message was clear even in the 90s which is why no one wanted to port their Unix to x86 and why no one has trusted Solaris on x86. Either SGI, Digital and Sun kept up and kept surpassing raw x86 performance to justify their high costs or they were in real trouble when the inevitable x86 based 'Unix' came along. They all went into denial when Linux came along and made that happen.
But how do you put in the research and development to make sure that SPARC keeps up with x86 performance and justifies its added cost? Sun farmed it out to Fujitsu because they could no longer put the development effort in and even Fujitsu cannot manage the costs of keeping up.
Sun focused far too much on hardware and Solaris without creating any firm advantages in either, apart from a magical pixie and arrogant belief that people would come back to Sun 'enterprise' hardware and software, and the leadership allowed deeply entrenched politics at the company to get in the way. I doubt whether Oracle will allow that to happen. They're a company that looks at returns and precious little else.
Re:MySQL won't die (Score:4, Insightful)
However, there is no way at all that MySQL will be allowed to acquire features that will let it compete with Oracle.
It's likely that a lot of MySQL users will consider this a feature. There's a niche for a simple, basic DB that's fairly fast and has a small footprint. If you don't actually need those advanced features that PostgreSQL and Oracle provide, there's no reason to pay for them (with money or memory or slower speed).
It's sorta like how the makers of word-processor software would love to eliminate the use of plain text, so we all have to pay them to use formatting features even when we don't need them. So far, they haven't succeeded at this, and it's fairly obvious (even to managment) why. There's no reason the same reasoning shouldn't be applied to databases.
In fact, I've worked on a few projects in which the management eventually gave up on the fancy database version, because our "preliminary test" setup that used the unix filesystem did everything that was needed, was an order of magnitude faster, required no memory other than the usual libc and kernel filesystem drivers. Why pay good money for a system that doesn't do anything extra, needs more resources, and costs more?
Of course, as the DB and WP folks know, there's a good market for their products. Some customers do need their extra capabilities. And I suppose it's no surprise that they would also push their products for situations where they aren't needed. More income is better than less, after all, even if it means conning customers into buying things that they don't need.
Re:Sun Microsystems: What are your theories? (Score:4, Insightful)
Many many small processors without a fast interconnect will give good database performance if and only if all the operations are wonderfully parallelizable, and don't require coordination.
This is somewhat hard to arrange(;)) A bank, for example, always debits one account when it credits another, so in the general case ties up two machines for every operation. If there is another transaction outstanding against either of these accounts, you've tied up three. Think about how well this scales in a busy bank branch and you can guess that the dominating cost is the coordination. This is true for most thing you *use* transactions for, pretty much by definition.
That works best on a machine with a really fast locking regieme, which in turn you need a backplane like a Cray. That's what you get when you by a Sun or IBM machine: hardware to make database transactions go fast.
--dave
Re:38% of Sun shareholders are fools? (Score:4, Insightful)
To Oracle, Sun is worth the value of Sun plus the value of IBM not having Sun. That is more than it is worth to anybody else.
Re:Sun Microsystems: What are your theories? (Score:1, Insightful)
My theory is that the highly reliable hardware Sun Microsystems sells is no longer popular because it is far cheaper to use consumer-grade hardware with software that is fault-tolerant
Check out the numbers comparing, say x86-based servers from Dell and HP to Sun's T2-based lines. Dell and HP's offerings will end up costing considerably more in terms of price/performance. Besides that, consider that it takes 2 quad-core Xeons to match a single T2 in terms or core count, and 8 quad-core Xeons to match a single T2 in terms of threads (2 threads per core, vs 8 threads per core). You're looking at 32 CPUs and 128 Cores to match a quad-socket Sun server. The cost differential actually favours Sun, on the upfront hardware costs, without factoring in the power consumption, cooling and storage (as in physical space) costs.
The differential is quite amusing in certain situations (say for an MySQL cluster), where you're limited to 8 cores per node (for some reason, MySQL just doesn't scale well past 8 cores, you're actually looking at considerably better throughput at 64 threads on 8 cores than you are on 16 cores, at the expense of a slightly lower peak at 32 threads) in such configurations, mot only will the x86 equivalent to a quad-socket T2 rig cost considerablty more, but the difference in upfront hardware costs pays for an Oracle EE licence, with interest (conveniently enough, the EE license covers 4 sockets)!
Sun hasn't done too well because they have brilliant products but a shitty sales and marketing team, and pony-tailed douchebags in charge who make phenomenally stupid decisions, like blowing $1 billion on MySQL. Even so, I'd hardly qualify $10 billion in annual revenues (~$2.5b quarterly) as doing poorly. Granted they're nowhere near as large as HP or IBM (both in the $40+ billion range), but even with their shitty sales people, it's not as if they're having trouble selling units.
Why would Oracle buy Sun? For one, at $7.5 billion, they got Sun for a steal. For two, Oracle is in the database in a box business, they already had the database and middleware, now they have their own OS and hardware. For three, Oracle has always and continues to run best on Solaris, which in turn, runs best on Sparc. For four, Oracle is heavily invested in Java, and now they own it. For 5, Oracle is also heavily invested in J2ee, they pretty well own that stack now, as well.
The question shouldn't be "why would Oracle buy Sun?" but rather, "Why wouldn't Oracle buy Sun, and what's taken them so long?". With Larry's talent for profit, Oracle's marketing and sales teams, and Sun's product line, there's no reason not to expect SOracle to take on IBM and HP head on now.
Also, why would you run Oracle on 4 computers when you can get better throughput (remember Sparc is designed for throughput and vertical scalability, x86 is not) on one?