Oracle's Sun acquisition passes US anti-trust test The $5.6bn takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle moved another step toward closing as the US Department of Justice has given the acquisition its nod. Specifically, the DoJ terminated the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, according to a terse statement from Oracle, which reminded everyone that Sun's shareholders …
So what we really appear to have here is Oracle Sun being vetted to make sure that they do not threaten, with a concentration and focus of more intellectual power, governments and collections of governments? Methinks they are nowhere near well enough equipped to stop that happening.
We've let those other guys get away with illegal trusts, so now we have to let you go too?
Friggin ridiculous. Break up Microsoft. Force them to open up the hooks that they use for Office and IE. Let Firefox and OpenOffice use them. Break off SQL server, for that matter. Lets see some real competition again. And I don't mean netbooks and "Web OS" vs. desktop. I mean fair game for everyone.
Also, force a standard driver model. See how quickly BeOS, TinyOS, and a dozen others bounce back once they don't have to slowly develop driver support.
And neither do most CEOs, they all see it as a commodity cost. not a benefit. Diversity is bad, it pushes up costs. I expect most think that if you only have to deal with Microsoft, HP, IBM and Oracle, then so much the better, Diversity, like Democracy stands in the way of profit. MySQL doesn't feature, because, and I'm sorry to have to say this, it wouldn't matter if it vanished tomorrow.
Diversity and competition drive advancement, but increase cost, you need to spend time researching the product you buy in a wide market, in a narrow market it's a no-brainer, who needs consultants when all you have to do is choose between Microsoft and Oracle, you won't get fired either way.
What frightens the regulators is that Oracle might start charging for Java, which will push up costs for every body. Oracle is mostly J2EE based, compared to its biggest competitor which has its own technology. Everybody else has to use one or the other, well if you want to be in more than the windows market, actually you only have one choice.
In fact quite a lot of stuff happening in the market at the moment will restrict you choices in IT and lock you in to one vendor, have a real good think about virtualization, on demand and cloud computing and what they will do to your application environments. As an IT manager in outsourcig the name of the game is to deliver as cheaply as I can. Got an app, well, I'll virtualize it and stick it in a cloud, probably x86 and windows based, and once it's there I'm locked into windows and the virtualization platform, and yet that isn't the best solution for J2EE, is it now, but it is fashionable. (Any one read "The Zap Gun" by Phillip K. Dick, don't you just think IT is like that sometimes, and is getting worse.
Java's an open language. While Sun may "own" it, they can't really control it as much as if it were proprietary. Furthermore, it has thriving competition.
Oracle DB, on the other hand, is a large, proprietary database, apparently wholly owned by Oracle, who is now purchasing the company that owns one of their significant competitors. Yes, MySQL has only a tiny market share - that's because Oracle has so much of the market, and much of the rest of the market is held by Monopolysoft's product.
That having been said, the ruling is consistent with the DoJ's mis-approvals of mergers in the past. I don't think it could have gone any other way.
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