The South East Asia SOA Weblog

No company wants to shoot itself in the foot. But if it goes bad, another will take its place.

I see your point however it's not the "company" so much as the "industry" that is at stake. The IT industry has invested so much in Java that damage by mismanagement could be irreversible. When you look at the only kind of viable alternative to Java then it makes you wonder if we are all just working for the clampdown. You have to admit that Richard Stallman had a point (even with the long greasy hair and attitude).

You make some good points in your blog about the coupling of Oracle
with Solaris. My question is will this be on Sparc architecture or on X86?
And what will it do to SUN’s HW offering for the architecture that is
not chosen?

My guess is that they will come to the market with a new all singing and all dancing "software, hardware and services" message similar to the story that IBM tells. I anticipate that they will initially tell the market a 14 years support story for everything Sun has (including both SPARC and X86) but later they will probably do what Sun did a while back and drop Solaris X86 into EOL mode with no development.

The powers that be inside Oracle are very pro-Linux (I worked there for 7 years in a regional tole) and will not see a long term justification to support two OS ports on the same hardware architecture. The only thing that brought Solaris X86 back to life was Linux fear within the Solaris camp within Sun and I can see that being the first political power base within Sun that gets eroded. Solaris X86 was a commercial failure for Sun initially (at USD 20 a shot) so they dropped it in early 2003 then brought it back to life in late 2003 due to complaints from customers. I can't imagine Oracle maintaining it for free when they already have Oracle Enterprise Linux and have the Linuc community to do most of the work on that other than the Oracle database-specific drivers for RAC etc.

My guess is that their market message will be something like:
* Offers the market the broadest range of products (servers, storage, networking, software)
* Deliver a complete integrated platform (servers, operating system, storage, database, middleware, apps)
* Simplify your IT environment, reduce risk and TCO
* Continued platform innovation (database, SPARC, Solaris, Java, Applications)

In reality it should be something like this:
* Offers the market the most complex, expensive and heterogeneous plethora of tools and applications
* Delivers value for databases but at a ridiculous price point
* Introduces massive and insurmountable complexity into your IT environment, increasing costs
* Delivers a complete and integrated platform with continued powerpoint innovation.
* Continues to destroy the IT industry through innovative debt/equity and bonds issues

Anyway... apparently god is giving a sermon about it all on 27th January so watch it yourself if you like: http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=108481&src=6806472&src=6806472&Act=10&msgid=8453463&eid=4661519850&lid=3