The announcement by Oracle yesterday that it would purchase Sun for approximately $7.4 Billion marks the end of an era. As their advertising proclaimed, with only slight hyperbole, Sun put the dot in dot-com. No other single company has done more to advance the Internet. Amidst the hype around cloud computing these days, it is easy to forget that Sun founder John Gage coined the phrase "The network is the computer" nearly twenty-eight years ago.
Nostalgia aside, Sun chose to exercise its technology vision in a way that genuinely made a difference - by pursuing a business plan built around open source software. Its contributions to open source, which include Java, OpenSolaris, Open Office and MySQL (to name just a few of the more well-known packages), have had a meaningful impact on the world. If for no other reason, by providing viable alternatives to proprietary software in almost every category. As with other open source companies, Sun hoped to generate services revenue around its systems (it is ironic that the company's bread and butter market - high-end servers - was eroded by the very commodity computing it espoused).
Unfortunately, Sun's management could not convince the market that the open source model would generate a sufficient financial return. And, whatever Oracle decides to do with Sun's technology assets, it seems safe to say that open source will be the loser in this deal. It is difficult to imagine Oracle, with management firmly focused on the bottom line, allocating resources in the same way.
Perhaps Sun's demise as an independent company was inevitable. I'm just saying that it would have been nice to see them go to a company less brutally efficient than Oracle.
Nostalgia aside, Sun chose to exercise its technology vision in a way that genuinely made a difference - by pursuing a business plan built around open source software. Its contributions to open source, which include Java, OpenSolaris, Open Office and MySQL (to name just a few of the more well-known packages), have had a meaningful impact on the world. If for no other reason, by providing viable alternatives to proprietary software in almost every category. As with other open source companies, Sun hoped to generate services revenue around its systems (it is ironic that the company's bread and butter market - high-end servers - was eroded by the very commodity computing it espoused).
Unfortunately, Sun's management could not convince the market that the open source model would generate a sufficient financial return. And, whatever Oracle decides to do with Sun's technology assets, it seems safe to say that open source will be the loser in this deal. It is difficult to imagine Oracle, with management firmly focused on the bottom line, allocating resources in the same way.
Perhaps Sun's demise as an independent company was inevitable. I'm just saying that it would have been nice to see them go to a company less brutally efficient than Oracle.
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