shades of things to come for Sun
By joe
- 2 minutes read - 290 wordsThere are still a few stalwarts who believe that Oracle’s purchase of Sun will continue their favorite projects and products. Then you see stuff like this:
Whoops.
Now fast forward a few weeks, for when Sun’s purchase closes.
So virtualbox is likely dead as a product. A few months ago I speculated that the purchase of Sun was brilliant in part due to all the technologies Oracle would get. Many would be shuttered. I did not guess that Oracle would shutter the Virtualization parts of the business. I guessed something quite the opposite. I think I need to edit that post and change the word brilliant to something more appropriate. [update] I said it before, a few people agreed. Now it looks like I was basically correct. From the reg: Sun’s hardware is pretty much toast.
As I pointed out elsewhere, this could put some of Oracle’s partnerships at risk
And the people who helped build the house of McNealy, aren’t happy about the sale. I dispute his notion that Sun killed SGI. Sun did undercut SGI on pricing. We saw that all the time. We used to point out that since they didn’t have much in the way of differentiable value to offer, their only choice was dropping their drawers as it were, on price. But reasonably regularly, we beat them at a higher price (when I was there). If you offer 10x the value to the customer for 1.2x the price, chances are you might get that business. The contest was fierce, but what killed SGI wasn’t Sun. SGI’s wounds were largely self inflicted. Like Bo Ewald selling Sun the SunFire 10000 when SGI bought Cray. That was wrong, at so many levels. So completely wrong. And self-inflicted.