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To the question of why it was sold to a company with such a vastly different culture. Because it does not matter to the shareholders what kind of culture Oracl
by TY 16y ago
To the question of why it was sold to a company with such a vastly different culture.
Because it does not matter to the shareholders what kind of culture Oracle has. The only metric that mattered was how much money Oracle was willing to pay for Sun vs another bidder.
Using any other criteria would just launch a nasty shareholder lawsuit against Sun's soon to be departed management...
- maukdaddy 16y ago^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go pubic with an IPO, the shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are elected on behalf of those shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value. If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.
- jrockway 16y agoHow did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?
- j_baker 16y agoOracle uses a decent amount of Java. It was probably worth it just to control the language's standards and runtime.
- gvb 16y agoRecent history suggests for Sun's patents, not their software. Oracle has claimed they bought Sun for their hardware (e.g. so they could do vertical integration selling like IBM), but that remains to be seen if it is true or not.
- ora600 16y agoOracle used Sun's hardware to build the Exadata - which they very aggressively sell as a data warehouse solution. Competing with Netezza, Teradata, Greenplum and the likes.
- maukdaddy 16y agoI wasn't claiming that Oracle maximized their shareholder value ;) In fact I'd argue that Oracle simply burned cash.
- eru 16y agoAnd perhaps it was just managers expanding their empire. You know, principal agent problems between managers and shareholders.
- ciupicri 16y agoBut they still own the brands and for business people it matters. They can also develop various proprietary extensions.
- nl 16y agoSun has a significant hardware business, especially in the legacy SPARC products. Combining that with Oracle's applications turns Oracle into a complete solution provider like IBM & HP. Solaris is open source, but Oracle has dropped support for the open source version and isn't going to open source all new features. Sun also owned MySQL, which gives Oracle a great foot-in-the-door at a whole industry segment where they weren't a player before.
- loewenskind 16y agoSun has more patents than pretty much any company not called IBM. Oracle probably paid way too little for what they got.
- gaius 16y agoWell, Sun paid a billion dollars for the domain name mysql.com, when all's said and done.