Oracle-Sun Creating Churn - Forbes.com

In my experience Sun has been a leader in providing outstanding value in the Unix Server market with a combination of quality hardware and the Solaris OS... But they've always been seen as a more leading edge provider and therefore were pulled along in the wake of aggressive businesses like financial services.

I know... I remember back in the late 80's on Wall Street and the 90's in the web start up community, we couldn't buy the boxes fast enough. When those industries took a hit, Sun was pulled down with them like a swimmer wrapped in a boat anchor.

"...more important, the hardware represents a buy-in by customers that doesn't exist in the commodity world; you don't change vendors in the high-end Unix server world because another vendor is offering a better promotion..."

Conservative customers perceive blood in the water and are voting with their dollars for the second tier Unix Server producers like IBM and HP. Too bad... Sun has given so much back in the form of quality software in the market. James Gosling has only half joked in the past that "Sun issues Hardware as a receipt for software"

This Forbes brief also highlights the severity of the matter

The Chubb Corporation Q2 2009 Earnings Call Transcript -- Seeking Alpha

"Chubb turned into an outstanding quarter in every respect, despite the recessionary conditions in the US and around the world. We had terrific underwriting results and our investment portfolio performed extremely well...

...CCI’s performance in a difficult economic environment is a tribute, we think, to the franchise value of our brand, which is holding up nicely in a competitive market...

...The real story in CCI is its determined and consistent drive to secure rate increases as reflected in its overall 2.0 US renewal rate increase which improved a point over the first quarter and continued a trend of improving rates in each of the last four quarters..."

 

"JavaScript is a poorly thought out language considering it's influences were Scheme and Smalltalk."-Gilad Bracha

"...it got lucky. It's in a crucial place. It simply fell into the right place in the universe. It's very important and we are relatively lucky because a lot worse could have happened! JavaScript is a wonderful assembly language in my view.

 My view is that people should not be programming the web directly in JavaScript, they should program it in whatever they want. They should compile it down and the browser is evolving into the operating system and as it evolves it becomes more and more adequate as a target...

 ...I really don't want to see a world where people are forced to always program in the one true language... Right? I worked for a compay that tried to force that down the world's throat..."-Gilad Bracha

Great podcast. You should give it listen..  Quoted from the, oh so Teutonic, software engineering radio podcast (link below)...
 
http://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2009-07/episode-140-newspeak-and-pluggable-ty...
 
[Sent from my iPhone 3GS]

Coding Horror: Software Engineering: Dead?

"I can publicly acknowledge what I've slowly, gradually realized over the last 5 to 10 years of my career as a software developer: what we do is craftsmanship, not engineering. And I can say this proudly, unashamedly, with nary a shred of self-doubt."
                                                                - Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror)

[Sent from my iPhone 3GS]

You've Gotta Hand it to Larry!

Ellison Moves Quickly to Push Aside IBM, Plunges Into Competitive Server Market - WSJ.com:

"One person familiar with the situation said IBM's final offer over the weekend was closer to the latter figure, making Oracle's $9.50 offer a financially better alternative in the view of Sun's board and more likely to close. Oracle has to pay Sun a $260 million breakup fee if it terminates the transaction.

Another person said
IBM was pressing Sun's board to revoke change-of-control provisions that would give a large number of Sun executives two years of salary in the event of a sale. Yet another person familiar with the matter said Oracle didn't hesitate to accept those provisions, characterizing them as 'a rounding error' to the software giant."