You really have to love Larry Ellison of Oracle; if there is one thing that you cannot acuse him of and that is being a shy retiring violet. But his latest pronouncements on becoming the new IBM; not the IBM we have today but the monopolistic (although very successful) monster of Thomas Watson Jr's day.
The IBM which manipulated the market, the big arrogant beast? Do we really want this to happen? Does anyone really want the IBM of the past back? I don't, do you? Perhaps he thinks that today's crop of ITers don't remember that IBM gouged the market with their prices for years. Is this the message that he is really sending out!
However to be honest, I don't think he stands a hope in hell of becoming the behemoth; there is too much competition out there and that in my mind is good.
Larry has dreams like every one, but from dreams to reality is a long way to walk. 😉
I loved the comments about ‘doubling investment in SPARC’, ‘doubling investment in Solaris’ – nothing about storage – does this mean they are exiting?
Also I am lead to believe that this is likely just to try and stop the rot on their seriously declining SPARC sales – at the moment its happy pickings for IBM and HP when it comes to Unix servers… who’s going to invest in SPARC servers that are likely to be killed off…
Barry,
As a Sun Reseller i need to believe Larry. SPARC and Solaris will live!
installed base is big and if they will continue to develop SPARC with fujitsu it can be good for both companies.
On Storage you are right, first comments on HDS are not good, Pillar is around the corner and Open Storage (7000) is still a work in progress. a lot of confusion!
Enrico,
My question is if they (Oracle,Fujitsu) can afford the outlay needed to keep SPARC alive. The investment in silicon design and fab itself is proving to be massive for all involved. I do hope we don’t end up with everyone thinking, oh crap how did we give all this to Intel, but at the same time can all these companies, continue to invest in different architectures when Intel and Power can probably meet every need out there.
It comes back to a more fundamental question – why does it all cost so much these days? Back in the 1960’s when the UK invested in building the M1 (Motorway) I bet it didn’t cost (even in inflation adjusted terms) the £3M or so it costs per mile to build a motorway… why is that?