Oracle has announced that it buys Sun Microsystem. This is a crazy news this week. Later Sun will be a part of Oracle and disappear forever. We have to say goodbye to Sun.
A few people believed that Oracle suddenly acquires Sun for 7.4 billion dollars. Two weeks ago, Sun refused to sell itself to IBM for 7 billion dollars, because the price is too low. When IBM decided that they would stop negotiation with Sun, many analysts said that Sun is dropping and going to die. Although someone guess that it is possible that Oracle combines with Sun, no one can make sure that it comes true quite soon.
In the past 27 years, Sun was still leading to development of IT technology. It created many great products, for example, Solaris, Java and SPARC. Sun is good at high-level computing market. Their products are so popular in the banks and telecom companies. They made many profits for Sun in th past. However, with development of of economy, Linux becomes more and more popular and people want to decrease their IT budget. Sun's products are too expensive, and it is hard to attract their clients. Later, Sun released its low-level server. But it is too late. IBM had shared most part of low-level server market with HP and Dell. Sun is too difficult to get into this market. And then Sun open their technology to public, including OS, CPU and Java. In the meanwhile, it acquired many opensource software, such as MySQL, VirtualBox and OpenOffice.org. Financial crisis means their dream can not come true.
As we know, Oracle is the second biggest business software company in the world. No one doubts their ability to compete with their enemy. It will increase their power greatly after finishing acquirement. Ellison has said that they had gained two key technology: Solaris and Java. But he did not refer to other products from Sun. Also some people said Oracle will sell Sun's hardware department to Cisco, and Oracle maybe give up MySQL and some software. Now no one can prove it. I heard that Oracle wanted to acquire Red Hat because it want to gain JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I just can say no one can guess what Oracle want to do. We just remember a sentence said by Ellison: The best method to beat your enemies is to buy it.
As an ordinary desktop user, I am not concerned about Sun's hardware and server software. I am just concerned about Sun's desktop software and MySQL. I can not make sure what their future are. But now I have got accustomed to OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox. I also like them very much. But Sun can not get money from them. We can not prove whether Oracle will give up them or not. We can not make sure what their futures are. I just hope Oracle still develop them and make them better and better.
We must say goodbye to Sun. The spirit of Sun is continuing.
