A senior manager from Sun is a facebook friend. When the Oracle acquisition of Sun was announced, she quickly updated her facebook page to say ""Oracle of the East" Very excited for customers and partners". I started reading my tweet grid search tool for insights with an eye to gleaning insights from Sun and Oracle employees (or alumni) that I know and who are tweeting. The pundits, with typical 'certainty' framed the acquisition in 'objective' financial value terms. Some enlightened technologists whose opinions I respect offered versions of:
Here is this full set of integrated toolsets and solution stacks that we invest in with R&D and support. From a basic free LAMP stack, through Identity Management and Directory Services, Datawarehousing and EPM. We can put together a solution that fits your organization's needs with the right mix of support,development tools, training, professional services, we can even install the whole thing in a shipping container data center and drop it at your door.It's in our best interest to contribute back a lot of the these tools and solutions as OSS to broaden the overall ecosystem because that expands our potential service base
When I got a call from the Wall Street Journal to share my view, I outlined that I was neither expert in nor particularly interested in the so-called financial analysis. I also shared that Oracle's track record on advanced technology services was less than stellar from my experiences. While the WSJ article and subsequent reporting and ">here focused on MySQL and the risk of open source, my two cents were framed in much more, I would say, 'stark' insights.
I started by sharing with the WSJ that the acquisition was the 'mother of all organizational cultural mismatches'. I know dozens of Sun and Oracle employees(both current and alumni) who are scratching their heads trying to figure out what the blending of cultures will look like. From my nearly 20 years of experience with Oracles M&A activities and organizational culture I think we can kiss the innovation, autonomous technical genius, project driven methodology, and core commitment to Open Source (admittedly a more recent development) all part of what Sun is/was (good and bad)-- good bye.
Oracle will selectively integrate Java, some terrific middleware code, and perhaps continuing interest with thin-client. While there is likely to be some placation of the installed base of MySQL, OpenSolaris, and many of Sun's open development tools, the probability of further R&D investment in these business units is nearly zero over a 3-4 yearhorizon. As others have pointed out, Oracles likely business behavior will afford new opportunities for innovation and open source activity. The loss, I referenced, is less product specific (MySQL or OpenSolaris) and first and foremost that building an organizational culture, a paradigm of computing and technology does not re-emerge at the scale that Sun represented to the eco-system in an overnight fashion. This is what led me to conclude that the net result was/is a major step backwards. One guy's view....
Lev Gonick
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, OH
April 23, 2009