Though he resigned earlier this year, former MySQL boss Mårten Mickos still has strong opinions about the open-source database outfit, which was acquired by Sun in 2008. In a letter to the European Commission Thursday, Mickos urged regulators to green-light Oracle’s takeover of Sun, arguing that to delay it will only harm competition.
The European Commission’s inquiry into Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun is costing the database giant dearly. Speaking at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley Monday evening, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said Sun is losing $100 million a month because of the extended European antitrust review. He also said he’d like his company to be “the successor to IBM.”
Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun will undoubtedly be the subject of much discussion this afternoon when the database behemoth reports fiscal first-quarter earnings after the market close. Indeed, there’s quite a bit of jawing about it already, particularly about Oracle’s continued commitment to the deal in light of the ugly decline in Sun’s revenues and profitability since it was announced in April.
Oracle has a message for CIOs concerned about its plans for Sun’s hardware, Solaris and SPARC businesses: Relax. In a full-page ad published in The Wall Street Journal today, the database giant made a very public commitment to all of them.
Google claims that its Book Search settlement will “bring back to life millions of lost books in a way that serves the interest of all.” And if that truly is its goal, the company is going to have to put its own Brobdingnagian self interests second to those of others–if only for a little while. To wit, Google’s announcement Monday of a number of concessions to the European Union, which seems a bit dubious of the whole thing.
Sun Microsystems’s last quarterly report as an independent company was about as miserable as earnings reports get. No surprise, then, that the company didn’t bother to issue a press release or hold a conference call with analysts to discuss them.
September third. That’s the day the European Commission will determine whether or not to clear Oracle’s planned $5.6 billion merger with Sun. And though there would seem, on the face of things, to be no serious antitrust objections to the deal, one never knows. Questionnaires distributed by the EC suggest the agency is particularly interested in the merger’s potential impact on MySQL.
Larry Ellison’s got some news for skeptics predicting Oracle will dump the Sun Microsystems hardware business when its $7.4 billion acquisition of the company closes: It’s not gonna happen. In an interview with Reuters subsequently filed with the SEC, the Oracle CEO said he plans to maintain that part of Sun’s business.
In its second quarter, Oracle managed to hit Wall Street’s earnings targets despite the souring economy. Will it manage to do so again in its third? That’s not clear. But, by some accounts, the company’s third quarter is shaping up to be an ugly one–-the company’s worst since the early ’90s.
“We’re growing dramatically faster than our competitors, and our target really is to beat IBM. If we maintain our trajectory and IBM maintains their trajectory, we could pass them as early as the end of this year or certainly next year to be the No. 2 player in middleware.” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made that prediction last September, and a little over a year later it’s come to pass–according to Ellison, anyway.
If one set out to design electronic voting machines that undermine voter confidence and threaten the integrity and accuracy of the whole election process, it would be hard to outdo those of Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems. But Sequoia Voting Systems is trying–really trying.
Here’s a clever way of streamlining the acquisition process: Become a platform-as-a-service provider and encourage developers to create Web applications using your proprietary database and your APIs (application programming interfaces).
That seems to be what Google (GOOG) has done with App Engine, a new service for developers who’d like to write and run their Web applications [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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