Microsoft’s proposed antitrust concessions, particularly its offer to give European computer users a choice of Web browsers, appear to have gone over well with the European Commission. This morning, the EC announced a market test of the browser ballot feature Microsoft plans to include in Windows 7.
Brocade investors are smiling into their coffee cups this morning after reports that the networking-gear maker has put itself up for sale sent the company’s shares soaring. People familiar with the matter tell The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg that Brocade is seeking a buyer and that both Hewlett-Packard and Oracle are among its potential suitors.
The passing of a year hasn’t much changed Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s opinion of cloud computing. Remarking on the industry’s sudden fascination with the concept at Oracle OpenWorld last September, Ellison reduced it to a thin sheen of windshield condensation. In conversation with former Sun CEO Ed Zander at a Churchill Club event a little over a year later, Ellison expanded on those remarks, suggesting that if the cloud is anything, it’s a cloud of BS.
Randy Seidl’s bio is still live on the Sun Microsystems Web site, but the exec who once oversaw the company’s North American sales has new digs. At Hewlett-Packard.
If you’re going to claim in an advertisement that Transaction Processing Council benchmarks show that a hybrid Sun-Oracle server runs faster than a competing product from IBM, it’s probably wise to make sure you have the TPC benchmarks to back up your claim. Not if you’re Oracle, though.
Though some analysts claim otherwise, MySQL is an asset, not baggage, and Oracle has no plans to unload it. Nor does the company think it will be forced to win regulatory approval for its proposed purchase of Sun Microsystems. “No, we’re not going to spin [MySQL] off,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told attendees of a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley Monday evening.
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 shares are slipping after market trading today on news of the company’s latest financials. Seems that while Oracle’s earnings were in line with the Street’s expectations, sales were not.
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.
Approved without incident by Sun shareholders in July and the U.S. Justice Department in August, Oracle’s planned $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems seemed poised to easily pass muster with European regulators as well. Sadly for Oracle, that’s not how things have played out. Citing “serious concerns” about the deal’s effect on competition in the market for databases, the European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation into it.
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. Read more »
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 use of the Beeker “meee” ever.
While the technology behind the Telephone is new, the design is reassuringly old-fashioned, reminiscent of a phrenologist’s horn or ear-candle in form. We found the experience far more comfortable than the one we had with the Telegraph.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
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