Sun Microsystems To Cut 3,000 Jobs As Oracle Deal Drags On 251
afgun writes with news that Sun will be shedding 3,000 jobs, roughly 10% of their workforce, as they continue to lose money while waiting for EC regulators to approve their acquisition by Oracle. "Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said Sept. 22 that Sun is losing about $100 million a month as the transaction is delayed by the EU probe." James Staten, an analyst with Forrester, said, "The longer a cloud of uncertainty hangs over Sun, that drives customers into delays of purchases or into the hands of competitors. This is a very trying time for Sun and Oracle as they wait for an answer." A spokesman for EU Competition Comissioner Neelie Kroes said today that she "expressed her disappointment that Oracle failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition problems or a proposal for a remedy to the competition concerns identified by the commission," and that "a rapid solution lies in Oracle's hands."
Nancy Kroes? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Aren't these both US companies? (Score:5, Informative)
They both operate in Europe as well. When you're a large, multinational corporation you generally have to accept regulatory practices of each nation you wish to operate in.
Re:I must be missing something (Score:3, Informative)
If, by not merging, Sun goes out of business, then no more support for your newly purchased equipment. Of course, I don't have any idea how likely Sun is to go under, but that's what they're trying to allude to in pressuring the EU. As for counter evidence, just point to all the competing products/companies that will still exist in their markets after the merger.
Re:I must be missing something (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that the longer the decision is delayed the longer Sun's EU employees get to keep their jobs doing .... whatever it is they do.
I dunno what Sun people do anymore. Every time I've called Sun for the last 5 or 6 years they seemed only vaguely interested in selling me a computer.
Re:I must be missing something (Score:3, Informative)
Because Oracle doesn't already offer a competing product in the same market space as Java, raising concerns about anticompetitive squashing or stifling of Java.
OTOH, MySQL runs the perceived risk of being the fifth wheel in the "Oracle RDBMS über alles" mindset that much of the community fears (wrongly or rightly).
On a slightly offtopic note: I wonder if this comment will preserve the umlaut-u I put into the quoted phrase there.
Re:I must be missing something (Score:3, Informative)
Because, while OpenSolaris is pretty cool, support for OpenSolaris could easily disappear tomorrow. Yes, OpenSolaris might still exist, but future development on OpenSolaris is basically 100% dependent on Sun. If Oracle decides that it does not want to fund OpenSolaris development any more (or it simply decides to reduce funding for development) then OpenSolaris will be in serious trouble.
Apple can't take server share (Score:4, Informative)
While OS X Server is real underrated state of art UNIX which can do amazing things, Apple isn't and can't be a "server" competitor unless they allow OS X Server to run on "generic" x86.
While not widely known, OS X server can be used as a client, you can even play all the games on it even with better performance. So, they can't make "blade only" Apple OS X server. It would mean the end of "OS X working only on Apple hardware". I mean it is not AIX.
Forget everything, Apple can't compete in "support" department for servers. There is Big Blue there, Dell there, HP there and of course, Sun with decades old agreements and happy customers who expects same kind of service.
Of course, if you consider the things you can do with distributed computing (Xserve), spotlight (server version), it is sad but industry hates brand hardware without any competition. Java's (especially J2EE) success and mainframes coming back to life is also related to that trend, people choose Java because it will work anywhere, any CPU and even any OS with minor modifications.
Re:MySQL isn't nearly worth the losses Sun is taki (Score:1, Informative)
Sun is generating the kill list internally and submitting it for vetting by Oracle. Roughly 10 to 15% of people who would have been axed weren't because of consultation with Oracle.
Anon for job security reasons.
Re:Apple can't take server share (Score:3, Informative)
The main problem with OS X as a server is that the multi-thread libraries create a huge amount of overhead for applications like SQL databases to perform well. I saw some MySQL benchmarks and OS X server was absolutely atrocious performance wise compared to Linux on similar hardware.
OS X makes a great desktop UNIX, but it's kernel and OS libraries are optimized for desktop environments, not server environments. Making it UNIX under the hood is definitely a step in the right direction, but even Linux distros optimize differently for server or workstation roles. You probably wouldn't use a realtime kernel patch on a server, but you definitely would do it on a desktop workstation.