Most of Oracle's moves are short term plays. Growing the Java and Unix industries would allow them to sell boxes. These do the opposite, in favor of making cash now.
It's a long-term strategy and Sun ran out of juice. The strategy doesn't work by itself; you do the kinds of things Sun was doing to keep the ecosystem active and healthy, and then you release and aggressively promote a commercial Java IDE and make a ton of cash, and build other products on top of the ecosystem that you sustain.
In my opinion Sun's downfall was a serious overestimation of SPARC's performance. They needed to move and get something else out there.
Comments
Most of Oracle's moves are short term plays. Growing the Java and Unix industries would allow them to sell boxes. These do the opposite, in favor of making cash now.
Sure. Individual investors might care, but Wall St. is incentivized to only care about quarterly profits.
"Growing the Java and Unix industries would allow them to sell boxes."
I am highly skeptical of this. I believe this was the stated strategy of many of Sun's decisions, and it did not work out well for them.
It's a long-term strategy and Sun ran out of juice. The strategy doesn't work by itself; you do the kinds of things Sun was doing to keep the ecosystem active and healthy, and then you release and aggressively promote a commercial Java IDE and make a ton of cash, and build other products on top of the ecosystem that you sustain.
In my opinion Sun's downfall was a serious overestimation of SPARC's performance. They needed to move and get something else out there.
That and buying tech and not taking it anywhere.
- What did they get for MySQL? Nobody was buying Sun kit to run MySQL. There was no move into the LAMP space by Sun.
- VirtualBox? A free desktop-class VM which still hasn't been integrated with any other product or seemingly used to build anything.
"and then you release and aggressively promote a commercial Java IDE and make a ton of cash"
Who pays for IDEs any more?
Uh, lots of people. Visual Studio? That costs rather a lot of money.