Sun/Oracle Merger

I’m happy to see it; I’m happy to be involved in it.

Sun has some of the best ideas in the world. From a creativity point of view, they’re pretty amazing. From an implementation point of view, with some notable exceptions (ex: Fishworks), they’re pitiful. Sun couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse wearing a suit made of hundred dollar bills.

Half of Sun’s ideas were half-baked. (Either go fully baked, a’la Steve Jobs, or lay off whatever writes you make bad haiku, mmkay?) The x45xx line of servers is a wonderful idea and a wonderful form factor, and Sun overcame significant engineering challenges to develop it. Unfortunately, the first gen fell down hard under load and were practically unusable. The second gen is still suffering from some high replacement part and add-on costs that don’t justify the price in many cases. The integration of ZFS and SSDs as ZIL/L2ARC is wonderful, but there are a ton of technical problems that customers keep running into and Sun keeps refusing to acknowledge. It took three months to solve the problem I was having with SSDs and ZIL. I place the blame for the former on poor management controls, and the latter on excessive outsourcing of core competencies. Both are failures of management to execute the brilliant ideas that engineers come with.

It’s nice to see a company with a reputation for being able to execute and capitalize on new ideas come in. Oracle’s already started to cut, and all of the cuts I know of so far in my various interactions with the company have been well-justified. I’m really excited, from the point of view of someone with several relationships with the company, to see what comes of this merger.