McNealy no longer has an executives page on Oracle.com. He also sent
To be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company.
In other words, for 7.4 Billion dollars, you win (not that I’d blame him too much). Then Jonathan Schwartz sent a letter to Sun employees that ended:
So thank you, again, for the privilege and honor of working together. The internet’s made the world a far smaller place–so I’m sure we’ll be bumping into one another.
That sounds like goodbye to me, meaning that the face of Sun is now completely different at the end of the acquisition than it was at the beginning. And right on queue, Charles Phillips then sent an email that signaled that the Oracle acquisition of Sun is now complete:
We are pleased to announce that Oracle has completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and Sun is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle. With this news, we want to reiterate our commitment to deliver complete, open and integrated systems that help our customers improve the performance, reliability and security of their IT infrastructure. We would also like to thank the many customers that have supported us throughout the acquisition process.
There is no doubt that this combination transforms the IT industry. With the addition of servers, storage, SPARC processors, the Solaris operating system, Java, and the MySQL database to Oracle’s portfolio of database, middleware, and business and industry applications, we plan to engineer and deliver open and integrated systems – from applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together out of the box.
Performance levels will be unmatched. Oracle’s software already runs faster on Sun SPARC/Solaris than on any other server or operating system. With Sun as a part of Oracle, each layer of the stack will be engineered to further improve performance, reliability and manageability so that IT will be more predictable, more supportable, and more secure. Customers will benefit as their system performance goes up and their system integration and management costs go down.
In addition, our open standards-based technology will give customers choice. Customers can purchase our fully integrated systems, or easily integrate our best-of-breed technologies with their existing environments. Our open technology also enables customers to take full advantage of third party innovations. Oracle also plans to extend its partner specialization program to include Sun technologies to better enable partners to deliver differentiated and value-added solutions to customers.
As always, our primary goal is 100% customer satisfaction. We are dedicated to delivering without interruption the quality of support and service that you have come to expect from Oracle and Sun, and more. Oracle plans to enhance Sun customer support by improving support access, offering better interoperability support between Oracle and Sun products and delivering services in more local languages. Support procedures for your existing Sun and Oracle products are unchanged, so for now you should continue to use the same channels you’ve been using. Customers can continue to purchase products from Sun in the same way they did prior to the acquisition. We will communicate any changes to this through regular channels.
We are very excited about this combination and look forward to delivering to you increased innovation through accelerated investment in Sun’s hardware and software technologies such as SPARC, Solaris, Java, and MySQL. If you weren’t able to join the live event on January 27 where we, along with Larry Ellison and other executives from Oracle and Sun outlined how this powerful combination will transform the IT industry, you are welcome to view the replay that can be accessed at oracle.com/sun.
Sincerely,
Charles Phillips
President
I wonder if Phillips put up any billboards to that effect or reserves that right for his mistresses alone? Does this all seem like a high tech Melrose Place to you? If 7.4 Billion buys out the moral center of a company that reshaped the way we think about computing then I can only imagine what the profits will buy in terms of the token “sorry I cheated on you” ring that Kobe Bryant made a must to mend certain fences. Have fun with that guys: you have proven to me yet again that Rome is burning. I just hope Schwartz’s ponytail isn’t like the roaches, the last to survive it all…