Now that the Solaris team has been axed, the skeleton of Sun looks like it has finally been stripped clean.

The news from the former Sun Community social media channel is that the long-rumored layoffs in the hardware systems division of about 450, which were widely rumored back in January, are true. On Friday, Oracle laid off key talent from its Solaris and SPARC teams. This certainly means that the future of the product line will be maintenance, not r&d, especially given the cancellation of Solaris. This is a classic Example of Oracle quietly shutting down projects, no matter what the company says.

With the hardware axed, I think Oracle’s last Sun acquisition has been wiped clean. How smart was Oracle’s decision to buy Sun? I don’t actually follow Oracle’s business very closely, but it seems obvious from the coverage:

  • Ellison said he would rebuild Sun’s hardware business, but the team behind it had just been disbanded.

  • Java was hailed as “the jewel in the crown”, but the real reason for the acquisition of Java SE (an attempt to Sue Google for $8 billion) fell through twice.

  • Ellison said Java’s role in middleware was key to success, but Java EE is now being handed over to the open source Foundation.

  • Oracle initially criticized Sun for “not monetizing Java” (ignoring the fact that Java had brought Sun’s hardware business to market from 1996 to 2000) and proposed a freemium model that generated no revenue.

  • They embraced NetBeans and are now donating it to the Apache Foundation.

  • Oracle spurned Sun’s identity management programs, and Forgerock now uses them in a business valued at about $500 million, driven by Oracle’s estranged customers.

  • Oracle has decided to cancel Sun Cloud and the market will follow the Cloud.

Ellison didn’t understand Sun’s actual failures — it had been slow to open Solaris, tried to take a marketing-led approach from 2000 to 2002, instead of Sun’s traditional technology-led approach, and blamed the scapegoat for picking up the pieces. McNealy, Zander, Tolliver and their gang left Sun a burning ruin. Ellison never understood Schwartz’s groundbreaking approach, But laugh at blog (https://web.archive.org/web/20100516032944/http://abcnews.go.com:80/Business/wirestory?id=10630034&page=2), Calling all the work in progress “science projects,” while fragmenting the partner channel and alienating the open source community.

Oracle said it would “revitalise the Sun brand”, but the result was a more fatal blow to it than any Sun executive. Like many former Sun workers today, this saddens me immensely.

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