Sun's demise or a revival in the making

With the Sun Microsystems acquisition complete, everyone should expect at least a million blogs about the golden and brilliant days of Sun at its peak and its subsequent retardation. While many inside Sun will lament its demise as an open cultured fun loving ass-kicking technological company, I for one believe the Oracle takeover might be the best thing that has happened to Sun. I am not talking about Oracle saving Sun from death because that goes without saying but the fact that Oracle can give all the Sun technologies a sense of purpose and direction.

Agreed that the two merging companies don't share a lot of culture. Oracle is known for its ruthless demeanor doing one thing it knows how to do best. Making money. Sun over years of extraordinary research and development has developed hordes of bleeding edge technologies but looking a bit deeper one can't help but wonder that all of them look like orphans. This is comparable to developing the coolest operating system with little or no applications running over it. Of course, I am not talking about Solaris here but Sun as a whole. I believe with the acquisition most of the Sun technologies have now got a singular purpose. To make sure Oracle applications work best on them. Oracle in that sense is a very lucky company to get hold of Sun. It now has to its disposal some of the most advanced "tools" it can use to make sure it stays ahead of the applications race.

No matter what anyone says the feeling of satisfaction when one gets after being appreciated for developing a good piece of art is way more than developing a stupendous piece of art that no one will ever appreciate. The fact that the merger will kill Sun's working culture is undeniable but I think if there is a sense of purpose and return on "research and development" investment thats far more important than anything else.

It will finally give people a sense that no one at Sun is wasting their time doing ultra-cool stuff that had the potential of never being used because Sun couldn't find the right user application to sell it with.