Re: For those who keep asking for a "free" version...

On Nov 14, 11:38 am, Ian Michael Gumby <im_gu...@hotmail.com> wrote: > Watch history in the making as Sun Micro is taking a hit after the > MySQL purchase. > Can you say $1 billion dollar waste? Sun is especially good at that though. (disclosure: I used to work for Sun) With MySQL they paid $1B for $64M in revenue. But it was a "strategic" decision. This is after they had said a year or so before that they would be backing PostgreSQL. Just because Sun did something stupid, don't think that it is an indictment of an idea. Sun can make a loser out of any great technology. You would think that Java would be a huge money maker. Solaris is, or was the best Unix based OS (in the late 80's they had the first intel port, but you had to buy there hardware, this was while Windows was at 1.0 and had <1% market share. They could have had us all using the X window system instead of MS while Linus was in grade school.). Sparc processors have been excellent for years. You have to make business decisions and market your products. I saw one the best set of commercials for any high tech company in about 2002 at Sun. They paid to make the ads, and the only place they ever showed them was JavaOne. They should have been on the Sunday morning shows right behind the IBM commercials. But not Sun, if you are not a member of the congregation, we don't want your business. But I rant.

> From: jaxent@gmail.com > Subject: Re: For those who keep asking for a "free" version... > Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:12:23 -0800 > To: informix-list@iiug.org > > On Nov 14, 11:38 am, Ian Michael Gumby <im_gu...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > Watch history in the making as Sun Micro is taking a hit after the > > MySQL purchase. > > Can you say $1 billion dollar waste? > > Sun is especially good at that though. (disclosure: I used to work > for Sun) With MySQL they paid $1B for $64M in revenue. But it was a > "strategic" decision. This is after they had said a year or so before > that they would be backing PostgreSQL. Just because Sun did something > stupid, don't think that it is an indictment of an idea. Actually it is a brain dead idea. Sorry that InDeep keeps harping about playing to the masses of developers. If Sun were to start chasing down all of those MySQL licenses in production for revenue, you'd see a couple of things happening. 1) Sun would get called Nazi's for demanding their pound of flesh. 2) Sun would not become a platform of choice for those developers. Incidently, how many of those MySQL production sites run on Sun? AIX? HP? Linux? ... See the point? The point is that Sun thought that they could capitalize MySQL's success in to hardware licenses. It's a pipe dream. The other thing that Sun is attempting to do is to take MySQL's core and convert it in to their own database that they can own and control. Something that they could tune to their Rock Architecture. From this standpoint, the concept makes sense, however, there could have been other alternatives out there that made more sense. Greenplum is a good example of an alternative target that would have been a better candidate and put them in to a better position to compete with IBM. > Sun can make a loser out of any great technology. You would think > that Java would be a huge money maker. Solaris is, or was the best > Unix based OS (in the late 80's they had the first intel port, but you > had to buy there hardware, this was while Windows was at 1.0 and had > <1% market share. They could have had us all using the X window system > instead of MS while Linus was in grade school.). Sparc processors > have been excellent for years. I think you need to work on your history lesson. > You have to make business decisions and market your products. I saw > one the best set of commercials for any high tech company in about > 2002 at Sun. They paid to make the ads, and the only place they ever > showed them was JavaOne. They should have been on the Sunday morning > shows right behind the IBM commercials. But not Sun, if you are not a > member of the congregation, we don't want your business. > But I rant. I think you need to put down the pipe and stop smoking that shit. You are indeed ranting and not making much sense. Sun made a poor choice and over paid for MySQL. Even when Sun breaks down their revenue numbers today, the MySQL number is still bundled in their software numbers and isn't all that transparent. What Sun is currently hoping to achieve is the ability to morph MySQL in to something more serious of a database and one which then can tune to their Rock architecture. Actually IDS could be a better choice on Rock, but it gets down to how IDS works. ;-) The point I was trying to make with this thread is that you can't sell a "free" version of IDS without cutting in to your existing revenue stream. At the same time, the costs of marketing such a product to get mindshare is going to break the bank. You are better off targeting a market segment that can benefit from IDS's strengths that can not be duplicated elsewhere. But that's been said far too many times, so I guess that it should some day strike a few of IDS's management's synapses and they get a clue. Maybe that would be a good X-Mas present for Tiny Tim.... :-) _________________________________________________________________ Color coding for safety: Windows Live Hotmail alerts you to suspicious email. http://windowslive.com/Explore/Hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_hotmail_acq_safety_112008

Ian Michael Gumby wrote: > > > > From: jaxent@gmail.com > > Subject: Re: For those who keep asking for a "free" version... > > Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:12:23 -0800 > > To: informix-list@iiug.org > > > > On Nov 14, 11:38 am, Ian Michael Gumby <im_gu...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > > Watch history in the making as Sun Micro is taking a hit after the > > > MySQL purchase. > > > Can you say $1 billion dollar waste? > > > > Sun is especially good at that though. (disclosure: I used to work > > for Sun) With MySQL they paid $1B for $64M in revenue. But it was a > > "strategic" decision. This is after they had said a year or so before > > that they would be backing PostgreSQL. Just because Sun did something > > stupid, don't think that it is an indictment of an idea. > > Actually it is a brain dead idea. > > Sorry that InDeep keeps harping about playing to the masses of developers. No need to apologize, or speak for me. I'm working strictly off of what I see other successful companies do. It's not rocket surgery. Regarding Suns' history of buying 'bad' vs 'good', I remember how they tried to get into storage, buying one particular company at the wrong time and literally pissing their money away on it. It was a great learning experience for them. The problem is, they were trying to chase EMC, and lost. Sun could not give away their Data-Share SANs, nobody cared about them. They had bad timing on that one. But you have to give them credit for trying. This time it's a bit different. While I'd argue it might be a bad buy right now, there are plenty of companies west of the Mississippi who are using MySQL and very happy with it, using the bottom-up approach to marketing that has been used successfully by Microsoft, Oracle, and other companies over the years. There are also a lot of 3rd-party players that are making MySQL successful, i.e. Continuent, selling not only its commercial products, but also distributing open source Sequoia clustering tools. There are companies innovating with MySQL because it works for them, and it has a strong developer following, with a lot of mind share that is not going to go quietly to some other product. The jump now is heterogeneous replication, i.e. Oracle <=> MySQL if you can believe it. You may want to pay attention to this too because RedHat was smart enough to get really cozy with Oracle. Today, Oracle and RedHat are extremely strong. Sun picking up MySQL makes sense, especially when you see where MySQL will be some day, basically following the same path of maturity that Informix had. Sun may have paid too much for MySQL, whatever the argument, but they actually did the right thing by solidifying their foothold in the open source community and the *NIX market, which up till now was questionable. Sun said they'd never go x86, never go Linux, never this, never that, and eventually they have had to reverse every one of those 'never' statements. According to articles out on the web they have a lot of cash evidently, and will survive. Now all they need to do is clarify wtf their company is about, and they will be back on track. The biggest point to all of this is that IBM better start paying attention to this market. IBM has already lost a lot of opportunities in the MySQL space, clear evidence that they do not have competent management in the IDS market. You can ignore me, or what I say, it doesn't matter, the writing is on the wall. IBM needs to spend a little less time on their outsourcing and get back on track with some real marketing or they may as well step out of the race. IBM and DB2 may be their combo, like Oracle/RedHat, and now Sun/MySQL, but I'm willing to bet DB2 will never go anywhere like the others simply because IBM has too much of their own weight preventing them from being agile enough to meet the future market. -ID-