Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle(blogs.sun.com) |
Creator of ZFS, Jeff Bonwick, leaves Oracle(blogs.sun.com) |
That leads me not to conclude they are failing at what I originally thought they were doing, but succeeding at something else and I am curious as to what that is.
Of course, it all boils down to whether they need to innovate in the first place. By now, Java is well established enough in the enterprise sector, just as BEA and Oracle DB are.
While small organizations can't afford a research division, Oracle certainly can. You'd think a company in the business of storing data might want to keep the guy who created ZFS, especially given how lively the database world is right now with NoSQL implementations, etc.
Still, will be interesting to see what happens with the seeds flung off from this tempest.
I was about to say Oracle has a serious human resources problem, but I noticed that, maybe, the problem is in calling humans "resources".
The operative problem here seems to be that Oracle doesn't value senior technical resources as much as some other companies might, or as much as those resources are used to being valued (and really, few people react well to a cut in autonomy, pay or respect.) They aren't willing to invest what is required, probably in the non-monetary sense as much as the monetary sense, to keep the top talent that came with the Sun acquisition. Personally, I agree that this sounds like a mistake, but this sort of attitude is not new for Oracle, and eh, they've done okay so far, so what do I know?
As many others have wondered in this set of comments and others, just what is Oracle's cunning plan to make their purchase of Sun worth the investment???
Personally I find the people that use this outdated term stop doing so when continually referred to as 'Outlook resources'.
Reminds me of my brother’s old company ( http://www.freud.com/ ). Their website says:
We employ humans, not resources. Job opportunities, contact the HR manager.
Good luck Jeff Bonwick.
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/en_US/entry/zfs_dedup
P.S. also, the 2008 pics with Linus. I suppose there is no further story to go with those ...
Will be interesting to see what his startup is working on when they come out of stealth mode.
(1) Don't bother investing too much in R&D or figuring out the next big technology, just buy companies that are alread profitable (to name a few: Sun, BEA, Hyperion, Sieble, Innobase, PeopleSoft...).
(2) Immediately execute massive layoffs to increase profits even more. And suck every dollar possible out of the business for a couple years.
(3) After a while, the profits will start decreasing, but slowly enough (due to market inertia) that they have time to rinse and repeat. Go back to step 1.
Sometimes, Oracle will get lucky and be able to keep running a business good enough that the profits will somewhat be stable enough for years.
don't know about the rest in your list, can you specify what do you mean saying "profitable" in application to Sun?
Why it so surprising that ones who grounded the carrier didn't get to steer the rescuing ship?
The result (in either case) would be a lot of IBM hardware salesmen crawling over Sun's customers saying things like: If you want to switch to DB2 to go with your new IBM servers we can do you a deal.
I know, I know... It's easy to say it now, that hindsight is always 20-20, but come on, who outside Sun thought their market strategy was sane? Who really believed they were on the right track? And, as much as I like McNeally (he was really fun), it's as much his fault as Schwartz's that Sun had a problem with "financial reality" (as Gosling so mildly said).
It was painful to watch because we knew how cool technologies they had were, what they could accomplish while, at the same time, knowing it wouldn't last.
I think part of suns problem was engineering that was going in for engineering sake, not business sake, and oracle is going to lose those engineers.
Personally that's precisely why I'm using Postgresql ... I can talk to the core team of developers and get their input whenever I feel like there's a problem with Postgresql. And for a web service we worked on, we even hired a Mysql developer to come and help us (was also on Sun's payroll at the time).
How could I trust a product based on ZFS or how could I trust them to build my products on top of Java or any of their Sun-derived solutions ... when the top talent that worked on those products left?
Not to mention I don't like hypocrites ... before the Sun acquisition they called on Sun to make the JCP more open. Is this an US thing? Can companies fuck with you because it's just business?
Oracle seems to me like a sweat shop. Nothing wrong with that and I'm glad they are making lots of money ... but in my shop you can get fired for suggesting Oracle products, and it's not just me, there's a whole generation of software developers that won't touch their cash cows.
There's a whole generation of developer that have chosen Mysql or Postgres or implemented their own shit, and did not go for Oracle's DB ... that's revenue and opportunities lost for them, and I'm only seeing this trend getting stronger.
There could also be bureaucratic turf wars going on, i.e. the total loss of autonomy/decision making power that Gosling reported suggests that those already in Oracle are happy with how they run things and have no intention of sharing those responsibilities. One can also imagine Oracle having a culture where those acquired from a money losing company don't get much respect for that alone.
Everyone in tech knows this - which is why everyone who can leaves before a 'merger'. And why you never hear of the innovative smaller company's work 6months after the takeover.
But, yes, most of the time this is an important part of what makes the vast majority of high tech acquisitions fail miserably.
I don't think that will work.
It would work if Solaris was something people really desired. Right now, it's not. People are very happy with Linux and need some incentive to move to Solaris. Paying more is not a good one.
The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire, but there are a lot of businesses that rely on it and IBM still gets paid to support mainframes.
[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...
I for one am not happy with Linux and would love to run Open/whateverSolaris ... if it has serious driver support. That's been the Achilles heal of x86 Solaris for more than a decade (e.g. something I directly experienced in 1999) and fixing that will likely be a determining factor in its future success.
Unfortunately that's very painful hard work and lots of it, I wouldn't predict success on general principles. But one can hope.
Also, Jeff leaving doesn't necessarily mean that ZFS is dead to Oracle. Maybe he left because they decided to focus more on btrfs, maybe it's just a personal issue.
When I looked hard at this 2-3 years ago, it was clear to me that without a tape backup system I couldn't justify purchasing, ZFS just wasn't there yet. I've heard nothing since them to convince me it has been sufficiently polished to get over my threshold or required reliability.
ADDED: I don't think it can be said that ZFS is established to the same degree that the parent's examples are (Java, BEA and Oracle's DB).
I use to call them "Powerpoint resources", but I think I'll adopt your designation.
I liked OS/400, you insensitive clod. If I come across a 5250, I'll buy it immediately.
Not sure what I'll connect it to.
But, going back to Solaris and OpenSolaris, it's easy to switch a deployment to "legacy mode". Unix machines are Unix machines and it's not nearly as difficult to move from AIX/HP-UX/Solaris/IRIX to Linux as it would be to move from MVS, unless your binaries insist on running only under Solaris. Legacy mode means no new deployments and no expansion unless justified. It's slow death.
True, in the case of very proprietary platforms (like z and iSeries boxes) it takes very long, but it's death nevertheless.
In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.
But I'm not saying that Solaris is going to live. Just that, as someone who uses Solaris 10, Oracle seems to be tightening up. I think that they don't really care that much about Solaris and are just going to squeeze it dry. I'm far more worried what they're going to do with Java.
> In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.
True, but keep in mind that their competitors are often limited to "enterprise" distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu Server.
I'm coming around to Zuckerberg's opinion that social is something a company is built around, not something you staple on or buy after the fact.
This comes across very weird...
I know... Wrong website for jokes like these. Couldn't help.