The Oracle - Yahoo Deal

Hmm, some interesting points Axel. I think the logic stacks up but there is an elephant in the room (well maybe two).

Firstly, in relation to the Sun acquisition how do you think the developer/IT community will react to MySQL being shut down? Oracle could in one move turn tens of thousands of (potential) enterprise customers against them and alienate millions of developers and IT personnel - the MySQL evangelists. Many of these MySQL evangelists are this way because of the abusive, questionable, non-collaborative practices of Oracle and Microsoft in years gone by.

Whilst it’d be nice to see Oracle keep Sun as kind of a community ideas incubator where Oracle contributes some of their intellectual muscle whilst allowing the Sun community to contribute to the enterprise - my gut feel is this is too big a culture shift for Larry’s troops.

Whilst it’s fine to call Oracle SaaS aware, I’m not convinced they really want this SaaS/cloud computing model to keep developing in the direction it’s going. And this to me is the elephant in the room. Can Oracle really break it’s addiction to the traditional software license model of big fat license fee up front then annual maintenance revenue (maintenance or protection money?)? How much are they banking annually in maintenance revenue? Is it $10b yet?

I don’t agree 100% with your comments about search. In my opinion one of the underlying problems is that users have become lazy and simply “Google” something and then read maybe the first page of results, possibly the second. So whilst the search engines are trying to contextualise results (like you’ve outlined) the missing link is the user. Can search be turned on its head? I’ve no doubt. But the users need to come to the party as well; and coming to the party means offering up meaningful contextual information that will allow these search server farms to do their magic.