Yahoo is up for sale. Microsoft has a tradition: You mess with them twice they never talk to you a third time. Would Google buy Yahoo? No. Who else? SAP? Not a fit, not happening. Oracle? Hmmmm - let's think about that one.
Oracle just bought Sun and turning Sun into a cloud computing power house. Probably rearrange the software part, integrating professional services, shutting down MySQL, and decommissioning the hardware box sales over time.
Now - Oracle is thinking Social-CRM, they have a cool online community, they are very much SaaS and Web 2.0 aware (even if they don't produce yet). While maintaining their existing enterprise business, they will migrate carefully into the networked world - built from ground up on: yes, their own cloud.
The first meaningful application: Search. A search server farm is a cloud on its own. So here is a fit too. Oracle is bold and crazy enough to pull this off.
Oracle could even become the SaaS, Search, Social Web cloud provider for their own acquisitions plus the rest who is out there.
The benefit for the users? Huge. Oracle is the last company that would build an advertising based business model. Hence search may become a whole new user experience.
Search is over 10 years old and there was zero progress for the user - only for the advertiser. We still struggle with 10,000,000,000 search results generated in 0.0007 seconds. We still have no structured search, we still have no geo based search, we still have no social search, we still have no crowed search, we still have no ranking, selection or filter based search, we still have no.... - Simply there is zero evolution in the single most used software application on the planet. Right?
I would even pay 10$ per year for a search that does a good job. With a billion users that is $10 Billion per year.
And that is just the obvious beginning....
Strike - done - we will see.
Axel Schultze [1]