[HN Gopher] Oracle loses bid to upend HP's $3B win
___________________________________________________________________
Oracle loses bid to upend HP's $3B win
Author : wil421
Score : 154 points
Date : 2021-07-30 13:18 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| darksaints wrote:
| Regardless of the merits of the lawsuit, any day that Oracle gets
| sued into oblivion is a good day.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Kind of tangential, but the instruction set design of the Itanium
| was very good. I wish it had more success.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| I never programmed it but there were legitimate things that
| people didn't like about it, instruction density, extremely
| large architected register set (which has downsides beyond
| density), register windows, from memory. Which have their
| reasons but also have very real problems.
|
| It did have some "interesting" things like advance loads and
| associated speculation support, programmable branch predictors,
| rich prefetching and cache hinting, highly predicated
| execution. Which were intended to all combine and make out of
| order execution unnecessary.
|
| In practice they were very difficult to use well, didn't solve
| all deficiencies of in-order execution, and were often
| inefficient and difficult to implement. Itanium remained stuck
| at low frequencies and performance was tied to things like
| heroically fast (and therefore unfortunately tiny) L1 caches.
|
| And if you do have an out of order design, then many of those
| interesting aspects of it were much less useful.
| rafaelturk wrote:
| I'm still puzzled why Itanium didn't go any further. A
| precursor of the ARM revolution. And Intel just wrongly killed
| the project.
| pjc50 wrote:
| ARM pre-dates Itanium by quite some way as well as outliving
| it. Design started in 1983 (!) https://www.cs.umd.edu/~meesh/
| cmsc411/website/proj01/arm/his... and by 1987 you could buy
| ARM home computers.
|
| The ARM revolution has been a long time coming, but it was
| given a big boost by the use of the chip in phones, a market
| that Intel failed to break into (I have one of the rare
| x86-Android phones, a Zenfone 2). I can't imagine Itanium
| would have been any better at scaling down to fit into that
| market.
|
| Intel had no choice but to kill it; it was outclassed by
| ARM64 and had a slowly shrinking customer base.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| I love how ARM's killer feature of low power consumption
| came completely by accident. [1] ACORN designed ARM as a
| desktop processor with good memory bandwidth, and only
| discovered its energy efficiency when a prototype continued
| running without a power supply from signal input voltages.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ
| blacktriangle wrote:
| I worked on a project mid-aughts to port a scientific package
| to Itanium. The issue that we observed was that Itanium
| really pushed the hard work out to the compiler and by
| association the devs to make everything work with their
| compilers in order to get the full benefits. And since very
| few people had Itaniums and the compilers weren't quite there
| yet, the overall dev effort was not worth it. Somewhat of a
| chicken and egg problem.
|
| ARM managed to be worth the trouble since it solved a real
| problem of power useage which got it the installed base, at
| which point it was worth the trouble of supporting.
| wbl wrote:
| Most code cannot be statically scheduled and code that can be
| is amenable to the big vector units we have now.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I'm still puzzled why Itanium didn't go any further.
|
| It turned out nobody knew how to build effective compilers
| for them, so nobody bought them.
|
| > And Intel just wrongly killed the project.
|
| What's the point of a processor you can't program
| efficiently? What do you think Intel should have done? Just
| kept making them regardless of the fact nobody bought them?
| jeffbee wrote:
| > It turned out nobody knew how to build effective
| compilers for them, so nobody bought them.
|
| It's a funny sign of those times. People really thought at
| one time that we were leaving a huge amount of potential
| instruction-level parallelism on the table. There was a
| DEC-WRL paper in the early 90s that said in the future
| (i.e., now) we'd be disappointed with 15 instructions
| retired per clock. But in the future we presently occupy
| we're all glad to have IPC of 0.8.
| hestefisk wrote:
| Answer is IA-64 was good enough and industry did not have a
| good incentive to rewrite working software for another
| architecture.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| IA-64 usually means Itanium. You probably mean x86-64 (also
| known as x64, amd64, Intel 64 or EM64T).
| veltas wrote:
| IA-64 is Itanium
| psanford wrote:
| Ha. Intel pushed Itanium very hard. AMD released AMD64 and
| that was the end of Itanium. No one wanted it. Intel killed
| it because it was a failure in the market place.
|
| I love this graph of Intel's projected vs actual Itanium
| sales. They certainly believed in Itanium for a long time: ht
| tps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Itanium_...
| tyingq wrote:
| I think those projections weren't really all that crazy.
| AMD surprised everyone with AMD64, and they were the only
| ones that could have done 64-bit x86 other than Intel.
| Intel should have had better spies at AMD :)
| chasil wrote:
| They did. There was a skunkworks project to copy it, and
| the copy was not entirely correct.
|
| https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=366538
| Grazester wrote:
| Did you post the wrong link or something? That link only
| talks about Intel implementation(EM64T) of AMD64
| chasil wrote:
| This is likely more appropriate.
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/52858-picking-up-the-
| chi...
|
| Also related to the 3.06GHz P4 launch were rumors that
| Intel has secretly included x86-64 support in the new P4
| in the form of disabled circuitry on the chip's die. Such
| circuitry is allegedly the product of Intel's skunkworks
| Yamhill project, which is intended to give Intel some
| flexibility in responding to the potential threat posed
| by AMD's upcoming x86-64 "Hammer" line of processors.
|
| Intel has repeatedly denied the existence of Yamhill,
| insisting that the only 64-bit instruction set they plan
| to support is IA-64. So will we see Yamhill publicly
| unveiled in 2003? It's possible, but not likely.
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2002/01/25/intels_yamhill_ita
| nic...
| mrweasel wrote:
| I wonder how many Itanium CPUs they've sold in the last
| five years. Also do they just do a single waffer or two
| every now and then, or do they have a production line?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Given the slow sales relative to projections, I wouldn't
| be surprised if they just did one run and it took that
| long to sell through. What was the last Itanium launched?
| mrweasel wrote:
| That would be Kittson in 2017, but I can't find an actual
| sales numbers.
| soco wrote:
| Thinking that Compaq killed Alpha to bet everything on
| Itanium makes the history even more frustrating.
| tux3 wrote:
| Well, have you seen the famous Itanium Sales Forecast graph?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanic#Itanium_(Merced):_2001
| tyingq wrote:
| It depended on compilers smart enough to make not-parallel-
| friendly code run well in parallel. In a way that would
| outpace the price/performance growth curve of the (somewhat
| new at the time) x86-64 CPUs.
|
| The compilers never fully delivered on that. X86-64 just beat
| them with process size and clock speed on a less elegant
| architecture.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, I'd say that whether VLIW is more elegant than OoO is
| a matter of subjective opinion.
| guenthert wrote:
| Elegance might be in the eye of the beholder, security is
| not.
| tartoran wrote:
| Great. I worked for a governmental agency and they started
| migrating away from oracle. It was a gargantuan task but it was
| supposed to save them a whole lot of money. Oracle is a greedy
| company whose innovation pace has dropped significantly. Their
| success lies in locked in clients who have to overpay for their
| services.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Many of Oracle's locked in customers come from startups that
| Oracle purchased.
|
| Oracle goes around looking at the lock-in potential and
| acquires based on _that_ , then they ride that startup
| product's reputation for as long as possible until they just
| leave it to rot. They also try to bundle in existing Oracle
| products (e.g. Oracle DB) almost giving it away to get your
| foot in the door then dumping on you.
|
| Unfortunately a lot of companies find themselves in a business
| relationship with Oracle, even after never having purchase an
| Oracle branded product.
| tkojames wrote:
| This right here is what happened to my dad. By accident he
| started working in the wine industry as a IT project manager
| and developer. They used a product from JD Edwards for large
| scale wine production. Oracle bought them. The Oracle product
| they had was way more expensive. For awhile they let them use
| the JD Edwards product that worked well. They wine and dined
| him we got to go to Oracle park luxury box for game etc.. but
| eventually they told him you got to use the Oracle one now
| for like 10x the cost... Software was junk anyways so he just
| ended up building stuff in house. Saved the company millions
| in licensing fees.
| fnord77 wrote:
| so maybe I can get Oracle to buy my startup if I use Oracle
| products?
| mark-r wrote:
| They need to be greedy to be able to pay out judgements like
| this!
|
| Yes I know, the greed came first.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Their management of java is excellent so I wouldn't say that
| they are not innovative. They also do top-notch research, with
| GraalVM for example.
|
| And for-profit companies are greedy per definition..
| ksec wrote:
| And mySQL. Although there has been very little news on
| version 9.
| chris_wot wrote:
| One wonders how long it will take for Oracle to become largely
| irrelevant.
| evilduck wrote:
| Oracle is relevant outside of a courthouse?
| lambersley wrote:
| Oracle has made substantial push into the hyperscale cloud
| space in the last 2 years. Even though they lag quite a bit
| behind AWS/Azure/GCP, they are far from irrelevant. (Revenue
| grew approximately 26% year over year in 2019) While Oracle DB
| is still dominant (At the end of 2019, Oracle was the leader in
| DBMS revenue ($15.15 billion) and market share (27.5%)) in
| large enterprises, Oracle will retain a place in the industry.
| (430,000 customers in 175 countries and revenue of $39 billion
| for fiscal year 2020)
| hectormalot wrote:
| Not contesting the facts, but important to read them in
| context.
|
| Market share by revenue is likely biased towards Oracle vs
| market share by usage/installs. I'm under the impression that
| those migrating towards other DBMS's are partly doing so to
| get away from the high pricing of Oracle. So even if usage of
| eg RDS Aurora and Oracle are the same, it would show Oracle
| as doing really well. If I'm correct, and the underlying user
| base for Oracle is declining, then their numbers can only go
| down in the long term.
|
| But, they have a great money printing machine today, loads of
| enterprise sales expertise, and the buffers (read: time) to
| deal with this change. So, although I don't think they'll
| become irrelevant, I wouldn't say they're doing particularly
| well either (from a trends and market direction perspective)
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Larry Ellison started the Oracle ball rolling by selling an
| up-and-coming database technology, based on relationships,
| which was an R&D study at Stanford? (IIRC) to the FBI. I
| presume that Oracle powers all the "signals" gathering at the
| NSA/CIA/FBI. That alone would be enough to keep Oracle in
| business forever.
| hobs wrote:
| There were no Oracle databases in the Snowden revelations,
| all MySQL iirc.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Oracle owns MySQL, though.
| hobs wrote:
| Sure, but the division between Oracle Database and MySQL
| Database is pretty large; that being said I wouldnt be
| surprised if they had somehow gotten some money out of
| it.
| vips7L wrote:
| Don't forget that Java is an Oracle product too and it's
| still in the top 3 seat for languages used whether HN likes
| it or not. Oracle isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
| scythe wrote:
| Java was a Sun product, but that didn't keep Sun alive
| vips7L wrote:
| It's still an Oracle product now and Oracle has done a
| lot of good for Java.
| systems wrote:
| well, they need to move to the cloud fast
|
| but they are already kind of there, they own NetSuite which is
| the number 1 cloud ERP
|
| they also own Oracle ERP which is another top 5 cloud ERP
|
| they own peoplesoft/jd edwards and all their clients
|
| they next to SAP, own the enterprise apps market and unlike
| SAP, they seem to be serious about competing with AWS ans
| Azure, Oracle OCI, see to get niece reviews
|
| So how long will it take for Oracle to be irrelevant, if OCI
| and NetSuite continue to move in the right directions, for as
| long as people have money
| sjg007 wrote:
| They have a cloud offering
| hestefisk wrote:
| Seems the Oracle PR department found HN :)
| beached_whale wrote:
| Enterprise market is a nice place to be and they are firmly
| entrenched
| tyingq wrote:
| They've certainly started getting flat in revenue:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ORCL/oracle/revenu...
|
| My guess is they will hang on for a long time as the reigning
| king of on-prem. They aren't hurting yet, because the companies
| that are losing ground in on-prem are losing it both to
| AWS/Azure, but also losing the on-prem ground to Oracle.
| Eventually, the continued downward spiral of on-prem will hit
| them. But on-prem really never goes away. Oracle will just
| become the king of a much smaller hill.
| twiddling wrote:
| like IBM irrelevant?
|
| still generating revenue but not seen as influential within
| tech.
| jollybean wrote:
| As long as RDBMS and Java are around they will be.
|
| And the information revolution is just beginning for most of
| the 4 billion citizens on the planet.
| mastrsushi wrote:
| It's at least noticeable, what do they even make anymore that's
| valuable? DB software, Java?
| brianwawok wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/269728/oracles-
| revenue-b...
|
| Cloud services and license support is the top bucket, unclear
| what all the entails.
|
| They own a LOT of business oriented very pricey software
| (Netsuite etc)...
| not1ofU wrote:
| virtualbox
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| They are a strong name in Enterprise Resource Planning
| software, both internally developed and acquired. Besides
| licenses, they do a lot of ERP hosting, likely recognized as
| "Cloud" revenue.
|
| (Disclaimer/Source - I've been a PeopleSoft
| admin/architect/ops working for IBM for 20 years; PeopleSoft
| was bought by Oracle in 2005; all opinions my own etc:)
|
| They made other plays - there is Oracle Linux as rebrand of
| RHEL; a few rebranded/purchased virtualization as well as
| hardware products; etc etc
| deelowe wrote:
| They are pivoting their enterprise db and server (sun)
| business into a cloud services business. Oracle solutions
| require a ton of infrastructure to run properly at scale and
| they are using that to pitch their own cloud. I wonder how
| long it'll be before they start building moats to defend
| against "bare metal" solutions from other providers.
| stephankoelle wrote:
| GraalVM
| snek_case wrote:
| You would think, but the stock price is still going up and they
| have a lot of cash on hand. I don't really understand why
| anyone does business with them, but they are likely to be
| around for a long time.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL?p=ORCL
| markus_zhang wrote:
| They are probably going to last really long considering the
| impact they made before FAANG took off. Many of their
| customers are governments and quasi-government companies
| (think bank and telecom) so I actually think they are going
| to last a lot longer than we want.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| I wonder at what point anyone will be willing to work for
| them and at what salary, though.
|
| Surely there comes a point where even paying triple the
| standard rate, you can't get more engineers working on
| dusty old code while remaining profitable and their
| customers' best offer.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Golden time for retired contractors. The same you see for
| the COBOL generation.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>why anyone does business with them, but they are likely to
| be around for a long time
|
| The answer is partially in the question.
|
| For large enterprises where large part of IT is a strict cost
| centre - the "boring" areas of HR/Pay, Financials, CRM, ERM,
| SCM, etc - predictability, support, longevity, reliability
| are far more important than sexiness, new technologies, or
| even immediate cost of license compared to cost of change and
| uncertainty.
| basch wrote:
| And most Oracle "customers" probably arent interacting with
| Oracle directly. They are buying a financial system or erp
| from a vendor who is Oracle under the hood. They might get
| to the product selection stage and be looking at 3 industry
| specific products built on Oracle vs NetSuite. Either way
| Oracle wins.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > predictability, support, longevity, reliability
|
| You can get all of those with postgres too.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I mean, yes and no. "No", for the purposes of many
| traditional non-IT large enterprises.
|
| CIO of large company sees value in having "one neck to
| choke" for their HR Application, Proxy Server, Web
| Server, App Server, Database Server, Enterprise Service
| Bus, Search Engine, Monitoring Software, etc. A simple
| licensing and support model with streamlined contract
| model as opposed to 27 bespoke contracts with "never
| heard of them" consulting/support companies for each
| level of the open-source stack which "nobody owns" (https
| ://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort..
| .).
|
| At ground level, we may not see value in the same way; we
| may complain and moan about it; about vendor lock-in,
| license cost, slow pace, etc etc etc. I certainly did,
| for decades :).
|
| Longevity, ditto:
| https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/
|
| https://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lsp-tech-
| chart-069...
| xadhominemx wrote:
| From June 15th
| wil421 wrote:
| Yes. There is another article about intel ending Itanium and I
| thought it was relevant for today's discussion.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| Yikes, 5 years between the ruling and the appeal being finalised.
| The earnings by the lawyers must be astronomical.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| And the employees, management, and shareholders at HP won't
| even get compensated for the lost time, opportunity costs,
| stress, hassle, etc., incurred during those 5 years.
|
| No wonder big companies settle out of court so often.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| I have a question about that. Big companies like these have (I
| believe) pretty hefty legal departments, and would be
| constantly involved in legal negotiations and court proceedings
| (though not always at such a scale).
|
| So why do court cases cost them so much in legal fees? Do they
| outsource representation for these big cases, or do they just
| extrapolate a lot of the costs from payroll, or what?
| KarlKode wrote:
| I'm not sure if a "normal" legal dept does cases like this
| but besides that, they have other things to do. That means
| that the day-to-day business would be postponed or the legal
| team expanded.
| gmueckl wrote:
| I doubt that legal departments are good at big court cases.
| They tend to be more concerned with mundane busywork like
| drafting contracts and reviewing public statements for
| potential issues. So it makes sense to outsource lawsuits,
| especially bigger ones, to experts with experience at court.
| conductr wrote:
| This is true in my experience at various large corps I've
| worked for. The legal department has a rather small
| headcount but a massive consulting budget. They hire other
| lawyers with local jurisdiction experience, subject matter
| expertise, courtroom experience, etc. Their day-to-day
| hands on work is 1) managing all of the outsourcing 2)
| mundane corporate contract stuff which is more
| frequent/consistent in volume.
| mbesto wrote:
| To add to this like - having internal legal counsel take on
| a litigation cases would be like hiring SAP developers full
| time to do an SAP ERP implementation.
| Consultants/contractors are great for episodic projects
| (even if they span multiple years).
| unavoidable wrote:
| Litigation (court stuff) is almost always outsourced to law
| firms. The reason is that it's a different kind of practice
| than day-to-day corporate stuff (contracts, acquisitions,
| regulatory compliance) which is primarily done in house.
| Another major reason is the economics - generally, court
| cases are not always expected, and "lumpy" in timing (for
| example, you can have a few hearings back to back, and then
| spend months without court cases). So it's not usually
| efficient for companies to have in-house litigators. In
| addition, once litigation starts, you need a _very_ big team
| to handle the work (pretty commonly, 10+ lawyers working full
| time on a tech case during pre-trial and trial). Companies
| don 't like big payrolls.
|
| Source: am litigator.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| Makes sense, thank you.
|
| It would be interesting to know how big and litigious a
| technology company would have to get before it made sense
| to develop their own litigation capability. Or would that
| run afoul of some legal profession expectation that
| "prestigious firms" are required, no matter the size of the
| tech company?
| andylynch wrote:
| I struggle to think of a firm better matching that
| description than Oracle. But slightly more seriously,
| this kind of litigation work is both very specialised and
| high risk, so it makes sense to rely on the best advisors
| in the field, who will almost certainly be external
| counsel.
| unavoidable wrote:
| There isn't really a professional expectation about
| prestigious firms. However, there is some reputational
| effect of having external counsel represent you in court.
| Some courts (judges, juries) might view a lawyer who
| represents a variety of clients more credibly than a
| lawyer who is directly employed by one corporate party
| (admittedly I think this is a very small effect and can
| work both ways).
|
| Most companies also want to maintain a healthy separation
| between internal and external counsel so that they can
| keep certain kinds of communications privileged and avoid
| awkward situations where an attorney who is both an
| employee and legal advisor to a company might be
| subpoenaed for a deposition (basically any time a lawsuit
| happens, any corporate employee with knowledge can
| potentially become subject to deposition as a fact
| witness). You basically never want your in-court lawyer
| to be deposed for any reason.
|
| That said, there are some companies who look into this
| kind of stuff for smaller matters - small corporate
| disputes, collections of accounts receivables, and
| whatnot - oftentimes are now being done in-house even if
| they involve some in-court matters. It still doesn't seem
| to make sense for big files though.
| structural wrote:
| Don't forget that if any company were to do litigation
| completely in-house, the second they were involved in one
| major litigation would be the perfect time for anyone else
| to take the company to court -- their lawyers are already
| all busy!
| dkersten wrote:
| > The reason is that it's a different kind of practice than
| day-to-day corporate stuff
|
| With some of these big companies, litigation almost seems
| like its part of their day-to-day though.
| blevin wrote:
| Do you have any thoughts on litigation funding as an
| investment portfolio component -- e.g. via Lexshares,
| Burford, or Pravati?
| jeffbee wrote:
| But litigation is Oracle's core business!
| meepmorp wrote:
| This is not true and also not entirely wrong.
| jeffbee wrote:
| https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
| meepmorp wrote:
| I like the MS business units pointing guns at one
| another. Gotta focus on the real enemy.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Both.
|
| Mind most of the lawyers in any corporation are responsible
| for "daily business" like contract negotiations with
| customers or routine operations in HR or deal with
| acquisitions or whatever the company does.
|
| Only few deal with actual court cases. Now many of those
| court cases are very specialized and you don't keep all those
| experts on payroll, thus you go out contracting specialists.
| To some degree you also want to have a firewall by using
| external people who can dig up dirt without you doing it
| directly. However also the lawyers on your paywall don't work
| for free but produce cost ...
| mathattack wrote:
| They outsource. And if you think Accenture is expensive, try
| an army of lawyers at double the rate billing 60-80 hours per
| week.
|
| They have to do this to get specialists and many top experts
| work at firms. (Vs generalists who work in house)
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > So why do court cases cost them so much in legal fees?
|
| im not involved in legal stuff, but i think part of the
| reason is the system of common law. this makes past related
| cases as important, if not more important, than the letter of
| the law. so in order to mount an effective legal case, you
| have to research your case and every other case like it in
| history (!)
|
| more simply, its a high demand, low supply, high stakes job.
| drives up the price.
|
| also, the job is just complex. you need to have good PR, a
| network of expert witnesses, an understanding of psychology
| to both select and then convince the jury, technical
| understanding of everything related to your case (computers,
| firearms, recording devices, medical devices, police
| procedures, jurisdictional boundaries, etc etc), on top of
| the normal business stuff like brand recognition to maintain
| business relationships, etc.
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| Dealing with Discovery in corporate lawsuits can be
| extremely labor intensive. Defendants especially like to
| dump huge amounts of evidence in discovery that the law
| firms have to sift through. A recent example was Remington
| submitting tens of thousands of pages of cartoons in
| discovery for the suit against them by Sandy Hook victims'
| parents [11]
|
| [1] https://www.thewrap.com/gunmaker-includes-thousands-of-
| rando...
| sabalaba wrote:
| $10s of millions of dollars
| markus_zhang wrote:
| That's why they love those kind of things. Layers and layers of
| laws and regulations.
| sparkling wrote:
| Wild speculation: i feel like the $3b from this lawsuit is far
| more than any revenue they may have lost due too the lack or
| Oracle products on their Itanium machines.
| SloopJon wrote:
| On the flip side, $3B is a lot more than it would have cost
| Oracle to keep supporting the platform. Having worked on a
| product that at one time or another supported Windows
| (including IA64), VMS (including IA64), and thirty-one flavors
| of Unix (including HP-UX and Linux on IA64), the marginal cost
| of continuing to support a platform is not that high. Sure, if
| the demand isn't there, we drop it, and we have dropped a lot
| of platforms over the years, including VMS and everything IA64.
| If HP claimed the demand was there, and furthermore claimed a
| contract required us to keep going, it would be a no-brainer. I
| don't get it. I mean, it's Oracle, so I get it, but I don't get
| it.
| tyingq wrote:
| I agree, though supporting Itanium was arguably more costly
| than other platforms, since the compiler was somewhat
| special.
| mark-r wrote:
| I'm sure Oracle never even contemplated the possibility that
| they'd get hit with a $3B bill. Makes their company name kind
| of ironic, doesn't it?
| tyingq wrote:
| The suit seems to have been filed in 2011, and HP said:
|
| _" The Itanium product line was highly profitable for HP,
| generating over $2 billion in annual profits in 2010"_
|
| And, also _" 84 percent of Itanium servers ran Oracle's
| database software."_
|
| So, even though Itanium was pretty well dead for new sales to
| new customers 2010, they were still selling enough of them to
| make $2B in profit (not revenue) the year prior. That is, sales
| to customers that were sort of stuck on Itanium/HP-UX, and not
| yet ready to switch to something else.
|
| Certainly, an EOL announcement for Oracle on Itanium would have
| kicked some Itanium-Locked-In customers into action faster than
| they would have otherwise.
|
| I'm not sure how to translate $2B/year profit on Itanium
| hardware into lost sales due to the Oracle announcement. But,
| $3B doesn't sound outrageous in relative terms. Sounds like 1.5
| years of H/W sales ending earlier than projected due to the
| stark message in Oracle's EOL announcement.
| InternalRun wrote:
| There are few things as satisfying than watching Oracle lose
| court cases.
| csunbird wrote:
| I really _really_ hope that HP continues making Itanium based
| servers available for 30 more years, even if they are not
| selling a single unit, just to spite Oracle, for the comedic
| value only.
|
| In all seriousness, HP can do that to get some out of court
| settlement money from Oracle, as Oracle clearly does not want
| to continue supporting the platform.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Just have the Itanium servers as something you can order, but
| not actually build the unless a costumer actually places an
| order.
|
| In reality Oracle is off the hook given that Intel is
| stopping Itanium production.
| jabl wrote:
| Can't HPE stock a bunch of Itanium systems in some
| warehouse, just to be able to claim they are still selling
| them? Doesn't matter that Intel isn't producing chips
| anymore?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Wikipedia says that HP stopped accepting orders for
| Itanium systems on dec. 31 2020.
| jabl wrote:
| Oh well, scratch that evil mastermind plan then. ;)
| dangerbird2 wrote:
| Don't worry, HP sells more than enough inkjet cartridges
| to keep their evil mastermind dreams alive
|
| (I know that's not HPE's business, but whatever)
| sgt wrote:
| H & P are turning over in their graves.
| pc86 wrote:
| Probably not
| vmception wrote:
| Everyone says this until they go work for Oracle and their tune
| changes immediately. It's... interesting.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| I know a few people who have worked at oracle who have
| _colorful_ things to say about the company.
|
| The most memorable version on the internet has to be this
| one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2115s
| watch for about 4 minutes.
| soared wrote:
| You can check my comment to cement this. The pay is
| excellent but the organization fits people's general ideas
| of oracle. I saw contracts signed where we'd purposely lose
| money for years in order to box out competitors in the
| short term and then jack up prices for the client in the
| long term.
|
| What people don't typically think about though is how
| massively successful oracle is because of these strategies.
| They work really well.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Isn't that a pretty widely used strategy? Eg. Uber pretty
| much lost on initial rides (maybe even now), so it's
| hardly big evil Oracle, but big evil capitalism.
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| Big evil predatory pricing.
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/predatory-
| pricing.asp
| usefulcat wrote:
| Except that Uber's product is a commodity. It's far, far
| easier to switch to using a different ride sharing app
| than it is to switch to using a different database.
| Especially for a large organization.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Like who? I imagine anyone who goes to work at Oracle doesn't
| really posses the disdain for them that allows for the
| derivation of pleasure from hearing they lost a court case.
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