[Info-vax] Maybe a bit OT, maybe not.. in any case an interesting article

[Nomen Nescio]

"Mazzini Alessandro" <mazzinia$$$$@tin.it> wrote:

> >>
> >> Sun SPARC/Solaris used to be pretty popular for web servers.
> >> Maybe it still is.
> >
> > It is becoming dramatically less popular thanks to Larry. Have a look on
> > ebay. People are dumping perfectly good SPARCware by the metric tonne and
> > pallet load. Most webservers today seem to be running Windows or FreeBSD 
> > on
> > Intel commodity crapware. I'm shorting SPARC futures...
> >
> 
> Bit deviating from the topic but, given that I admit my total ignorance 
> about the Sparc current situation... why is it becoming dramatically less 
> popular after being purchased by Oracle ? 

Larry likes to do the Tarzan bit and yell he's King Of The World. And he
really really hates IBM for selling tons of DB2 and AIX and POWER, but most
of all AIX dammit! And mainframes cost more than Larry's biggest baddest
Whoracle Exaworld-Is-Mine Appliance. And that causes somebody to fail the
biggest pair test and he hates that more than anything.

So he decided to kill about 75% or more of existing SPARC servers by EOL'ing
them to death (everything from sun4v and earlier) and only sell THE BIG ONES
you need three guys and a pallet jack to move. You want to pay a hundred
grand? Buy a Whoracle x86 server and run Linux ya cheap bastid and say thank
you for selling it to me! We're not worthy!

You want to be a real man? Let's see if you can buy a Whoracle SPARC server
and pay a hundred grand (or more likely 200-250) just for the software
licensing. Solaris, yeah baby YEAH! SHOW ME THE MONEY! He thinks he can make
a business selling only to premium customers like IBM did. But he made one
big mistake. IBM sells AIX and POWER affordably and they've been cleaning
Larry's clock something terrible even before Sun was Larry. It's the
mainframes they can sell like they were made out of gold. The midrange
server market doesn't work that way. Hello Larry, goodbye Solaris and
SPARC.