Sun's management didn't learn a thing from the death of DEC. They were chasing commodity x86 hardware right over a cliff. Business school may claim everything is a widget but in the real world, companies that fail to differentiate themselves are in a race to the bottom.

Oracle will bring the focus back to transaction processing which is what servers are really all about. SPARC CPUs are more than fast enough and they have a better IOPS to power ratio than x86. The problem at Sun is the disk sub-system compared to the big IBM machines. Oracle understands performance requires better storage systems, not more Java.

Whatever happened to Montalvo the x86 cpu designer that Sun bought??

"Will continue to invest" is code for "will make massive cuts". There's little reason for Oracle to continue to pour more into the development of proprietary standards-based hardware other than to milk the installed base. A good hardware/software services business simply doesn't need proprietary hardware.

ORACLE Exadata Server is one of the best Intel Powered Server. I hope that Intel will help ORACLE to get more marketshare in server againts their competitors like Intel has helped Apple to win the high margin PC segment.

Sun hardware is officially dead in the water. A shame really as it was quite good back at the beginning of the 90s.