Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely.
They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem.
ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat.
Aurea does the same in mid-tier by the way.
The circle of life...
I am actually surprised they invested into Solaris for so long, considering its long time half dead status on the market.
I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different.
Sun was in bad financial situation at that point, there is a high chance all these engineers would be laid off 8 years earlier if takeover hadn't happened.
It's possible IBM would have been a significantly better steward. Of course, it would have been hard to be a worse one.
Of course, these businesses don't make enough money to cover the massive shareholder draw, so it's all a stage play to convince Wells Fargo to loan them enough to pay those dividends.
It's an untenable and irrational position in the long run, but markets can remain irrational longer than individuals can remain solvent. And many businesses are in this same situation, needing bank loans to pay never-reducing dividends.
This is true also of companies that are taken over by private equity firms, although that is probably common knowledge by now. e.g. every single one in my team at Rackspace has left for a different role (all at different companies, all at different times) after being acquired by PE firm.
Sometimes I wonder how the engineers can't see this coming. Sure there are cost savings to be made by streamlining product offerings, cutting the "recreational budget" etc (i.e. money for office parties). But the biggest cost center for tech companies are its employees (probably that and real estate).
I think that's a more apt description of CA, BMC, or Symantec. Places where tired old software goes to die a quiet death. What Oracle does is worse: kill software that still has plenty of life in it. I've seen them do it by acquisition, and I've seen them do it by stealing code or ideas from partners (personally, twice). So they're not so much a graveyard as a slaughterhouse for software.
Oh and don't forget to tell the truth in your next job interview: "CA is a tremendously successful company and excellent employer, unfortunately, the role was not the right fit for me".
Yup. Precisely what happened to Stellent, a company that used to produce great document filters. After ORA buyout, employees fled like there was a plague epidemic and prices spiked at such a level that you'd either cut your veins or consider migrating to another technology.
> ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software.
Well, except that some of the elephants were still alive and perfectly fine, and ora worms started eating them before they were dead.
