Sun Set?

Well, it's Monday. The parking garage was nearly full, the new screen saver my employers installed on my PC over the weekend locked it up so badly I had to do a hard reboot (ouch!) and Sun is in merger talks again, this time with Oracle. To paraphrase a lyric from Li'l Abner, it's a typical day in IT USA.

Unless you're part of the propeller beanie crowd (or a stockholder), you probably haven't paid much attention to Sun Microsystems' ongoing attempts to stay afloat in the current roiling economic waters, so here's a little background.

For what seemed like years, Sun had been in increasingly troubled merger talks with IBM, much to the alarm of many in the IT community, who saw it as a threat to both Sun's Solaris operating system and its Sparc hardware line. The deal would also have given IBM control of a majority (65%) of the world's UNIX servers - also a cause of unease.

The new deal with database giant Oracle would appear to set some of those fears at rest while raising others - mostly regarding the popular open-source database MySQL, which Sun acquired just last January. As Computerworld columnist Sharon Michlis mused in her April 20th column:

As MySQL becomes more successful in pushing into the enterprise, can Oracle executives resist seeing the open-source database as a threat to its own high-performing, capable but more costly offering?

All of this may seem pretty abstract to anyone who isn't involved in corporate IT or database development and I suppose it is, if viewed in isolation. As yet another example of the trend towards corporate mergers, however, it's disturbing. Competition is what makes capitalism work. The fewer companies there are competing for business, the less concerned they have to be with offering a quality product at a fair price and the more likely they are to come to Capitol Hill, platinum cup in hand, begging for bailouts.

We've already seen what happens when companies become “too big to fail”. Isn't it about time Federal regulators started enforcing anti-trust laws that were created to keep our capitalist system healthy in the first place? The merged Oracle/Sun entity might look healthy now, but then so did AIG and Citicorp.