Or, the end of the tech world as we know it.  Maybe that’s too harsh, time will tell.  I know one thing for sure, Oracle stepped up with an offer that was only $400 million more than IBM was tossing around (I know, “only”, but when you are talking $7+ billion it’s not so much), and I bet IBM is now pretty mad at themselves.  Not just because they let Sun get away, but more importantly because Oracle with all of Sun’s technology under their belt, just became a veritable behemoth competitor.

I can’t say that Oracle buying Sun is worse than IBM buying Sun, I think either would have been bad, but I do think that IBM would have made more of the technology that Sun has, especially in the hardware arena.  Most people already run Oracle on Sun, but I think Oracle was angling the software more than the hardware.  Now they have the whole “stack” sewn up.  They have been re-branding Red Hat Linux to provide “their own” operating system, but now they don’t have to because they really do have their own operating system with Solaris.  One that lots of people prefer for running Oracle versus Linux and especially Windows.  Now Oracle can provide the application, the database, the operating system and the hardware platform to run it all on, all in one nice bundle.  I have come to think of it as the “O-Stack”.  Now, instead of a LAMP stack, Oracle will be pushing their O-Stack.

I just hope that the folk out there that have a considerable investment in Sun (me included), not only in SPARC, but also their X86 line, didn’t just get screwed.  Can Oracle keep the support going?  Will they keep the hardware lines going?  What will happen to Solaris, MySQL and Java (to name a few)?  Only time will tell, but I for one am not pleased with this announcement.

I’ll have more updates as I find information to share.