Somewhere out there!

There is quite a bit of commentary about Sun and Oracle.  It think it is quite clear that Java is probably the number one reason why Oracle was interested in Sun.  This Computerworld article makes an interesting point:

… And we just picked a number — $500 seemed like a magic threshold,” Ellison said. “And Scott McNealy got very sarcastic and said, ‘The heck with $500, how about $200?’ Shut up, Scott.”

But what McNealy understood was that it wasn’t in the DNA of enterprise IT vendors like Oracle and Sun to market low-cost computers for school kids. The Network Computer needed to be a thin client for corporate networks. Two years later, in September 1999, Sun introduced its Sun Ray thin client. And that’s what will fulfill Ellison’s hardware dream.

Sun’s server business does absolutely nothing for Oracle. Unix servers are a dying breed, and Intel/AMD-based servers are a commodity. Oracle will almost certainly ratchet that business down as quickly as possible, or sell it off outright, perhaps to Fujitsu. But the thin-client business is a different story. It’s not difficult to see that the future of corporate computing lies in the cloud, and that a thin-client architecture will seed it.

My main concern is zfs. But if Oracle decides to delivery application appliances with Solaris/x64 hardware, I suspect future Solaris development should be fine.