Technology for Mortals

The web was a buzz earlier today with news that Microsoft wasn’t the only company being involved in CDTN Holdings and some including ZDNet and ComputerWorld blogger Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols tried to speculate just what patents each of the member companies of CDTN Holdings would want and why.
First many thought that VMware would jump at the opportunity to get an OS to complete their stack and as I found out talking to a few PR employees from VMware, they pretty much already have everything they need from Novell, or so they say. Of course, VMware is owned by EMC who is a partner in CDTN holdings, so the VMware reps didn’t exactly inform me accurately.  After a quick search I did happen to find patent number7,793,101, which is Verifiable virtualized storage port assignments for virtual machines . I think I could see why VMware might want a crack at that patent portfolio now. I noticed that there are several more storage based and virtualization based patents for VMware and their parent company EMC to hand pick through. Keep in mind that Microsoft is also competing in the virtualization space as well.
In the storage space there are a few other gems including:

• 7,844,787 Techniques for data replication with snapshot capabilities
• 7,844,580 Methods and systems for file replication utilizing differences between versions of files
• 7,809,910 Backup archive management
• 7,774,568 Clustered snapshots in networks

VMware is also dabbling in identity management, also something that Microsoft has been working with for some time. Oracle and Apple also have identity management needs and would probably not hesitate to pick up a couple patents for their own related products.
With Identity Management we have a whole slew of goodies to pick through including:

• 7,770,204 Techniques for securing electronic identities
• 7,774,826 System and method for determining effective policy profiles in a client-server architecture
• 7,793,340 Cryptographic binding of authentication schemes
• 7,793,342 Single sign-on with basic authentication for a transparent proxy
• 7,774,827 Techniques for providing role-based security with instance-level granularity

All four companies might be interested in improving their application deployment technologies with the following patents:

• 7,730,480 System and method for creating a pattern installation by cloning software installed another computer
• 7,739,681 Delayed application installation
• 7,730,179 System and method for policy-based registration of client devices

The point I am trying to make is that each of these four companies have much to gain for the capital they put together to get access to these patents.
Many of us know that Microsoft is all about their Operating System, their Active Directory architecture, Search, their entry into Cloud computing.
EMC is the storage giant, but they also own VMware, RSA, Atmos, vBlock, Mozy, RecoverPoint, Documentum and have just as much if not more to gain than Microsoft.
Oracle while everyone knows is a database company, has bought more companies than anyone else, and leverage patents from Identity Management to Virtualization. Don’t forget that they own Sun Microsystems and happen to have Virtual Box.
Lastly we have Apple, who seems to stand out as while being worth more than anyone in this venture, appears to have the least to gain. However, when considering identity management, Apple would be quick to take advantage. Novell has quite a few data synchronization patents that could help out their MobileMe services. Single SignOn could be a big plus for them as well. They don’t really seem to have as much to gain from what I can tell, but then again, Apple doesn’t think like most companies. We could see them try dive into the enterprise with some of these patents or perhaps they could push themselves to the cloud.
All in all, we have four companies that are going to benefit greatly from the jewels of Novell, their patents. And while everyone was too busy worrying about the UNIX copyrights, the patents which I consider much more important were being handed over pretty much going unnoticed by the media.
Trying to figure out the direction that Attachmate will take Novell is very scary, especially handing out all of the patents like they did. As a Novell customer myself, I am concerned. Then again, who really knows the direction of the tech industry in the long term.

The Aftermath of this transaction is most interesting. Novell was a real hot potato that no one company wanted entirely. The market share of Novell has been slipping since the 90′s, and their recognition is even less. When talking to a salesman for a backup software company, he failed to even recognize the name and recommended that I speak to a tech. Yet, much to the dismay of many, when the patents for Novell were up for grabs, these four companies were first in line.  Microsoft, Apple, EMC, and Oracle are bitter enemies on several fronts, and yet they put aside their differences to pick apart this former powerhouse.

The Oracle/Sun merger is old news, even the approval of it is old news. All the same, I am a bit surprised by how little people fought against it. Look, if it was Microsoft buying Sun, there would be picketing outside the SEC by a zillion people begging for the deal to be halted, on the basis of monopoly. But somehow the protests seemed rather muted. In any event, it is now a done deal, so let’s look at the results.

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle has just made an end run around IBM to become the big Java shop out there. The big difference is, Oracle hasn’t capitalized well on Java so far. All of their Java related offerings fall under “also ran”, “never was”, and “wannabe”. In fact, the same could be said for just about everything else that Oracle makes, other than their core database product. They are a lot like Sun, in that regard. Other than Java, has Sun been a market leader in anything for the last ten or so years? Nope. That’s why they were going under. Oracle stays in business by extracting gigantic license fees from their mostly unwilling victims… I mean… customers. Given the choice, which do you prefer? Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, or PostgreSQL? Probably not Oracle. Would you rather deal with Solaris or Linux, a BSD, or Windows? Probably not Solaris. Which makes more sense, using “real” Apache or IIS, or Oracle’s hacked up version which is always ages behind? And so on.

Another thing the two companies have in common in the utter ugliness of their products, in terms of living with them. The only installer worse than Solaris’ is the Oracle installer. You know, the installer that for years puts the wrong permissions on the files it installs under Windows, and makes you wrestle with a million Java errors just to get the install going. I have never met someone who actually said, “I like Oracle”. Every single person I spoke to despises it. The only positive thing people have to say about it, is that it is so hard to use that they can justify charging $250/hour as an Oracle consultant. The situation is about the same for Solaris, except few people will be a consultant for a whole OS; instead, Solaris admins get paid such a premium that no one wants Solaris in their server room.

So what we have here is the merger of two really ugly parents who have some good looking kids with behavioral problems (I’m thinking of a mix of The Brady Bunch and House of 1000 Corpses).

And then there is the MySQL end of things. Oracle just went from being one of three major DB players to two of three. That’s pretty scary, and almost makes me want to buy a SQL Server license just to keep things fair. All joking aside, it says a lot about MySQL that folks are considering it just as big of a prize, if not bigger than Java. The fact is, Sun messed up with Java pretty bad. When they kept the development close to themselves, they did the usual “Sun’s magic touch” where they created a marvel of technical wizardry that met no one’s needs in reality. Somehow, Java survived long enough for folks like Spring and Apache to bring enough inovation to the table to make Java an attractive platform, despite all of its problems. Meanwhile, Microsoft, the 80,000 lb. gorilla, has been able to do enough interesting things with .NET that there is relatively little third-party open source for .NET because there just is not enough necessity to birth any invention. Luckily for Oracle, Sun didn’t have MySQL long enough to wreck it.

All the same, one has to wonder what will happen to MySQL with the awful combination of Sun and Oracle’s collective ineptitude when it comes to customer satisfaction. I would not be surprised to see a fork of MySQL at some point, but at the same time, you have to realize that very few people work on MySQL for fun or in the spirit of open source, relative to the number of developers working on it. It’s just one of those projects where people are paid to work on it, because everyone hopes to exploit it somehow. Hopefully, enough people will consider MySQL to be a critical piece of infrastructure (and it is, despite all of its flaws) that they’ll manage to keep Oracle from trashing it or reserving all of the important features for paying customers.

J.Ja

It appears to be a happy ending for Sun Microsystems after all.  Not only did they avoid being abandoned and ravaged by the market like Yahoo, they even got a slightly higher bid with a better matching company.  Oracle and Sun were always joined at the hip when it came to Java and Middleware and Oracle database and SPARC/Solaris.  The vast majority of Oracle database administrator I knew consider SPARC/Solaris the only serious Oracle platform in the world (though I don’t personally agree with this viewpoint).  And if cheaper/faster x86/x64 solutions are needed, Sun finally dropped their SPARC-only religion and leveraged their engineering prowess to produce some good x86/x64 servers so Oracle is now covered in terms of software and hardware.

From a technology property standpoint, the assets of both companies appear to be mostly complementary rather than competitive.  That means you won’t need to kill off a lot of products to accommodate the merger which translates to fewer layoffs.  That’s not to say that there won’t be redundancies and overlapping positions that won’t vanish, but I think it’s safe to say that Sun is much better off with Oracle than IBM.

I love Scott M. Fulton’s larger take on this deal.

In a 2006 interview with the Financial Times Richard Waters, Ellison was asked point-blank whether he believed the open source business model would be disruptive to Oracle’s plans.  Point-blank question, point-blank answer: “No. If an open source product gets good enough, we’ll simply take it…  Once Apache got better than our own Web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it — a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that’s what we’ll do.