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Larry Ellison about the ex-Sun management

In this Reuters.com article, Larry Ellison openhearted speaks about his view on the ex-Sun management decisions of the last years. It's quite a critical view :


"Their management made some very bad decisions that damaged their business and allowed us to buy them for a bargain price"


"The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed"


Ellison shut down one of Schwartz's pet projects -- development of the "Rock" microprocessor for Sun's high-end SPARC server line, a semiconductor that had struggled in development for five years as engineers sought to overcome a string of technical problems. "This processor had two incredible virtues: It was incredibly slow and it consumed vast amounts of energy."


Ellison says he learned that Sun's pony-tailed chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, ignored problems as they escalated, made poor strategic decisions and spent too much time working on his blog, which Sun translated into 11 languages.



At least you can't accuse Ellison of not being clear. Much is off course corporate chatter; IBMs Power7 chip runs pretty hot, and is equipped with impressive heat sinks too. The article continues to say that investment is boosting again in Sparc and OpenSolaris, but I'm afraid this will not be enough to restore faith in Solaris for many customers.