Everyone From Sun Went to Google — Software Defined Talk Podcast #22
Feb 3rd, 2015 8:55pm by

Microsoft buys an open source company and intends to keep it open source. We discuss how R plus Excel could be a great for Microsoft. In other BigCo news, we discuss Oracle buying Sun five years later, layoff rumors at IBM, and some new stuff Coté is up to.
With Brandon Whichard, Matt Ray, and Coté.
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Show notes
Microsoft: don’t mess it up.
- Microsoft Buys an Open Source Company: Revolution Analytics
- Office dominance, not to mention Excel
- Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby, nice R and Ruby book
- Latest Exponent podcast has a good take on Microsoft.
Nice analysis from Gavin Clark of Sun acquisition, five years later
- “In Sun’s last good year before being bought by Oracle, 2007, sales for servers totalled $5.9bn. Of these, $5.2bn’s worth were Sparc and it got $700m for x86 systems. In 2013, the last full year for Oracle, total systems sales were $2.3bn – $1.2bn from Sparc and $1.1bn from x86.”
- Brandon’s theory: everyone from Sun went to Google. Anecdotes back this up.
- Further anecdotes for the anecdote pile on Coté’s mythical book, “Sun: WTF?!?”
- Oracle should be lovin’ this microservices, Docker/container stuff. Feel free to call them when you stateless kids finally need to become stateful.
- JP’s Law of Crappity Crap Software: all software is crap.
IBM apparently not laying off lots of people
- IBM Feeling (Big) Blue?
- “What’s worse, getting laid off on a Friday or being told to pick up the slack on the following Monday?”
Coté works at Pivotal now
- In the technical marketing team for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, with Andrew Shafer and crew.
- Among other things, come see him talk about Pivotal at several roadshows! (Austin on March 3rd, Houston on March 5th, Cincinnati on March 10th, and Columbus on March 12th)
- The All Things Pivotal Podcast, Coté is looking to start a new one further up the stack, talking about what people use Pivotal Cloud Foundry for, and other fun uses of software in the realworld.
- Coté’s praise for analysts – as long as use all of them together, don’t silo your brain.
Recommendations
- Matt: Bloomberg’s 404/500 pages; the politics section has its own 404 and 500 pages!
- Brandon: UE MINI-BOOM Bluetooth speaker. It’s good, <eom>
- Coté: Coconut chips dipped in maple syrup. Yup. At CostCo. Also: Slack for team collab and ChatWhiteCollarOps works well…so far.