One wonders why Oracle, a predominantly software company, wants to buy a vendor like Sun

While
the IT industry is known for speed, it rarely makes you gasp. The last
time it shocked  me was in 1998, when I stood with my mouth open like a
goldfish at a counter in Bangalore’s old airport when the exasperated
assistant behind the counter asked me for the Nth time if I needed a
seat on the window or the aisle. For the life of me I couldn’t respond,
for before me was a business dally with big bold words that said that
Compaq had bought Digital. The deal went bad and Compaq’s then-CEO
Eckhard Pfeiffer, who engineered the merger, was eased out in 1999 in a
coup led by board chairman Ben Rosen and replaced by Michael Capellas.

Why? Why? Why?

In
the context of Oracle buying Sun, one asks just one question why? After
all, the only common thing between Oracle and Sun is that the former’s
software products do run on the latter’s hardware. Many industry
observers are also asking the same question. Some say that one reason
why Oracle is buying Sun is because of Java, but software is a small
part of Sun, and as analysts have pointed out, this argument may not
cut much ice with Oracle’s own shareholders.

Future focus

One
other thing in common between Oracle and Sun is in databases. While
Oracle has its Oracle RDBMS, which is one of the top database systems
in the world, Sun has MySQL, which it acquired in 2008 for $1 billion.
Now, what will happen to MySQL? Will Oracle continue to develop it?
Also, will Oracle be able to take Sun’s hardware division and make
sense of it? This is an important question and one that nobody would
have asked IBM, which is known for its hardware expertise. But Oracle
is a pure software-only player whose only knowledge of hardware comes
from the failed Network Computer concept that died with the dot-com
boom. Naturally, Sun’s hardware customers are bound to be worried.

And
if Oracle and Sun don’t take steps to clear the air and tell their
users where they are heading, they might find their clients moving to
their competitors.

For those who can read tamil check this post out, well here is a small snippet of java and its corresponding translation in tamil (indian language)

public class Project
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
int a;
string b;
if(a==0)
{
b = “Zero”;
}
else
{
b = “Non-Zero”;
}
return;
}
}