Who should be {next} in Oracle's shopping cart?

I could not sleep tonight for some reason and thought will come down and post a blog (My wife tells me I am crazy when I got up from bed). I am writing this blog listening to Lewis Black on comedy central, so watch out what I post here...

After my previous post on Microsoft's shopping cart, I thought to balance my thought process I should look at what could be the next move on Microsoft's competitors to trump before MS makes next announcement.

Oracle is other company I admire a lot (Facebook, Sun, IBM, Google, Nokia and Apple follow the suit in *my list* of admirable tech companies) that I have been watching in the sidelines and rooting for them when ever they make they make the right move. I believe so far Oracle has made good choices on their purchases with Siebel, PeopleSoft, BEA, etc.,

To make them compete with IBM and Microsoft, they should complete their acquisition cycle by buying Sun. I understand if readers are booing me for this suggestion and stop reading. But seriously people if we set our sentiments aside and read through you may agree. Sun has great server OS (Solaris) that already gives IBM, HP and RedHat run for their money. I know Oracle have been working and improving on 'Unbreakable Linux'. I read about that in OTN and Oracle magazine, thats about it. I am not downloading and installing it even on my home sandbox machine to play around with it. Truth is when it comes to Linux, people look at RedHat, Novell, Ubuntu, etc, not Oracle. I can see people nodding their heads now.

On the other hand, does anyone know if Sun makes any money out of Java other than core API support... Lets be serious, every one other than Sun has made more money than Sun by selling Java or Java related technologies. App Server vendors like IBM, BEA(now Oracle), Integration vendors like TIBCO, etc., has probably made more money compared to the scale of money that Sun made in Java technologies (For full disclosure - I dont read all the quarterly reports and line items of these companies my assumption is based on penetration of these products in the market). Sun is certainly providing the thought leadership for Java but dont know how to capitalize that into actionable fat wallet.

Atleast if Oracle buys Sun, then they have a reliable OS like Solaris, solidify their Java platform with Sun/BEA acquisition (compelling competition for IBM) and strengthen their open source initiatives based on Sun's learning. I just ran the stock performance of Sun in the past 15 years against a comparison with IBM and BEA (Oracle) and just that paints the entire story. Sun has become like Borland of 1990s that does not know how to capitalize/market/opertionalize their products. The only shining story they have so far is Solaris (and probably mySQL acquistion). Did anyone even ask Sun what happend to the SeeBeyond acquistion. I remember that being a hot technology along side with Tibco and WebMethods, but quickly faded away, so fast that people dont even remember that product anymore.

Larry, please resuce Sun before this becomes a salvage target like YaWHO (yes, I believe yahoo is going to be Ya-who very soon, heck it used to be one of the *my list* of admirable tech companies).

coming soon *Google Vs Apple*

{ Gaja; }