Digital Adventures of Cyril Pauya

Yes, another software company has gone bust, this time it’s Borland Software Corporation.  They are to be acquired by Micro Focus International for $1 per share which brings the transaction to approximately $75 million.  Borland announced it at their website last May 6, 2009.

I knew some of Borland’s products well… very well because I made my first computer programs in their Turbo Pascal product.

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To continue my previous post where Oracle announced to buy Sun Microsystems for a staggering $7.4 billion.  I have been wondering why IBM decided to back-out from buying Sun.  Click here to find out.  It’s quite a long list of why Oracle should not buy a sunset company like Sun according to IBM.

Why am I posting as a third-hand source of this information?  Because this article is authored by Robert X. Cringely.  What!  You don’t know who Robert X. Cringely is?  Geez, if you belong to the IT world you owe it to yourself to look after the best of what he has authored/hosted so far:

Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date (1992, 1996) - I have actually not read this book yet, but I know it exists!  And that it became the pre-cursor to the next item here.

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On April 20, 2009, Oracle Corporation announced it has bought Sun Microsystems.  It’s true!  It’s in the frontpage of Oracle’s website “Oracle Buys Sun” and in Sun’s website “Oracle To Buy Sun“.

Oracle, the largest enterprise software company, is known for its enterprise database product aptly named Oracle.  Sun owns the Solaris operating system, MySQL database, the Java programming language, and the OpenOffice productivity suite.  Oracle is said to buy $9.50 per share of Sun in cash with the whole transaction approximately valued at $7.4 billion.  What’s interesting is the fact that this announcement came after IBM backed-out from buying Sun earlier this month as reported here.

This does not come as a surprise knowing that big software companies are known to do two things in their lifetime: buy other companies or sell itself to others.  As a programmer however, the thing we should look forward to is:  What will happen to the open-source database MySQL?

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