I saw an interesting interview with Larry over at Oracle yesterday. It was pretty good, it was nice to see him being honest, he wasn’t trying to sugar coat anything.
He says they have two hardware businesses – one that they care about (engineered systems), and another one that they don’t (commodity x86 stuff mainly though I have to think it encompasses everything that is not the engineered integrated products). He also says they don’t care if/when the Sun hardware business goes to $0. Pretty brutal.
This is somewhat contrary to some comments I saw somewhat recently where people were claiming Oracle was heavily discounting their software and keeping Sun hardware discounts at 0 so they could show higher revenue on the hardware side.
Given that is there any hope for what’s left of Pillar ? I suspect not, I suppose that funky acquisition of Pillar that Oracle did a while back probably won’t result in anyone getting a dime, and may or may not allow Larry to recoup his investment in the company, sad.