I WAS sad to discover that a long-time technology-rich company, Sun Microsystems had been bought over by business software firm Oracle for US$7.4 billion (S$11.2 billion). From the mid-1990s, I’d been covering this company, making many trips to its events in San Francisco and elsewhere to find out more about its technology and to meet its charismatic co-founder, Scott McNealy.
What I remember most of Sun is its prescience about the future of IT. Long before the Internet became a buzzword, Sun’s slogan had been "the network is the computer". It’s been proven correct for today every organisation is linked via the Internet. There’re 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide – about one in four people globally - according to the Internet World Stats.
Founded in 1982, Sun also proposed that software should be considered a utility, delivered on tap as and when users needed it. This came in the 1990s, years before the IT world came up with a similar concept called cloud computing.
Way before the sub-US$500 netbook wave took the world by storm last year, Sun had suggested in 1997 that Net PCs, small computers priced below US$1000, was the best for surfing on the Internet. Well, PCs are still kicking, but its sales have dropped while netbooks are flying off the shelves. .
Sun is a company that is steeped in technology. I was present in San Francisco in 1995 when the company unveiled Java, a special programming language that let developers write applications that can be used across computing devices regardless of brand. Java is used in 800 million PCs and 2.1 billion mobile phones. Sun receives royalties from PC makers and cell-phone vendors for using Java in their equipment.
Java is the main reason Oracle is buying Sun. Last night during a conference call to announce the acquisition, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called Java the single most important software asset it had acquired. This coming from a CEO who had spent in excess of US$40 billion to buy more than 50 software companies since 2005. Analysts expect Java to be vital to Oracle’s plans to ensure that its many software products would work smoothly together.