Oracle gets big on Sun

Predicting the Future, The Oracle concept watches by Designer Andy Kurovets mixes time with Chinese philosophy

Fascinating news. I didn’t see a single consultant, analyst, journalist predict this. WRT to the supposed IBM/SUN on/off deal, I guess the biggest part to work out is how this will effect Oracle products on IBM Power Systems servers.

Oracle was definately the most significant software product on Power systems, I assume if Oracle decides it wants to keep the SPARC hardware architecture alive, it’s going to have to start favouring SPARC over Power. If nothing else, one assumes the fees IBM pays Oracle for Power support/currency/testing etc. will likely go up. Fascinating indeed.

I guess that also puts Oracle into competition with Dell and HP too, not just becuase of their SUN x86 hardware, but also again for platform currency. I didn’t dial-in to the investor call this morning, but I wonder how many are already wondering what the chances are of Oracle spending a year to work out how to sell-off the parts of Sun it doesn’t want, like the hardware business, but keeping the bits it does want, like Java and the other key software assets and intellectual property. Fascinating indeed.

However, if this knoxnews.com picture is anything to go by, Oracle have some work to do on their Industrial design and human factors for their hardware.

Short DNS and brand ownership

I cycle home Wednesday evenings and back in on Thursday morning, it’s a 22-mile drag from Round Rock to Down Town Austin, with some quiet bits, some busy bits and some dangerous bits. While spinning up North Lamar heading south  towards 183, I was thinking about the rise of web URL shortnening websites such as tinyurl.com, which was the first I was aware of that offered a free service to take a long url such as this blog entry http://cathcam.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/short-dns-and-brand-ownership/ and turn it into http://snipurl.com/shorterdns

The main reason these became really popular was becuase some systems, such as Lotus Notes used to produce bizzare, very, very long URL’s for pages in Notes databases. It was easier to remember tinyurl.com/ae5ny than it would be to remember the page name, try it… Now, people these days know these services for twitter.com where every character counts, but thats not how or why they started.

There are a bunch of these services, tinyurl.com, snurl.com, is.gd, bit.ly etc. I tend to use snurl as it allows you to save specific names, I’m sure other shortners do too. What I was thinking about last night was the ownership, rights etc. to shortened URLs.

When my son wanted some cards from http://moo.com to help him promote his DJ work, I created them for him, but his myspace URL didn’t easily fit and flow, and what if later he wanted to create a website, he’d have to get new cards.

Answer, use snurl. So Oli and his alter ego Kaewan are now http://snurl.com/kaewan - It currently points to his myspace profile, but I can change it whenever I want. 

So these services have become, in some way, analgous to Domain Registrars. Sure a short URL isn’t a domain, but effectively it’s the same as one, except you don’t own it, and you didn’t have to pay for it. For fun I created http://snurl.com/redmonk - It actually points to Redmonks home page. But it could easily point elsewhere. And there’s the rub. With a traditional Name regsitrar there is an established right of review and appeal if you believe that someone has registered a domain that impinges on your brand and trademarks.

Not long after I created this blog, original DNS http://ibmcorner.com _ I got a “cease and desist” call from IBM legal pointing out that this wasn’t allowed and I should stop using it and not re-register the domain when it expired. SO where does http://snurl.com/ibm point to? Well not IBM and is was nothing to do with me.

(Belated) Leaving drinks in London

Since I’m coming over to the UK to get my new machine readable visa inserted in my passport, it’s a great opportunity for a “leaving drink”. So consider this an open invitation to all my former IBM UK Colleagues, either current or past, and any customers, analysts, journalists or consultants that I worked with.

I’ll be at the Archduke on Concert Hall Approach between IBM South Bank at Waterloo Station from 5.30pm onwards on February 23rd to buy drinks. I was going to say I’d be easy to find since I’ll be the one in cowboy boots and hat, but that would be an untrue stereotype for Austin, and decent cowboy boots are expensive, and I doubt I can find a hat big enough for my head – So I’ll pass on that idea.

If you can make it along it would be great to see you, even if you just have time to stop in and say “goodbye”. Feel free to add a comment if you can or can’t make it, in case I need to make any special arrangements with the Archduke.