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Will Ellison-McNealy meeting be "Snoracle"?

Stephen Shankland Former Principal Writer
Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
Expertise Processors, semiconductors, web browsers, quantum computing, supercomputers, AI, 3D printing, drones, computer science, physics, programming, materials science, USB, UWB, Android, digital photography, science. Credentials
  • Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Stephen Shankland
2 min read

Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy, the respective CEOs of Oracle and Sun Microsystems, will squeeze their egos into the same room at Oracle headquarters Tuesday to detail partnership plans, according a Thursday news advisory.

The two executives have had a close business relationship for years; Oracle's database and other server software products are popular on Sun's servers. But there has been some friction of late as Oracle touted Linux and Dell servers and McNealy bashed Oracle's pricing.

Tuesday's meeting, billed as a "Sun/Oracle employee town hall," will address a number of issues, according to the press advisory. Among them: "Why the time is right to kick off the next phase of the Sun/Oracle alliance, how both companies intend to extend the importance of Java for the future, how Oracle's new pricing model for multi-core systems benefits customers, (and) how Sun and Oracle will go to market together to expand adoption for Sun and Oracle technologies."

Given that list of subjects and the fact that neither company has a shy and retiring publicity department, it's probably not too much to hope that this event will provide some concrete details and not just marketing fluff. The bar has been set pretty low: Sun and Google drew frenzied speculation but offered few details when they announced the Snoogle partnership in October. Even a few scraps of detail should be enough to keep people from snoring through Snoracle.

One probability is some patching-up of a relationship has shown some signs of fraying in recent years.

McNealy has aimed gentle barbs at Ellison--making fun of his and , for example. But he also has made a more serious charge, complaining about how Oracle based its software prices on the number of cores a processor has. Sun, which has the most aggressive multi-core processor strategy in the server market, would have been at a major pricing disadvantage by such a move, but Oracle in December announced more liberal pricing.

Meanwhile, in 2003, Oracle said Linux would become its primary software development platform. But in November 2005, the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company updated its position, saying Solaris is the "preferred development and deployment platform" for 64-bit x86 processors.