Saturday, March 3, 2007

Oracle Strikes Again

A few years ago, I wrote a column for TechWeb about Oracle's buyout of PeopleSoft. I speculated the takeover ploy was originally designed to roil the markets and sow FUD, but somehow ended up a done deal. And I wondered whether Larry Ellison would eventually regret having fought so hard to acquire PeopleSoft in the first place.

I shouldn't have bothered. Larry shows no signs of buyers remorse, and followed up his PeopleSoft snack with the almost as big gulp of Siebel Systems. And now Oracle has announced plans for dessert with a $3.3 billion deal to buy business intelligence software maker Hyperion.

While this deal will likely reshape the business intelligence software market, I can't seem to muster the same level of outrage. Sure, Oracle is still an evil empire, but these days everyone is more afraid of Google than Oracle, Microsoft, or any other company perceived as a traditional software vendor.

Somehow, these deals, though huge, seem a bit like dinosaurs bulking up to do battle with other dinosaurs. Not to overstretch a mixed metaphor, but Google got to be dinosaur-sized by eating the eggs of other dinosaurs.

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