Do the red corpuscles get a new chance at Oracle?

Oracle is buying Sun.

While the major reason may be Java, it makes Oracle a major hardware player - an "applications to disk" player.

That was Larry Ellison's vision 10 years ago, if you read Timothy Chou's column in my Cloud Pioneer series. But, as he puts it, Oracle's "white corpuscles" have fought that integration (and other innovation) even as Ellison-funded salesforce and NetSuite have shown that integrated offering is attractive to customers.

Scott McNealy, if he has a serious role, could bring radiation to the leukemia that the excess of white corpuscles have spread at Oracle.

But I am not optimistic. Oracle's numerous acquisitions over the last few years have not been rationalized and there has been little new or innovative stuff coming out of Oracle (ironically, one of the few is Exadata, a joint development with HP, which will need to be re-evaluated with this acquisition) while the executives continue to brag about the margins they squeeze by consolidating SG&A from the acquisitions.

As I wrote in February "Its top executives are deal makers, not technology visionaries. Worse, when it comes to their acquisitions, they cannot retain or easily replace the entrepreneurial talent."

It is a sad commentary on the state of the industry that Sun's only other home would have been IBM, which in its own way has also become a graveyard for once innovative technology companies.

John Chambers is probably chuckling this morning that his move into servers was well timed.