War and Revolution

Earlier this month, Oracle effectively declared war on HP and went out of its way to disparage HP's products. I couldn't help but think back to Scott McNealy and his attacks on Microsoft nearly a decade ago. At that time, I scratched my head because Sun was basically a high-end hardware company and Microsoft a software pure-play, and it would have made more sense for the two to partner than to go to war.

After a decade of pounding Microsoft and doing a considerable amount of damage, Sun failed -- largely because HP, Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) chewed Sun up. Sun had to restructure to be more effective against Microsoft and ended up commoditizing its own hardware products in the process, resulting in failure in the market.

Now look at Oracle and HP. Oracle is at the core a software company, and HP is a hardware company; however, HP is more complex in structure than Microsoft and is designed very similarly to IBM, with a few exceptions. HP lacks software, and it has printing, networking and PCs, which IBM lacks. So right now, HP really isn't in Oracle's space, and Oracle has no interest in much of the business that HP is in.

Oracle's more natural competitors are Microsoft and IBM in their class. Like Sun and Microsoft, it would seem more natural that Oracle should HP partner -- and historically they did, with an estimated 100,000 shared customers.