Just as the market had adjusted to the fact that IBM would not, after all, be acquiring the ailing Sun Microsystems, Oracle stepped in and announced it would play the role of suitor. This is the first time in the history of the industry that a leading software vendor has bought out a leading hardware vendor. That might be for good reason: the two businesses have always been very different.

Sun has tried to do both for many years with mixed success. Its Java technology failed as a universal means of delivering rich web content but succeeded wildly as the enterprise business application development platform of choice.