You are absolutely right, Larry is much more a 'showdown on main street' kind of guy. I think Larry was supporting his good buddy Scott McNealy on that one. An area that Larry does have a passionate position on is the NC, and he needed to push a lot of other players (Sun and IBM in particular) to help with that, support of this nonsense with DOJ was probably the price he had to pay. I think Larry also thinks Mister Softee will shrug off the DOJ and it will be back to business as usual, round XXII.
Notice that unlike Scott, who seems to be shooting himself in the foot as the only major player with no NT strategy, Larry has not really done anything to hurt his business in all of this, in fact has pushed very hard personally to drive Oracle on NT development and sales, especially with Oracle 8 and OPS. CPQ, MSFT and Oracle all had to work together pretty closely to pull off the recent 27,000 TPM-C cluster benchmark on OPS / NT. If you want to see what these guys really care about, look at where they put resources. The rest is just posturing for the press. |
