ReadWriteWeb

Oracle is buying Sun, and bankers are looking forward to the next wave of consolidation. To somebody who remembers the innovation and excitement of earlier enterprise hardware and software start-ups, this is a bit gloomy. CHOI (Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM) does not spell "choice" for buyers, employees, or investors. Choose your behemoth. If consolidation means lower prices -- and it will -- buyers will be happy. But, it all sounds like cost-cutting, layoffs, and less innovation to me.

We have written a lot about Microsoft's struggle to gain back market share from Google in the search engine market. Microsoft's latest attempt at this is a distribution deal with Sun. Starting today, Sun will distribute the MSN Toolbar to users in the U.S. who download the Java Runtime Engine for Internet Explorer. Given that Java is installed on virtually every computer, this new deal should give Microsoft's search market share a bit of a boost, as the MSN Toolbar uses Live Search as its default search engine.

Sun Microsystems announced today that had entered into an agreement to acquire open source database company MySQL AB for $1 billion in cash and assumed stock options. MySQL is used by many of the web's largest companies, including YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia, and makes up the "M" in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), one of the most popular open source web development stacks utilized by web sites today.