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by pjmlp
589 days ago
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While it is fashionable to hate Oracle, they aren't the only Java vendors in town. As someone that does consulting across multiple programming languages, what I notice is that .NET is too late to the party in the server room wars. For better or worse, UNIX and ideas derived from it, won the server rooms and cloud deployments, even Azure is mostly Linux nowadays (> 60% as per official numbers). Due to its previous history, .NET has always had a bad name in UNIX shops (even with Mono), and most companies would rather use something else, unless they are a Microsoft shop, it could be Java, Go, or whatever. As far as I am aware, Wal-Mart isn't a Microsoft shop and only acquired Jet for the business, not the technology, so like in all acquisitions something like that was bound to happen. |
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I've never worked for Wal-Mart, I've only seen PR and blog posts and job postings. That is likely its own spin of what happened, too. But during those years Wal-Mart was seen as a stable "Microsoft shop" in terms of what they were hiring for in software developers (if you didn't mind relocating to Arkansas).
Externally, the Java thing did seem to be a "coup" that came out of the blue. Like I said, the easiest explanation is that Wal-Mart, a company famous for ruthless cost cutting and layoffs, felt like they had milked their acquihire of Jet for just long enough to stay competitive and decided the easiest "exit" for those expensive employees was to force a top-down mandated tech stack change to a known cheaper tech stack and gently encourage them to quit on their own initiative in the chaos. (In that Wal-Mart was already very quick to RTO, they had already played that particular card, many other companies are still palming to cause similar layoffs.)
The Oracle rumors are icing on the cake, sure. But also extremely plausible given that is how Oracle's business works today.