Oracle, the new king?

Oracle stock price is going up since May when Oracle announced that it bought Sun Microsystems, one of the biggest distributors and makers of Linux and the creator of Open Office the biggest competitor against Microsoft Office.

Oracle’s stock price is currently $21.42 and Microsoft’s is $23.77

The fact that Oracle bought Sun Microsystems is to me a very strong indicator that the company is preparing conditions to start a full competition for market share against Microsoft. Oracle currently owns an Operating System, an Office Suite (Open Office) and the strongest database system in the market. Oracle is distributing also their own Virtual Machine, which seems to be stronger than Microsoft’s, their own ERP Solution (in fact 3 different flavors of it) which is also better than Microsoft’s Great Plain and a set of other applications including an universal file viewer and management system (AutoVue).

Oracle is giving away for free many of their applications (Open Office, Virtual Machine and Linux) only charging for Tech Support, this approach is becoming more often seen in the last few years when the world economy is not what it was in the late 90s. And many other companies are taking this in consideration to bring to the market products with a more competitive price. A proof of this is that currently you can buy a PC with Linux installed from Dell, HP or IBM. Stores like TigerDirect and others will install for you Linux in any server if you ask them to do that. Two years ago there was not any other option of Operating System available for you but Microsoft Windows.

Software Market is changing quickly and Microsoft’s days as only one company dominating it are over. Is this the end for Microsoft? I do not think so. But it will have to work harder to compete against all these other companies like Oracle (Linux), Google (Android, a flavor of Linux) and Apple (Mac).