Oracle buys Pillar: Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly
By Lee Johns, @StorageOlogist
I am about to compare Oracle's strategy to spiders. Not because they have 8 legs and fangs You may know differently - but because of a business practice that they have adopted and honed for a long time now.
When I was doing my Zoology degree we had an Entomology Professor -- yes I know spiders are arachnids and not insects -- who loved to talk about the spiders he called them Crafty @%3^ers.
There was a high chance that in finding a female to mate with they might fall prey to the larger female and so they brought with them an offering of a fly and while the female was eating this gift they copulated with her. Very smart, but nature can always improve. 
A closely related species started to get even more devious. They would wrap the offering in a silk web and the act of unwrapping the web before eating the contents meant that they got even more time whilst the female was distracted.
So how does this relate to Oracle. Well the moral of the story is that the more you invest in getting the value out of something provided to you by another, the longer the relationship is likely to last. And while that relationship lasts just like the female spider you may be getting - how shall I put it - “taken advantage of”.
Now as I said earlier, nature can always improve. Another of the Crafty @%3^er spiders has gone as far as providing a silk package with nothing in it. Nada. The male gets what he wants and the female walks away having spent a lot of effort for nothing but with the burden of caring for her little spiderlings in the future. So if you are an Oracle customer I just hope that once you unwrap it, your Oracle relationship provides you with more than a long term maintenance contract and some hardware that they paid nothing for and no one has wanted for years.
Check out this Wikibon Article on Oracle acquiring Pillar Data Systems. They may not hate the deal but you might!
Lee
