Save Windows XP: Thus far, more than 12,600 have have signed our Save XP petition. Most of those folks cited lack of compelling benefits in Vista, as well as training, support and upgrading costs as reasons to keep XP alive. Burton Group executive strategist Ken Anderson said that the reaction to XP’s impending demise is similar to what Coke went through when it unsuccessfully introduced a new formula in the 1980’s. “XP has come to the point of being Coke Classic,” he said. SaveXP.com. M&A’s: Two major acquisitions today. Oracle buys BEA Systems, after all, and for $8.5 billion obtains middleware that, CEO Larry Ellison explains, “gets [Oracle] where we need to be … across the software stack.” In the other deal, Sun Microsystems acquires MySQL and its open source database technology and hopes to build enterprise confidence in MySQL support, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz says. Related blogs: MySQL and BEA acquisitions, and Zack Urlocker’s insider’s story: Sun shines on LAMP. Columnist’s corner: There’s always room for a story packed with hubris, terrific marketing and an utter misunderstanding of just how important infrastructure really is. At least there is in Off the Record. Our anonymous author reflects on 1999, the year he was involved in a startup consumer Web site that, as so many have done, launched before the technology was ready. “The thinking was that we didn’t want anyone to get the jump on our brilliant idea.” Even if that line of rationale seems antiquated, it was the norm during the dotcom craze. Ah, the bubble. “On launch day, we flipped the switch and everything worked great.” An expensive celebration at a trendy restaurant, quite naturally, followed. “Until the inevitable happened. Word spread quickly: the servers were down!” Two days of recovery time and a million squandered user sign-ups later and the lesson learned was simple. “It’s possible that if we’d spent just a few thousand bucks more on server hardware, we could have been millionaires.” A classic tale of Dotcom woe. Share your own IT tragedies, comedies, and histories via the comments function below or by emailing them to offtherecord@infoworld.com. Ongoing coverage: Macworld 2008. And our three-part video series: Two Geeks and iPhone. Software Development