Paul Krill
Editor at Large

Microsoft and Oracle: Not so different

news
Feb 24, 20051 min

Microsoft and Oracle may be bitter rivals in the software industry, but both have taken a bit of a heads-in-the-sand approach to the growing competitive threat of open source offerings.

In unveiling an upgrade to its SQL Server database this week, Microsoft actually raised the price of the product by as much as 25 percent. That’s kind of peculiar when there are open source offerings such as MySQL and PostgreSQL that can be had for little to nothing.

Oracle made a similar move recently, upping the price of its Oracle Application Server 10g despite competition from open source alternatives such as the JBoss application server.

Meanwhile, more and more companies are looking for open source alternatives to the pricey commercial products they’ve been using.

Good luck to these rival companies in levying price increases in the face of open source. Something tells me, though, that the biggest benefactors of these price increases might not be Microsoft and Oracle but their open source counterparts.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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