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February 24, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft and Oracle: Not so different
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.
Posted by Paul Krill on February 24, 2005 11:23 AM
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