Whether you are talking Sparc, Power or Itanium, the reality is that each part is tied to the efforts of one vendor. The correspondence shows that HP, while Mark Hurd was still there, was not only fully behind Itanium it actually surprised how much Intel supported it. This is directly contrary to Oracle's allegations that Intel and HP were concealing a secret agenda to pull the plug. Not only weren't they pulling the plug, HP was still treating the technology as strategic and Intel apparently was as well.

Now I personally thought Intel had moved on from Itanium and was just continuing to support it because of the HP agreement, but the discovered documents clearly show that isn't the case. I had also given Oracle the benefit of the doubt because it had sent me a Xeon roadmap and argued that since Itanium wasn't on it that it clearly showed Intel was pulling the plug. I thought this was an honest mistake and that Oracle hadn't realized that the Xeon team wouldn't put Itanium on one of their charts any more than they would Core, Atom or Pentium because they don't own those lines either. However, the documents also showcase that they appeared to be moving against Itanium for competitive reasons and that chart doesn't seem to have any influence on that decision.

I guess it is the same thing but this reminds me of when Steve Jobs, who arguably was Larry Ellison's closest friend, came back to Apple. Larry was on Apple's board around this time and would have seen Steve painfully hype products he clearly thought were crap. We knew he thought they were crap because, prior to taking the job, he was outspoken on just how crappy they were. But he knew he had to convince people to buy them otherwise Apple would have failed so he pushed them until he could fix Apple and its product lines.

Ellison, apparently taking a page from Steve's book, is (based on this correspondence) doing pretty much the same thing and I don't think opening this particular curtain is going to make buyers feel all that warm and fuzzy about Oracle. I mean if it isn't honest about this what will it be honest about? Oracle employs some of the most highly compensated and skilled sales reps in the business, these folks likely could sell refrigerators to Eskimos.