Gearfuse

The other week, IBM was going to buy Sun and the world seemed to be in equilibrium. But that deal fell through and Sun was left standing in the middle of the street with its pants down. Lucky for J. Schwartz & Co., Larry Ellison’s Oracle Corporation decided to use flex its power and purchase Sun Microsystems for about $7.4 billion.

What does this mean? Aside from the consolidation effect this economy is having on a lot of companies, Oracle will now be positioned as one of the biggest tech companies to ever exist, especially by adding MySQL to its coffers after Sun acquired the company last year. Additionally, Oracle can now enter the hardware business (or get out of it) and bundle its software with servers and the like. A fine day as two tech giants collide.

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Tonight, MySpace kicked off its new commercial free music service which doesn’t include any of that bullshit DRM business.  Using its ever popular Flash player, users can purchase songs or add them to a playlist. It’s now possible to create a streaming playlist of as many as 100 songs each that can be shared and ranked.  MySpace music will also offer on-demand, ad-subsidized playback of full tracks in addition to allowing users to purchase unprotected MP3s of songs through Amazon.

Could MySpace music be another competitor for iTunes? It’s certainly looking that way. Just wait until Facebook joins with iTunes commercially. The “Great Social Networking” war is upon us.

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