Seems like Oracle made the right decision in dropping Itanium support
I strongly disagree.
Itanium was doing fine (as far as any Unix player was doing fine)
until Oracle pulled the critical software rug out from under it in a
flurry of anti-Itanium FUD PR campaign. Once the confidence of
users was undermined it didn't matter that support was reluctantly
reinstated under legal threat, the severe permanent damage was
done.
That being said, once the affair happened HP seemed to want to
maximise the damage to Itanium sales do enhance the award
from its law suit. It did absolutely nothing to promote the huge
benefits of the Poulson processor upgrade of its systems. It
seemed to have done the calculation that with the Unix market in
a secular, sustained decline and buyer confidence undermined by
Oracle it was better to let Itanium sales drop as fast as possible
to be able to demonstrate the largest possible damages to sales
in its law suit.
The bottom line is Unix servers are in terminal decline. The
action by Oracle basically yanked Itanium from an increasingly
strong second place to Power to a distant third place just behind
SPARC with Power way out in front of both. The server market
continues to become more and more dominated by x86 running
Linux, Windows (and minor OSes originated on RISC, IPF, and
mainframes).
This award to HP is a fair and just legal reply to a despicable
act of betrayal and anti-competitive action by Oracle to kill off
a vulnerable architecture that went from strong ally to competitor
after Oracle bought Sun and acquired its SPARC business. It also
appears that there was a strong element of personal revenge
regarding Mark Hurd's ignominious exit from HP to join Oracle.
I hope Oracle shareholders launch a suit against Larry and friends
for such a gross disregard for business ethics and fiduciary duties
in the course of their actions.
What is not clear is Intel's role in the initial action by Oracle.
But that is a story for another day. :-/
