We’re getting more of a taste as to the “new reality”. Most of the news is of the “Surprised, but knew this was coming” variety.

Motley Fool has a good write-up about the Oracle earnings announcement and how Sun’s impacting the bottom line as well as changes coming. Some of the include getting rid of all unprofitable resale deals, such as Veritas and Hitachi products.

CIO Mag dips into the new “All or Nothing” support model being adopted. The policy (PDF) states: “when acquiring technical support, all hardware systems must be supported (e.g., Oracle Premier Support for Systems or Oracle Premier Support for Operating Systems) or unsupported.”

The policy goes on with all sorts of horrors, such as heavy penalties 90-days after contract lapse, including “your hardware system must be qualified as service-ready before technical support can be reinstated” and “The reinstatement fee is equal to 150% of the last-paid support fee, or 150% of the list technical support price for the covered hardware system, prorated from the date technical support is being ordered back to the date technical support lapsed”. Ouch.

So how do you offer a product for free and then ensure that people pony up the cash? This sounds like the way. I haven’t seen anything about OS support for non-Sun systems (Dell, HP, etc) but I would assume they would have to support at least some of them due to prior agreements over the last couple years.

I’m sure we’ll be learning even more very soon. One thing is clear, Solaris just got too expensive for the SMB. The low income customer base that Sun’s tried to build up over the last couple years is SOL.