Sun Microsystems [JAVA] was expected to soon announce its cloud computing strategy. I met with one of the executives working on the launch fairly recently. He told me to expect a really great story about the Sun cloud computing services initiative designed to take on Amazon. And that it would be announced very soon.

But now with the Oracle acquisition, there seems to be a cloud over Sun's strategy. Not just in cloud computing but also in SPARC, systems innovation, open source, future data center technologies, blade servers, storage, and many other areas where Sun was trying to be innovative.

The key question is to Oracle: Does the Sun acquisition represent a departure from a merger strategy based on rolling up maintenance revenues? Oracle now has many of the business components that would enable it take on IBM, but does it have the will?

Oracle is at an interesting point in history. It can go for the brass ring or it can pass into a lucrative retirement.