Oracle-PeopleSoft: The winners and losers

When Oracle first announced its hostile bid for PeopleSoft, it looked like the move of a ruthless and savvy software giant. PeopleSoft had just made its move for smaller rival JD Edwards and Larry Ellison's team clearly thought it was time to get a better grip on an enterprise-applications market that it has let slip recently, certainly in comparison to its mainstay database business.

But while the jostling would lead to many stories, from all sorts of angles, these pages considered what any takeover would mean for users.

Columnist Rene Carayol called the Oracle-PeopleSoft-JD Edwards shenanigans "a soap opera we could do without" and merely "about getting rid of a competitor".

He wasn't the only one who could see who would gain - though those doing the taking over were thinking more about their own futures.

Yesterday's announcement that the US Department of Justice thinks it has a case against Oracle on an antitrust basis is likely to kill the merger. Oracle may fight on but the odds are stacked against it.

The DoJ experts even used past comments from Oracle co-president Chuck Phillips, saying a triumvirate of Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP might dominate this market - a stance Oracle disputes now, unsurprisingly, citing increased competition from upstarts.

One such upstart might end up being Microsoft - creating the backdrop to much of the current manoeuvring - and maybe five years down the line we'll have DoJ lawyers forced to eat their own words after it turns out they teed up a market for a company they have already ruled against in other tech areas.

Oracle and its confident leader Ellison will end up as the losers of the past nine months or so. The winners? PeopleSoft, able to properly integrate JD Edwards, will get back to business. SAP, Europe's single software giant, will do even better out of it.

And then maybe in the long term, Microsoft will also find it easier to break this market. Maybe.