Ask HN: Are you a fanboy of any company?

The risky one (here): Microsoft (winge all you want but Windows7 is awesome, XBox is what Apple and Google hope to build beyond the games with all the video/media center/music stuff and Kinect adds a whole new level of communication and interaction, OfficeLive blows away Google Docs in many respects, the entertainment systems in the new Ford vehicles, Zune music subscription (wish it was on iPhone!) and Ballmer is far more fun to laugh at than Steve Jobs is to laugh with.

There are many others that I use but they aren't as well known, local, or very niche. Things that they all excel at are customer service, product updating and reliability, and the intagible "fun" factor. I'd include MyRealPage (real estate IDX and site host), Panago Pizza, Japadog (street vendor of hotdogs with a Japanese twist), and the Ninja Tunes crew celebrating their 20th anniversary this year (weekly solid steel show is excellent and never (almost) disappointing... wish I could have attended their recent tour).

1. I do think the Google lawsuit is pretty stupid. They should have known when they acquired Sun how many problems they would have if they expected to close stuff that had previously been so open. I think they should stick to enterprise support for otherwise free products. So I'm not entirely an Oracle fanboy. But quite honestly, what laws are they breaking? I certainly think their actions makes some people mad for good reason, but it certainly doesn't justify some of the comments I've seen - and I've rarely gotten answers to some of the questions I've asked people about why the disagree with Oracle. A few people have explained, and I see their answer as valid - but I think a lot of people are joining their bandwagon.

2. I know several people who worked for Sun, and were very unhappy about how the company was being run into the ground. They love what Oracle has changed about the culture. My impression of Jonathan Schwarz from what I've seen was that his opinion of Sun's products was too high, and his desire to be open-source was such that it harmed the people working for him. I'm a big open-source guy, but you have to make a profit somehow, and he just seemed like he didn't see the direness of his company's financial situation.

3. Everyone was afraid of what would happen to MySQL, VirtualBox, etc... if Oracle bought them. I was afraid of what would happen if Sun just flat-out went bankrupt. So far it appears that everything is still free, but Oracle offers enterprise support and is continuing development with good financial backing. Yeah, they're trying to make a buck, but aren't we all? What's wrong with Oracle doing it? They're good at business - so if I wanted enterprise support for my database - I know who I'd choose. But if I just want to test how my app works with their database - there's a free copy I can test it with.

4. I really like their products. I've had very good experience with their database and their tools - I think their engineering prowess will benefit these products more than their big-business will harm them. In contrast, I've been disappointed by some of Sun's products. They're good, to be sure, but there's always something I like better, and I just never felt really "impressed" by them.

Just a couple years ago Sun was just short of Google in terms of the big names that they had. (Google, of course, got all the Bell Labs folk.) Were all of these people looking through the Schwartz goggles?