I'm an engineer in ME and have been thinking about the timing of the currently speculated events. Why kill off HW at this specific moment? The first sign was of course canceling Exadata SL and LoS which was really strange as they had really doubled down on this after the Jan RIF, so that really came as a shock.
So what changed since then? What made LE change his mind, leading to the most likely scenario that he had to move JF out of the way, who would not have wanted to cooperate in such a scenario.
My current hypothesis is AMD's resurgence in the server space. LE now no longer needs SPARC as a stick to beat Intel for forcing better deals, as he can now threaten to go to AMD instead. This was not a viable option before because AMD was really lacking.
Thoughts?