How Guardian Tech readers detailed Oracle and Sun's buyups

Gathering the details of Oracle's and Sun Microsystems' acquisitions down the years would be a slog for a single reporter, especially against a tight deadline. But what if you crowdsource it?
Guardian Tech twitter invite
How we started it all off: asking on the Guardian Tech twitter feed /

Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems, announced on Monday morning, was one of those things that happens regularly in journalism: a huge story, breaking just as we were preparing the Technology section (which, though it appears in Thursday's paper, needs to be complete by Tuesday evening).

We'd need a big story, of course, about what the implications of the takeover. But I also thought that it needed something else; both Oracle and Sun are famously acquisitive, having bought dozens if not scores of companies in their lives.

So, I thought, it would make sense to have a table of the major acquisitions by each company. Only problem was, who would do it? That's very labour-intensive work: someone has to track down the list and enter it into a spreadsheet or other table so that it can go into our production process.

But we didn't have a spare person to do that. The idea that newspapers have dozens of people sitting around waiting for the phone to ring is one that isn't in the least bit accurate. Everyone's focussed on getting stuff done.

However, I thought, perhaps there's a large group of people who'd be willing to sacrifice a little bit of time to help us get this done. Such as the 400,000-odd followers of the Guardian Technology twitter feed -@guardiantech - who might, after all, know just the detail we need (or where to find it).

So I set up a Google spreadsheet, made it world-editable (mindful of the fact that there's no revision control on those spreadsheets, so if someone deleted the content, it would be all gone forever) and announced it in the Twitter feed at 2.30pm.

The response was astonishing: people piled in, often 30 or more at a time. You could watch in real time as the spreadsheet rows flickered and updated. Yes, as I'd feared, some people did try to put rubbish in (perhaps thinking this was a live output to the Guardian site; I wouldn't do that without many more precautions in place) but others took it out. I barely had to keep watch. Other people policed it (thanks, @markng and others).

All I'd asked for was that people give the name of the purchased company, the amount (if known), whether it was cash or shares (if known), when it happened, a URL link to the event and their Twitter name.

But what was fascinating was that people decided that wasn't enough.

They edited the company names for Oracle and Sun so that they had a live stock ticker.
They added a column to explain what had happened to the acquired company or its technology - absorbed, dumped and so on. (One person put all the Oracle list from its website onto a separate sheet, but I had to stop that, because we just needed a straightforward table.)

The fact that we were doing this pinged around the twittersphere - notably, when Clay Shirky retweeted the fact at 3.30pm.

And about two and a half hours after I'd opened the spreadsheet, enough was done that I could close it.

So, thanks right there to those who left their Twitter handles - @nevali, @houseofhayden, @olafgeibig, @ar2, @moniforce, @ajlanghorn, @x20mar, @nomar, @patrickf, @rleyton, @pooya72, @JimboGunn, @cezarmaroti - you all did wonderful work. As did the many, many other people who edited but didn't leave a handle.

What was also interesting was that someone at the Wall Street Journal clearly had the same idea about getting a list of acquisitions - though there the thought was more of Oracle (and also about noting which organisations had had stakes in the companies sold).

You can see the result here. As far as I know, though, it wasn't crowdsourced; some poor soul (or souls) had to slog away at that. Certainly the information about the companies that were behind the sales is useful (key stuff for the WSJ demographic). But I'd also note a few things:

1) the Guardian twittersourced table has both Oracle and Sun acquisitions
2) it goes a lot further back than the WSJ one - to 1999 (whoever knew that Oracle bought Thinking Machines?)
3) ours points out some important ones - notably Sun's 1996 acquisition of Lighthouse Design, which is how Jonathan Schwartz, the present open source-loving chief executive, joined.

That wasn't the end of it, of course; to reach the final version in the paper and online, we had to check the details; for the paper, we had to leave out many of those that were provided simply for reasons of space. (That included the list of Twitter names who contributed. Apologies.)

But here it is: the table of some acquisitions made over the years by Oracle and Sun, as sourced by you. Apart from two - I put in Oracle buying Sun, and Sun buying MySQL. That was all. You can compare it to the spreadsheet (which is still viewable, but has been closed for editing).

The list isn't complete, either: there are lots of Oracle and Sun acquisitions that weren't included (even though both companies have extensive acquisitions pages on their sites).

No matter. We weren't looking for perfection, but "good enough" short cuts. Newspapers are only first drafts of history; we needed to have a form that would give some useful detail.

So, would I do this again? I'd like there to be a revision system: world-editable documents are dangerous thing, as any Wikipedian will tell you; I might try something with clearer limits, and make more regular backups somehow.

But as a way of bringing the power and knowledge of the crowd to this article, and helping out a journalist in something of a pickle, this was a time when I was delighted and surprised by the Guardian Technology readers. Thank you all again.