It's still surprisingly big in retail - it runs a crapton of local back-end stock keeping applications at the major retailer that I worked for awhile back, and I've since heard that they've virtualized it to deploy on their "next generation" in-store platform.

20 years ago, it was really the only game in town for Enterprise UNIX(tm) on Intel, and given how much it costs to design, buy, and deploy ANYTHING that's going in to 2000+ remote locations, it's going to stick around for quite a while more.

I dunno. I've been using the hell out of my Nook Tablet since my wife got it for me for Christmas, and it's provided a nice middle ground for me. The web browser is good enough to check Facebook or read a few newspaper articles, but not good enough to provide a fully interactive experience beyond typing a couple of one sentence emails or hitting a "like" button. On the other hand, I've probably dropped two hundred bucks on ebooks in the last three months. Instant gratification has its merits. Instead of hoofing it to the book store (which most likely won't have what I'm looking for) or ordering something from Amazon (in which case I'll have to wait a couple of days), I can get buy something new right then and there. I spend more of my free time reading instead of idly browsing the web. Oddly enough, I'm still buying hard copies of stuff - like reference books, cook books, and substantive non-fiction and literature. The Nook is my platform of choice for the brain candy SF that I'd be embarrassed to display on the shelves in my living room.

I'd love to pay $10,000 per processor for Oracle. List price for Oracle DB, Enterprise Edition, is something like $47,000 per CORE.