In July I shared some thoughts about the likely impact of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems from a Website perspective – plus a couple of suggestions from the peanut gallery. In the past few weeks, an era came to an end as some of the industry’s best and brightest Web professionals left the Sun.com team for greener pastures.

Of course, gone is not forgotten on the Web. Sun.com’s award winning usability & effectiveness and trendsetting best practices will be available online via the Wayback archives for years to come. For our part, our decade of work with the Sun.com team has generated gigs of best practices reviews. Although I can’t predict exactly when the Sun.com site will become the newest Borg within Oracle.com’s red and  white collective – I know that its forward thinking designs and best practices will be part of our analysis for years to come.

My hat is off to these professionals. Oracle’s loss is certain to be someone else’s gain.