There’s a premise in big business that no single person is essential to the success of an organization. If I die on the job, microscopic cringely.com dies with me, sure, but if Steve Ballmer kicks-off during a sales meeting tirade, Microsoft will move smoothly onward, or so the idea goes — as far as it goes. Because of course it is frequently wrong. There are many instances where a single person can bring about a sea change in a company or an industry. In the 19th century that meant John D. Rockefeller in oil or Andrew Carnegie in steel. In the 21st century it means Steve Jobs at Apple and Pixar, or Larry Ellison at Oracle. There’s already way too much written about Jobs so this column is about Ellison.
I was thinking about Larry Ellison while preparing next week’s 2011 predictions column. What an extraordinary guy! I’m pretty sure I couldn’t work for him (nor would he hire me) but I have a lot of respect for Larry. For one thing, he doesn’t give a damn about what you or I think of him or his company, which I find refreshing. A few years ago I did back-to-back interviews with Carly Fiorina and Larry Ellison and the difference between the two was like they shared no DNA at all. They were from different galaxies. Or if we limit ourselves strictly to Broadway, Fiorina was Woman of the Year while Ellison had the lead in Glengarry Glenn Ross. I came away knowing almost nothing about Fiorina while Ellison revealed his underwear brand (Munsingwear).
Larry Ellison is all about the pursuit of wealth, power, and personal experience. He is unabashed. Ask him a question and he answers. Where’s the strangest place you’ve ever done it? “On a riding trail in Woodside, CA.” Bam! Take that, Jack Welch.
This level of honesty doesn’t make Larry what most of us would think of as a nice person. I once heard him refer to having “nailed” a dinner companion, if you know what I mean and I think you do. But with Larry at least you know where you stand, with most of us standing, frankly, nowhere.
Larry knows his objectives and is willing to use whatever power he has to achieve those objectives, which makes Oracle’s ownership of the former Sun Microsystems especially interesting to me.
Sun was a company filled with very smart people who frequently stumbled upon success, and that was the problem. Larry doesn’t stumble and as a result he has in a very short period of time taken the former Sun to new successes in almost every market. This is the same Larry and the same Oracle, remember, which were expected to dismantle Sun and throw most of it away. Instead the former Sun is creating hell for HP and IBM and even causing murmurs of concern at Intel.
But here’s the most amazing part — almost nothing changed to accomplish this. Sun management left and have pretty much disappeared, but other than that the company remains largely intact. Certainly none of the new Sun products being touted by Oracle are Oracle designs — it’s too early for that. The difference in servers and processors and even Java is that Larry’s behind it all now and everyone knows Larry takes no prisoners.
Look at Java as an example. Java was mismanaged from the start: everybody made money from it except Sun. Oracle and Ellison aren’t about to put up with that BS about the world using Java and Oracle getting nothing in return. They’re happy to let freeloaders complain and leave. So Oracle displaced or disenchanted many Java community members when it tried inserting at least one big customer into the product mix. One called Hologic was a medical software company — an academic nobody injected into the technical direction of Java’s future. Oracle didn’t win the vote for this obvious Open Source sellout, but it shows the direction they are headed with the language, which is into a commercial orbit somewhere between Red Hat and Pluto.
I am not defending Oracle’s undermining of Open Source nor do I support it, but the company is at least being clear about its intentions and convictions. Customers like that.
There are plenty of businesses entrenched in Java that can’t easily change. And now Oracle can start charging them. Think about if Microsoft had suddenly owned Java. This is how Redmond would handle it, too. Then there’s the whole Oracle+Apple angle, but I’m saving that for next week’s predictions.
Sun ostensibly believed in free, open software. Oracle and Microsoft clearly don’t. Look where it got everyone.
Great column Bob. There’s a lot that Sun did that was interesting, and a lot of assets they left totally untapped. If Oracle had any insight, and I think they do, they would look to the many things that were good profitable ideas that Sun totally abandoned over the years. I can think of at least two that would make them virtually unstoppable.
Sounds like a prediction – care to elaborate or better yet email it to Bob with you name on it and we’ll see how your predictions for Oracle/ Sun fair against his 2011 predictions next week!
Oh, that’s true, isn’t it.
Drats. Already emailed mine in.
I hadn’t heard about Sun’s hardware resurging in the market. Do you have any helpful links that summarize your understanding of what is happening with Sun’s business?
Sorry to be asking rather than googling, but I’m not sure what to search for, here.
Ditto. In the past 4 months, I have been the recipient of cold calls from HP, Dell, and a host of others seeking to enlighten me about their latest product line. I’ve heard nothing from Oracle or Sun.
Oracle don’t care about selling you a desktop, or even a server. They might be interested in filling one of your racks – maybe. They are interested in filling your datacenter. What they really want is to fill ALL your datacenters.
Oracle are all about “big”, they don’t care about “small”. You, me, Bob – we’re small, Sun might have cared about us – but look where that got them, Oracle? They don’t care, it’s probably going to make them a fortune (another one). In reflection, I’m probably wrong about the “probably” in that last sentence – but I’ll stand by the rest.
I’ve been saying, here and elsewhere, that Larry wanted Sun for the hardware stack, so that he could steal the last group not in his fold: the IBM mainframe users. Now he has a credible hardware stack, and a database that’s as good or better than DB2 “on that stack”. He’s going after that. He don’t need no stinking web startups.
“…almost nothing changed to accomplish this. Sun management left and have pretty much disappeared…”
Gee, I always assumed that management was the key to the success or failure of most companies. You can buy almost everything else that’s needed. But if you don’t know what goals to pursue, then you won’t know what to buy, how to use it, how to market the products, etc. etc. etc.
By the way, Bob, how is the second phase of the Startup Tour progressing with all the bad weather we’re having?
While it’s true that you could put together overnight something you might claim is a Sun clone, that’s a huge over-simplification. You’d have no intellectual property, no product roadmap, and no customer base. You’d be a guy in a garage telling the world he’s a Unix vendor or a server vendor while really competing on nothing but price. Management doesn’t mean leadership. Love Larry or hate him the guy provides leadership, which was sorely missing at Sun.
Hi Bob,
I stand by my statement that, “management was the key to the success or failure of most companies.” In the case of Sun, the big change was that incompetent management left and (hopefully) competent management took over.
Now then, about the second phase of the Cringely Startup Tour…
you want a Sun clone? buy Fujitsu SPARC, because frankly, Sun shut down its silicon, and basically shut down its manufacturing, and those are all Fujitsu products with a little purple on them.
or rather, Sun is now a Fujitsu clone.
You’re right, Sun was company filled with very smart people. Was. Almost every big name left Oracle. People who created success and were generally recognizable as strongest Sun assets were left go or didn’t like new corporate overlords. DTrace creators, ZFS people. Java father and many more. Oracle killed OpenSolaris, alienated MySQL users, paralysed Java process, fired GNOME Accessibility people, practically forced forking OpenOffice into LibreOffice. There is only smoking ruins in place of Sun now. It will roll for few more years (months?), but without technical expertise it will collapse.
I was at Apple the day Mike Scott fired a third of the engineering staff. The company was hugely successful, hugely profitable and at the very top of its game in those Apple ][ years, yet Scott — feeling that the engineers were getting too complacent — cut the bottom third of the tech staff totally without warning. Was that a terrible thing to do? Did many smart people lose their jobs? Was it bad for the company? In the long run I’d argue that it was a good thing, though you might not.
Now think about Sun. The losses you are lamenting are PEOPLE. Yes, people are essential to successful tech companies, but people also come and go. I knew it was over for Sun (and wrote as much at the time) when Andy Bechtolscheim left for the second time. Oracle didn’t force Andy to leave and the people you cite who WERE nudged out probably should have gone on to better things years before. But Sun was too comfortable. If all those people and programs you cite are so valuable, then we’re about to see a thousand flowers bloom. Remind me again what’s wrong with that.
The products and programs you mention are mainly Open Source. None of those programs will die if they have value to the community. If they don’t have value then they SHOULD die. Forking isn’t bad, it is good.
Sun was killing itself. Keeping Sun alive couldn’t happen by throwing more money at what wasn’t working. New leaders bring new styles and new priorities and in this case that was very appropriate since nearly everything wrong with Sun could be traced back to a lack of either leadership or style.
The point the GP was making is that most of the people behind the successful products at Sun have either left or were let go. Yes, some of those people were open source project related, but not all. Java is hardly open source, and the principle founder of it left Sun. OpenSolaris was barely usable outside of a Sun provided Installation – but the community seems to have picked that one up. Losses to OpenSolaris also means losses to Solaris – a much bigger issue than just saying “well, that’s an open source project so no effect overall”. (Though OpenSolaris was more about trying to save Solaris while in direct competition to Linux than about being open source.) DTrace and ZFS are barely open source – BSD licensed yes, but not truly open source. Again, losses to DTrace and ZFS mean losses to Solaris. (And Oracle supposedly cares a lot about Solaris.)
Now contrast this with your Apple example – where they took out the BOTTOM third. Oracle/Sun has let the TOP third go, not the BOTTOM third. That’s a big difference right there. Yes, some of them probably should have moved on to other things, but not necessarily – they were still bringing about big projects and big success for Sun – thus they were the valuable group.
Now, Apple was a bad example to choose – namely because until the last couple of years, the success of Apple was more dependent on the insight and leadership of Steve Jobs than any other employee there. That problem was only resolved (and proven) in the last couple of years. But that’s a different issue – one Oracle may still have to face if Ellison had to be replaced for whatever reason. Microsoft has had that problem for a decade – since Gates stepped down – and Ballmer (even though he’s one of the original group) hasn’t been able to do as good a job, though they’ll have an even harder time when they go to replace him too.
What Mike Scott (NOT Steve Jobs) cut were not people but programs. As such some very fine engineers went down with their ships. The very best landed on other projects that were deemed more worthy but plenty of good engineers left. and that was the point. Scott wanted to instill fear in all levels, not just the under-performers.
But Mr. Cringely, “Good, Smart People” is exactly that. Moreover in the end, I think that layoffs are bad for any company. Firing or laying off people is NOT GOOD LEADERSHIP, it’s just looking good for the stockholders that’s all.
No, selling stuff is what keeps shareholders happy. Sun created lots of stuff, but they failed to execute on the “selling stuff” part. Smart people, creating smart stuff isn’t enough – you’ve got to actually make money off it. I know it seems rather base, but there it is.
Sun created lots of great stuff, but didn’t manage to turn much of it into hard cash. That’s bad leadership.
Larry has made Sun a far less comfortable place, you make product that sells or you’re gone. Harsh it might be, but is it really wrong?
Since, so far as I know, Larry wouldn’t know a pointer from a twig up his butt, comparing Larry/Oracle to Steve/Apple is a false dichotomy. Steve was/is a technical leader, who also steers the boat. Larry is just greedy. There’s a reason that O’Reilly chose insects for its Oracle books; the quality of Oracle software has never been underestimated. In that sense, Larry is in the mould of Watson, pere et fil.
Nevermind. Don’t listen to me. I’m a weirdo with weird analogies. Egad!
The juveniles are drunk on mead again.
For the most part we aren’t talking about layoffs here. These folks left on their own.
These threads are nesting oddly so let me be clear that this response is to Robert Young. Both Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs are college dropouts, though Jobs stayed at Reed College for only one year while Ellison lasted for two years at the University of Illinois. Ellison also received that year an award for being the top student in his engineering class. Steve Jobs has never claimed to be a programmer or engineer. Despite his bravura performances at product introductions, his lack of technical aptitude is legendary in Apple. That doesn’t mean he can’t be a visionary. What Steve does is represent the idealized user, which he does perfectly, demanding answers to stupid questions that aren’t asked in other companies because the askers aren’t Steve Jobs. THAT is his vision. In contrast, Larry Ellison worked as a journeyman programmer from 1964 well into the late 1970s. Larry DOES know pointers. It’s Jobs who doesn’t, nor does he claim to.
I won’t dispute your recitation of the historical record; the pointer point was only make the point that Oracle is widely known to be a steaming pile of crap, and Larry is happy with that. But I do dispute its relevance to my point:
Larry is motivated to generate cash first, last and always. Quality of product and customer satisfaction are not part of the equation. He is a Watson heir.
Steve is motivated to make neat stuff that customers will fight to keep. Not every product has worked out, but that’s a different story. He is an Edison heir.
Nevermind. I didn’t realize that Cringely destroyed my argument and I was refusing to acknowledge that I posted with no knowledge of the actual facts. Oh my!
Juveniles are really into the mead. Feel the need to waste money falsifying an identity they dislike. Must be an Redneck Inbred.
I have lost my grip on reality. C’est la vie.
Looks like and has a mien similar to, ‘Tony Stark’.
Larry is in Iron Man 2.
I think it’s the other way around: Tony Stark (at least the movie Tony Stark) was largely based on Larry Ellison.
IronMan’s Tony Stark existed before Larry Ellison was ever known, debuting in 1963 when Ellison was in college. Now, perhaps they drew a little from Ellison for the recent movies, but the character had been well established by the time Ellison would have been on the scene.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
For the movie, a Jon Favreu and Robert Downey, Jr were not shy about basing the movie version of Tony Stark character on Larry Ellison. When the blogosphere noticed and made comparisons, i.e. The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Rabid Fanboy, Daring Fireball, etc., it came as no surprise in Iron Man 2 when Larry actually made a blink and you miss it appearance in Iron Man 2
Sucka… you just got served!
We really need to stop glorifying sociopaths and taking megalomaniacs at their own estimation of themselves. It’s a big part of how we got where we are. (The other part is unaccountability.)
With the aquisition of Sun, Oracle now has a complete solution from hardware all the way up the application stack. The nice thing about this is that their customer base are companies and corporations who actually PAY for software, not consumers who want everything in cyberspace to be free. Expect to see Java monetized by Oracle in some form or fashion as that is a huge untapped revenue stream for Larry. I would not be suprised to see Sun embed some kind of networking appliance/software stack in servers and start to dine on Cisco’s revenue as well.
This is where Microsoft is vulnerable, a large part of their earnings come from consumers and here they are being squeezed by freeware (software and internet services). MS will be lucky if they can hold onto mid-range business customers. They can expect to see much of their desktop revenue shrink. Windows 8 will be a non-event and the “beginning of the end” of their hegemony.
Intel’s future is cloudy as PC’s become less dominate and mobile and embedded platforms take off. They will be left with the mid to high end server market as their bread and butter but this will be a shadow of their former glory days. They certainly will not need as many fabs to support that market so expect to see them shrink in size.
Apple has been able to differentiate themselves from Wintel with great design and product support. This was not always the case (prior to Mr. Jobs return) and the big risk to Apple is the clear lack of a successor to Mr. Jobs. Once he is out of the picture Apple will fad unless they can find a new front man who can be identified with iPhone/iPad which will continue to be a player in the mobile space.
Clearly mobile (phone, tablet, netbook/laptop) will be the dominate platforms for the consumer over the next decade with Larry and company owning the back end server stack.
An Oracle acquisition of Vyatta, perhaps? Followed by a SPARC port?
Q: What’s the difference between God and Larry Ellison?
A: God doesn’t think he is Larry Ellison.
{nod}
If you are referring to Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, he was not the lead. He had one cameo appearance at the beginning the film.
Alec Baldwin did not have a cameo, he had the best lines in the movie:
Blake: Put. That coffee. Down.
[pause]
Blake: Coffee’s for closers only.
————
Shelley Levene: The leads are weak.
Blake: The leads are weak? Fucking leads are weak. You’re weak. I’ve been in this business 15 years…
Dave Moss: What’s your name?
Blake: F*** you. That’s my name. You know why, mister? You drove a Hyundai to get here. I drove an eighty-thousand dollar BMW. THAT’S my name. And your name is you’re wanting. You can’t play in the man’s game, you can’t close them – go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted. You hear me you f****** f*****? A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing. ALWAYS BE CLOSING. A-I-D-A. Attention, Interest, Decision, Action. Attention – Do I have you attention? Interest – Are you interested? I know you are, because it’s f*** or walk. You close or you hit the bricks. Decision – Have you made your decision, for Christ? And Action. A-I-D-A. Get out there – you got the prospects coming in. You think they came in to get out of the rain? A guy don’t walk on the lot lest he wants to buy. They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money. Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it? What’s the problem, pal?
Why didn’t you censor the first swear while censoring the rest? This is illogical.
[Jim] Spock, it’s called being human.
Excellent column Bob.
There are several things a company needs to do to be successful. One is to produce useful products and profit from them. Another is to create value for the shareholders. There are many others. Companies fall in to decline or fail when they forget some of key attributes for success. Sun and Yahoo are two excellent examples of ignoring the Wall Street side of the business. IBM is an excellent example of a firm putting too much attention into Wall Street and is neglecting other things.
While Larry may not care what outsiders think, he expects results. Those results impress Wall Street.
I would like to hear more about your Carly interview. She impressed me as someone who was a consensus builder. HP really needs someone to shake things up, not build a consensus.
When management now asks me what we will use for the next new project I have to say Java. We have too much invested in foundation code to just toss it out. Oracle will put up it’s road blocks that require payment to pass and we will pay it. That is how they will make short term profit from us at least.
I switched over to Java because it’s move to being more open was fostering a community that was producing code that was far better than anything that was available elsewhere. I was starting to become more and more productive using Java. I don’t think that community will survive Oracle and I am already looking for alternatives, just in case. So the conversation with management may be quite different in 5 years time and I don’t think I am alone.
I have to admit Sun was very much like the Underpants Gnomes (Phase 1: Collect Underpants, Phase 2: ?, Phase 3: Profit) and Larry solved the puzzle.
I suspect that there will be resurgence of (ANSI) C++; it’s not tethered, and used appropriately, can be used much as java.
May I suggest Go(lang) from Google. Made by the legendary Ken Thompson, the creator of Unix and UTF8 and Rob Pike.
I was also working heavily in Java and C++ on the server. C++ is powerful but I have seen so many C++ projects fail. Java helped out being easier (managed, garbage collected) and with massive industry support.
Go is coming along nicely. It has a garbage collector, no virtual machine; compiles to native code and the supporting libraries are growing fast. It also has a very liberal license, Apache 2.0. There is an Eclipse plugin for editor challenged programmers.
Take a look.
http://golang.org/
Cheers,
bjorn
“editor challenged programmers”, LOL
I bet your productivity is way down on those using non-challenging editors.
THINKING challenges not TYPING challenges, fast coding, much, much faster to hit e.g. “.” Ca’Thingy’, than type “.CallLongNameFunction(Thingy);
Luddite! 🙂
“There are plenty of businesses entrenched in Java that can’t easily change. And now Oracle can start charging them. ”
Probably a win-win. It will punish dinosaurs and force smaller companies to use appropriate technology – and stop using legacy languages.
It’s been stated in this thread, by Bob and others, that Sun had to change, and that Larry/Oracle brought change. Fine and true.
All progress requires change, but not all change is progress. Bob should review his columns over the last decade dealing with previous Oracle acquisitions with the intent of defining the level of service/quality of product pre and post acquisition. From the point of view of customers. I believe he’ll find that Larry/Oracle sacrificed those customers to yachting (and other personal) needs. This is the issue vis-a-vis Bob’s recent point of view here. If the purpose of capitalism is just legalized social Darwinism, then lets all get guns and shoot obnoxious neighbors. I know I’ve gots lots of stupid Rednecks around my house.
Progress would be manifest in ways to do what Sun set out to do: sell systems on the back of (free) java. Bending/breaking the rules to charge for something that had been understood to be “free” isn’t adding value, merely extracting value by chicanery. If that sounds vaguely familiar, it’s exactly what the financial services studs did to the economy. I see nothing there which commands respect.
Now, as to what Oracle could do, beyond squeezing more blood out of Sun customers (both explicit and implicit), my guess is: Larry don’t give a rat’s sphincter. It was clear for some years that Sun had turned java into proto-COBOL, and then Bruce Tate (and others) wrote books about the corporate takeover of java. It is now The Other White Meat legacy language as handmaiden to COBOL. No one with a brain wants anything to do with it. Well, all those off shore freshers, perhaps. So Larry will find a way around the GPL to squeeze coin out of everybody. IBM did the same with COBOL; ANSI COBOL and IBM COBOL.
Stallman was right. Remember that.
Dude, what are you talking about?
Yeah, this dude is terrifying.
Java the platform (and the language) will likely survive, at least for quite a few more years, regardless of how much Oracle does to destroy it because companies have invested so much in it and all of the competition languages/frameworks have their own issues.
MySQL and OpenOffice are unlikely to survive – or at least no one will use them – because the vast majority of people that use those products don’t want to pay anything for them (I don’t know anyone who has ever paid for either) and the free forks will be far more attractive to users.
Every Solaris user that I know runs it on the Sun hardware that ships with it so while OpenSolaris may die, Solaris may not. Kind of depends on whether or not Oracle can retain/hire enough talent to keep it going.
So far as OOo is concerned, it’s more a case for linux folks to have a way to make .doc files. I’d pay a reasonable fee ($100) for a basic editor that did that.
Bob – you make it sound like Java had this huge turnaround thanks to Larry Ellison’s take no prisoners approach. As a developer who uses Java every day to write web applications, I haven’t noticed any such turnaround. Java exists – I use it – and don’t pay attention to the licensing since it is and has always been a free download.
Let me clarify. If there is some master strategy to have this all in one Oracle-Weblogic-Java solution, it doesn’t affect me. The JDK has always been a free download, and I can choose whatever Java container & framework I want on the server (JBoss & Tomcat web app servers are open source as well as Struts and Spring frameworks).
Java will be around as long (or longer than) COBOL. There is now a massive amount of legacy web apps written in Java even as new frameworks which use Java come and go. I get your point that Java can be used to make money with other Oracle products by commercializing Java again and veering away from the Open Source path it took when Jonathan Schwartz ran Sun. But not everyone is going to do one stop shopping for everything by Oracle. Oracle Weblogic is a fine product but my I.T. department could save money by using JBoss instead.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but that the JDK is a free download is by Larry’s sufferance. He can, and I assert will, stop doing that soon enough. Remember, Sun/Oracle have made it so that there can be no OS java (Harmony). That older version of java had an Open Source source tree doesn’t mean that much, now. You can’t build a JDK, and you can only get one from Oracle, and Oracle can (and will) force you to pay for it.
The whole Sun/Oracle thing just highlights how dysfunctional the commercial world tends to be. Developing societies have always had mechanisms to protect their “thinkers” from their “bullies”. It makes sure that those who are not good at. or have no interest in catching mammoths or making war against surrounding tribes, get the space to develop ideas for the future. Where is the commercial mechanism for protecting companies like Sun from companies like Oracle or Microsoft?
“Sun was a company filled with very smart people who frequently STUMBLED upon success”? Cringely is critical of Sun because he thinks it should have spent more time catching mammoths or making war against surrounding tribes. As usual his thinking is limited and more than a little insular.
Speaking of Apple: I loved the history of the personal computer (pc/Mac) that you did several years ago. With Apple’s and Microsoft’s changes over the years, why not update the piece to include more recent history?
Your premise holds only if you believe the person you’re interviewing.
For those in search a less rosy version of Oracle/java, Colebourne suffices:
https://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/category/Java
For me SUN was a mixed bag of ingredients without a recipe and a chef to make them all work together.
In the 90’s SUN was all over the chart. IBM was about deep R&D + services + big iron software. They sold to existing managers. They targeted to recruit young talent but got bit by revolving doors with startups. SUN was pumping out web & app servers + new internet solutions + much R&D for programming, storage & chips. They also sold to existing & startup managers. They also got bit by revolving doors with startups in the dot com bubble.
Apple quietly recruited smart designers/programmers, apparently keeps them fiercely loyal, outsourced its manufacturing & targeted and won the student/college market, who in 10+ years will be in the purchasing power positions.
Apple is going to lockup client to cloud computing if it can. Its applestore backend is I believe already a walled garden on Oracle Iron with virtualization.
From my understanding only 3 vendors for that Vmware, Parallels and Oracle’s Virtualbox.
Whats missing is any analysis for SUN’s .edu, government & military legacy. There seems to be a huge base of install that will have to be refreshed in 3-5 years. Ellison doesn’t seem to be the lowest bidder kind of guy.
The current market status may change according to whether or not the capitalaist ideals and fundamental standards remain in place. The level of public support will also revolve completely leaving an irrepresible disaster if the negative results prevail!
Nice post, love it
It would be interesting to see how long Google will contiinue with development on the GWT, though I’m sure Google pays some MS wares in house still, not like it cannot afford it. On the back end though, big guys like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are already moving on to NoSQL solutions, but with the rise of the cloud big DB vendors probably won’t feel the sting for a long time.
Oracle puts a big question mark on all free use of Java and MySQL, thus dampen the spirit on free mobile platforms. Unless Larry can extract some money or damages from Android, any Java platform competition to Android is lost.
In the last decade, every organization I’ve worked for seem to be moving off of Oracle/Sun to MSSQL/.NET. Those migrations are just about complete now and I don’t see those customers go back to Sun hardware anytime soon.
I’m sorry, I’ve missed this former Sun with successes in almost every market over the last year. Missed it completely. In fact the only consequence I’ve seen is a lot of companies with deep investments in Java reevaluating their investment. I figure you know IBM fairly well, how about a piece on what the changes in IBM movements with regards to java during 2010 means for IBM and Java in the future. Not just the Harmony thing, their entire shift.
And of course I’ve heard something of some shaky MySQL customers, but they had it coming one way or the other.
[…] I, Cringely » And Then Along Comes Larry…. – Cringely on Oracle […]
I don’t need to wait until the next post to know how the Oracle + Apple angle. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is best buds with Apple’s Steve Jobs. Apple’s Steve Jobs ain’t too happy about the success of Google’s Android. Oracle owns all the Java patents (or so they claim).
Therefore:
Oracle + Apple = lots of Oracle lawsuits against Google for the purposes of destroying Android, which is Google’s competitor to Apple’s iPhone.
Oracle is already suing Google. That is old news.
Hi Bob,
Somewhat off topic —
I just listened to your discourse on the A Kauffman website, Conversation with Robert Cringely of cringely.com at the Economic Bloggers Forum hosted by the Kauffman Foundation.
Great comments. Why don’t you put a link to this conversation on your website? Better yet, why don’t you send a copy of the video to those boobs running our universities and governments?
Hmm,
No doubt at all Larry will seek to monetize java. Mysql is already that way. If your using it for commercial use, you have to pay a fee already. Most dont, but you have to give oracles lawyers something to do for 2011. Of course, there are and always have been alternatives such as postgress sql and the linux folks have an open fork of Java unencumbered by anything Larry and his lawyers can do…
None of this malarky will worry the big fish, they already contribute to Larry’s sailing boats. Everyone else generally uses MSSQL or Sybase and are nimble enough to adapt.
Probably a better question to ponder is what Oracles motives are (SAP recently purchased Sybase). I suspect it has a lot to do with their core product offerings having a very narrow base of appeal, and as time goes on, are becoming increasingly irrelevant, as larger firms outsource just as the mid sized and smaller ones already have. Oracle and SAP are making good coin now, but they are at the top of the wave at the moment. Its only down hill from here for them. Larry, even though he is a tool, is smart enough to get that. Time to get a slice of the much bigger non fortune 1000 market and thats just what they are doing.
anyhow just my upside down view here down under.
Phil
Great post Bob. looking forward to the predictions. Poor Sun, so many great ideas, so few home runs.
Oracle has inherited a massive installed base not just of Sun + Oracle, but also of Java + Oracle customers.
While the headlines are all about the web companies use of technology, most folks have no understanding of the scale and intensity of data center computing going in the corporate sector, in particular in financial services. I worked at a UK trading house a couple of years ago. By early 2009 we already had more compute grid engines than Yahoo.
Most of our newer trading systems were written inhouse in java, new regulatory and risk requirements were causing us to change these systems while also keeping more and more historical market data online. Needless to say.. none of this data was being managed in MSSQL Server.
If Oracle is able to tie together a decent data center story without irritating its installed base, things could turn out seriously bad for their competition, and for the openness of Java.
http://community.nasdaq.com/News/2010-12/oracle-study-points-to-concerns-on-customer-satisfaction.aspx?storyid=49332
“According to a recent study by Computer Economics, 42% of Oracle ( ORCL ) customers are dissatisfied with the quality of Oracle’s support while 58% are dissatisfied with the cost of the support. We believe that continued dissatisfaction could mean that in spite of high switching costs attached with changing software license providers, some unhappy customers might migrate from Oracle’s support and services program, which could weigh on the stock given the high sensitivity to licensing renewals.”
I wonder, do Steve’s customers feel the same? Is this result something which should engender respect?
Not according to sources like JD Powers, at least the last time I looked. Respect? Who needs respect when you have leverage?
The day Sun/Oracle makes its first dollar of profit from Java (and I am counting the 15+ years of R&D costs), I will buy everyone I know that is still at Sun/Oracle a drink.
The day Sun/Oracle makes its first dollar of profit from Java (and I am counting the 15+ years of R&D costs), I will buy everyone I know that is still at Sun/Oracle a drink.
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I will continue to focus on
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