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> And the micromanagement Gosling says he felt may have been less of an issue at IBM. Specifically, Gosling says he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all

> And the micromanagement Gosling says he felt may have been less of an issue at IBM. Specifically, Gosling says he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java. Certainly IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano would not personally get his hands into the goings on with an acquisition, even a key one like Sun. But then IBM is not the house that Sam built like Oracle is Ellison's creation. There is a major difference in that. Why the fuck has Larry Ellison sidelined the creator of Java in the development of Java in favor of himself making the key decisions? What qualifications does Ellison have to make these decisions? That's just colossally egocentric and incompetent.

wolf550e 9y ago
Different incentives. Imagine a programming language team composed of a bunch of world class experts (expensive) worked on an amazing programming language that was a joy to use for millions of programmers worldwide and got a lot of academic interest and free work on it in the form of research etc. and they sold some books / support / services / consulting / certification / sponsorship that covered their salaries but did not bring in any more money than that. You and I would be very proud to be the corporation/manager that "owns" such a team, even if they don't make us a lot of money or increase the price of our stock options. But LPOD looks at this and tries to design it into a huge money maker. He realizes he cannot turn it into a long term cash cow like Oracle RDBMS but he can squeeze some profits out of it for a few years until it dies. Some profits is better than no profits. So that's what he does.
delinka 9y ago
“That's just colossally egocentric and incompetent.” You forgot narcissistic. And those attributes explain why.
sqlminus 9y ago
The entire Oracle leadership is full of narcissistic and technically incompetent leaders. Take for example, this article that for some reason glorifies profanity in business meetings. http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-thomas-kurian-has-interesting-rules-for-holding-meetings-2016-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-thomas-kurian-has-int... The leader here, who is known as TK internally, is known for being abusive and profane to his team. In my 5 years at Oracle, I have not met a single developer who respected TK. He was unanimously hated by all his developers. The general opinion among developers is, "This guy tries to be like Bill Gates, but come on, has he done anything in his life beyond managing supply chain management solutions?" Yet, this guy is glorified within Oracle, just because Larry Ellison likes him. It is really a situation of one man versus all, where the one man is winning due to an intricately established bureaucracy over decades that cannot be unsettled anymore.

wolf550e 9y ago

Different incentives. Imagine a programming language team composed of a bunch of world class experts (expensive) worked on an amazing programming language that was a joy to use for millions of programmers worldwide and got a lot of academic interest and free work on it in the form of research etc. and they sold some books / support / services / consulting / certification / sponsorship that covered their salaries but did not bring in any more money than that. You and I would be very proud to be the corporation/manager that "owns" such a team, even if they don't make us a lot of money or increase the price of our stock options. But LPOD looks at this and tries to design it into a huge money maker. He realizes he cannot turn it into a long term cash cow like Oracle RDBMS but he can squeeze some profits out of it for a few years until it dies. Some profits is better than no profits. So that's what he does.

delinka 9y ago

“That's just colossally egocentric and incompetent.” You forgot narcissistic. And those attributes explain why.

sqlminus 9y ago

The entire Oracle leadership is full of narcissistic and technically incompetent leaders. Take for example, this article that for some reason glorifies profanity in business meetings. http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-thomas-kurian-has-interesting-rules-for-holding-meetings-2016-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/oracles-thomas-kurian-has-int... The leader here, who is known as TK internally, is known for being abusive and profane to his team. In my 5 years at Oracle, I have not met a single developer who respected TK. He was unanimously hated by all his developers. The general opinion among developers is, "This guy tries to be like Bill Gates, but come on, has he done anything in his life beyond managing supply chain management solutions?" Yet, this guy is glorified within Oracle, just because Larry Ellison likes him. It is really a situation of one man versus all, where the one man is winning due to an intricately established bureaucracy over decades that cannot be unsettled anymore.