7 ms·

Everyone seems to have missed - or be ignoring - the fundamentals of Oracle. They aren't in this game to change the world (ala Sun), or improve the lives of dev

by pclark 16y ago

Everyone seems to have missed - or be ignoring - the fundamentals of Oracle. They aren't in this game to change the world (ala Sun), or improve the lives of developers, they're in this to make bucket loads of cash if products they acquire will not make them money - they will ruthlessly cut it. They aren't hackers. They aren't designers. They aren't entrepreneurs. They're business men. Similarly if you dare compete with Oracle, you're going up against a company similar to Microsoft 10 years ago: rich and mean. Look at someone like Google, you think they're evil? Oracle could literally wipe them off the planet if they were inclined. The fact people hate upon Apple or Google, or even Microsoft when Oracle is the towering nemesis is hilarious. At least Oracle doesn't bullshit you. Google? Do no evil? You're a public company. Vision, for the greater good, wanting to change the world are all well and great, but when the chips are down, you know what counts? Revenues. As Larry Ellison once said about Sun: "Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales" and you know what? I admire them for that. I respect that they walk that line. They're a public company, and god dammit, they're going to win. I would rather spend a year working with Larry than Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or the Google guys.

volida 16y ago
The last time I said a business man is not always an entrepreneur I got downvoted to the abyss.
mcantelon 16y ago
If money matters and innovation doesn't the oil industry is likely a better place to be than tech.
- pclark 16y ago
  It depends how you get said money - by being innovative perhaps.
  - mcantelon 16y ago
    Is Oracle innovative compared to Google or Apple?
    - pclark 16y ago
      I meant make lots of money by being innovative, or take the oracle approach, etc.
cookiecaper 16y ago
The thing is, as someone stated below, Oracle is all about short-term wins. If Oracle wins this patent suit against Google and gets lots and lots of damages from it, that's nice, but it'll scare everyone away from Java. That's not good for Oracle or anyone else. If they'd just cool their jets and let things like this slide while focusing on creating great Java-based products and improving the Java ecosystem, they'd have much better long-term prospects. Even Ellison stated that Java is the most important product Oracle has ever acquired, and he's going to kill it in desperation to milk every last cent of licenses that he can get today. If Oracle continues with this kind of ruthlessness, they may squeeze several million out of Google et al, but Java is done for. Nobody will want to use that platform anymore because it will be too risky legally. It'd be a huge opening for .NET and other competitors. Java would go the way of COBOL, only running in the darkest abysses of megacorporations that never modernize. You can be happy that Ellison doesn't play this "good for developers" thing, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander. By promoting software development and Java development specifically, Oracle would be ensuring generations of Java programmers, and lots of Java-related services and licenses from enterprises. If someone without any programming experience learns Java to write code for Dalvik/Android, as they may because Android is a "cool" platform that would attract young programmers, they can and likely will go on to big corporate environments and continue to work in Java.
- pclark 16y ago
  I think Oracle will have considered this, no idea what their long term strat is. I sometimes wonder if Larry cares about long term gains or once he retires he's done.
- avar 16y ago
  I think they've actually got the long term covered. Everyone in The Enterprise (which is all Oracle cares about anyway) is already using Java. Those people want to buy official looking software with support contracts from someone. They're going to be doing so for decades to come, either from Oracle itself, or someone who's paying Oracle truckloads of licensing fees to be allowed to publish their own Java implementation. The only thing that could upset their subscription to money would be some inconvenient little company that decides to make a clean-room Java implementation that could target the same customers. This is what Google has done. If they can win this in court or force a settlement that pretty much guarantees that anyone thinking of building that business model won't even bother to get off the ground, and Oracle can keep printing money. It's funny that you should mention COBOL. Java turning into the next COBOL would be awesome for Oracle. IBM still makes billions selling systems to run COBOL[1], that's more than Sun ever made off Java. 1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567595 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567595
pclark 16y ago
btw, I hope I don't sound like some kind of -- Oracle fanboy (which would be quite ironic considering my comments yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1598533 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1598533) just trying to state that (IMHO) Oracle is a very different beast to Google, MSFT, et all.
barrkel 16y ago
People generally aren't remembered for "winning"; and Google is quite a bit bigger company than Oracle.
- loumf 16y ago
  By what metric? Revenue, profit, cash on hand are all pretty much the same. Market cap is perception and even that isn't quite a bit bigger. Oracle has the advantage of many different revenue streams and long-term contracts. Google has advantages, but head to head -- it's pretty close.
- pclark 16y ago
  I think these kinds of hypothetical battles are less about literal resources (eg: money) and more about leadership and perception. Google: we're nice guys, don't censor china! Oracle: we've been around since 1977. we've been to war before, and we'll win again. Also the fallout could hurt Google far more than Oracle regarding market cap from public perception. I think people entrench enterprise stuff like Oracle as brutal, and Google as fluffy. IMHO.
lsc 16y ago
>Oracle could literally wipe them off the planet if they were inclined. Oracle has a $113B market cap. google has a 155b market cap. granted, both those numbers are large, but Google's is significantly larger. how many google Engineers do you think it would take to build a rdbms that is significantly better than Oracle's product? It's well within Google's capabilities. And yeah, it'd be a patent shitstorm, but it's not like google lacks patents or lawyers. I mean, granted, oracle is primarily a sales company, so simply coming out with something better, for free, won't kill them overnight. But it would significantly hurt them. Could Oracle write a search engine? No. the idea is just silly. so Oracle would be limited to legal maneuvering in their attempt to overcome google. I just don't see it happening.
- pclark 16y ago
  I think you've missed a large factor. The leadership. And who they are. For example, Eric Schmidt is apparently a super nice guy [1] Larry Ellison on the other hand, has cited (I believe, Ghengis Khan?) "It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail" So the leadership is drastically different in terms of how they work. Ellison is marine corp, Schmidt is peace corp. Could Google make a rdbms that is significantly better than Oracle? On paper, sure. But Google isn't doing a great job (yet) at obliterating markets that are entrenched (Sharepoint, Outlook, Exchange, Facebook) so it's unlikely Google has the willing (due to leadership) or management (due to internal reasons, I guess) to crush Oracle. I think if Oracle wanted to squeeze Google, they probably could actually. Google has made more and more enemies over the past few years, and I think if someone such as Ellison stepped in and decided to lead the blood hounds, it could be interesting. Obviously this is all hilarious speculation, but it's pretty interesting. [1]: http://www.slate.com/id/2250704/ http://www.slate.com/id/2250704/
  - lsc 16y ago
    >For example, Eric Schmidt is apparently a super nice guy [1] Larry Ellison on the other hand, has cited (I believe, Ghengis Khan?) "It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail" See, while I think that would make it /much/ harder for a little guy to go up against ellison than agains schmidt, being as oracle is /smaller/ than google, I don't think aggression is enough to tip the scales. the thing is, aggression only helps you if you have the ability to take down your enemy. I don't think Oracle has the ability to threaten google's core revenue generating stuff, search, adwords and adsense. Oracle is an enterprise software company, and google is a consumer software company. Completely different markets. I think either one will do poorly breaking in to the other's market. my point with the rdbms is that there's something relatively simple (well, relatively simple if you have Google's Engineering resources) google could do to hurt oracle. Now, obviously, for it to really hurt Oracle, it'd need to be marketed by companies that can market to the sort of people who spens money on Oracle, e.g., not google. but, if you release something awesome under a loose enough license, that's what happens. Other people will take the tech, relabel it, and start selling it. Look at all the companies that took ZFS and started selling network-attached storage devices. (granted NetApp is now using it's patents in an attempt to stop that sort of thing... like I said, there would be a legal shitstorm... but it is cutting in to NetApps core market.) The interesting thing about just releasing a RDBMS is that it's a not-very aggressive, very nerdy way to get revenge. it doesn't require Schmidt to talk about blood or anything, just releasing some really cool new software. Now, it would be really hard to actually kill oracle, but hurt it a little, in it's core business? yeah, I think Google releasing an open-source, loosely-licensed Oracle-quality and scale RDBMS under a permissive license would slowly do just that. Hell, I've personally watched managers debate Oracle vs MySQL... and many of those debates were close. many more would have ended up on the MySQL side if Oracle didn't have some significant technical and reliability advantages. My understanding is that Google's core business and nearly all their revinue comes from adwords, adsense, and search. My understanding is that everything else is just fucking around- e.g. gmail doesn't make them money (this may be wrong these days, but gmail is certainly small potatoes compared to adwords and adsense.) There's no way Oracle could put a dent in google's dominance in that area. Just like google wouldn't be able to market to enterprises like Oracle does, oracle doesn't know how to sell to consumers, technical barriers aside... and for Oracle, the technical barriers would be enormous. Oracle is used to customers willing to go spend an order of magnitude or two over the cost of commodity disk on storage. In the search market, you have to very carefully write your software so that it can work okay even though it is running on the cheapest and least reliable hardware you can find. (One of my past jobs was dealing with the flaky hardware at one of the larger search clusters.) I guess my main point is that I can see how google could contribute to others chipping away at Oracle's core business... I don't see how Oracle could contribute to anyone chipping away at Google's core business.

by pclark 16y ago

volida 16y ago

The last time I said a business man is not always an entrepreneur I got downvoted to the abyss.

mcantelon 16y ago

If money matters and innovation doesn't the oil industry is likely a better place to be than tech.

pclark 16y ago
It depends how you get said money - by being innovative perhaps.
- mcantelon 16y ago
  Is Oracle innovative compared to Google or Apple?
  - pclark 16y ago
    I meant make lots of money by being innovative, or take the oracle approach, etc.

cookiecaper 16y ago

The thing is, as someone stated below, Oracle is all about short-term wins. If Oracle wins this patent suit against Google and gets lots and lots of damages from it, that's nice, but it'll scare everyone away from Java. That's not good for Oracle or anyone else. If they'd just cool their jets and let things like this slide while focusing on creating great Java-based products and improving the Java ecosystem, they'd have much better long-term prospects. Even Ellison stated that Java is the most important product Oracle has ever acquired, and he's going to kill it in desperation to milk every last cent of licenses that he can get today. If Oracle continues with this kind of ruthlessness, they may squeeze several million out of Google et al, but Java is done for. Nobody will want to use that platform anymore because it will be too risky legally. It'd be a huge opening for .NET and other competitors. Java would go the way of COBOL, only running in the darkest abysses of megacorporations that never modernize. You can be happy that Ellison doesn't play this "good for developers" thing, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander. By promoting software development and Java development specifically, Oracle would be ensuring generations of Java programmers, and lots of Java-related services and licenses from enterprises. If someone without any programming experience learns Java to write code for Dalvik/Android, as they may because Android is a "cool" platform that would attract young programmers, they can and likely will go on to big corporate environments and continue to work in Java.

pclark 16y ago
I think Oracle will have considered this, no idea what their long term strat is. I sometimes wonder if Larry cares about long term gains or once he retires he's done.
avar 16y ago
I think they've actually got the long term covered. Everyone in The Enterprise (which is all Oracle cares about anyway) is already using Java. Those people want to buy official looking software with support contracts from someone. They're going to be doing so for decades to come, either from Oracle itself, or someone who's paying Oracle truckloads of licensing fees to be allowed to publish their own Java implementation. The only thing that could upset their subscription to money would be some inconvenient little company that decides to make a clean-room Java implementation that could target the same customers. This is what Google has done. If they can win this in court or force a settlement that pretty much guarantees that anyone thinking of building that business model won't even bother to get off the ground, and Oracle can keep printing money. It's funny that you should mention COBOL. Java turning into the next COBOL would be awesome for Oracle. IBM still makes billions selling systems to run COBOL[1], that's more than Sun ever made off Java. 1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567595 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567595

pclark 16y ago

btw, I hope I don't sound like some kind of -- Oracle fanboy (which would be quite ironic considering my comments yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1598533 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1598533) just trying to state that (IMHO) Oracle is a very different beast to Google, MSFT, et all.

barrkel 16y ago

People generally aren't remembered for "winning"; and Google is quite a bit bigger company than Oracle.

loumf 16y ago
By what metric? Revenue, profit, cash on hand are all pretty much the same. Market cap is perception and even that isn't quite a bit bigger. Oracle has the advantage of many different revenue streams and long-term contracts. Google has advantages, but head to head -- it's pretty close.
pclark 16y ago
I think these kinds of hypothetical battles are less about literal resources (eg: money) and more about leadership and perception. Google: we're nice guys, don't censor china! Oracle: we've been around since 1977. we've been to war before, and we'll win again. Also the fallout could hurt Google far more than Oracle regarding market cap from public perception. I think people entrench enterprise stuff like Oracle as brutal, and Google as fluffy. IMHO.

lsc 16y ago

>Oracle could literally wipe them off the planet if they were inclined. Oracle has a $113B market cap. google has a 155b market cap. granted, both those numbers are large, but Google's is significantly larger. how many google Engineers do you think it would take to build a rdbms that is significantly better than Oracle's product? It's well within Google's capabilities. And yeah, it'd be a patent shitstorm, but it's not like google lacks patents or lawyers. I mean, granted, oracle is primarily a sales company, so simply coming out with something better, for free, won't kill them overnight. But it would significantly hurt them. Could Oracle write a search engine? No. the idea is just silly. so Oracle would be limited to legal maneuvering in their attempt to overcome google. I just don't see it happening.

pclark 16y ago
I think you've missed a large factor. The leadership. And who they are. For example, Eric Schmidt is apparently a super nice guy [1] Larry Ellison on the other hand, has cited (I believe, Ghengis Khan?) "It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail" So the leadership is drastically different in terms of how they work. Ellison is marine corp, Schmidt is peace corp. Could Google make a rdbms that is significantly better than Oracle? On paper, sure. But Google isn't doing a great job (yet) at obliterating markets that are entrenched (Sharepoint, Outlook, Exchange, Facebook) so it's unlikely Google has the willing (due to leadership) or management (due to internal reasons, I guess) to crush Oracle. I think if Oracle wanted to squeeze Google, they probably could actually. Google has made more and more enemies over the past few years, and I think if someone such as Ellison stepped in and decided to lead the blood hounds, it could be interesting. Obviously this is all hilarious speculation, but it's pretty interesting. [1]: http://www.slate.com/id/2250704/ http://www.slate.com/id/2250704/
- lsc 16y ago
  >For example, Eric Schmidt is apparently a super nice guy [1] Larry Ellison on the other hand, has cited (I believe, Ghengis Khan?) "It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail" See, while I think that would make it /much/ harder for a little guy to go up against ellison than agains schmidt, being as oracle is /smaller/ than google, I don't think aggression is enough to tip the scales. the thing is, aggression only helps you if you have the ability to take down your enemy. I don't think Oracle has the ability to threaten google's core revenue generating stuff, search, adwords and adsense. Oracle is an enterprise software company, and google is a consumer software company. Completely different markets. I think either one will do poorly breaking in to the other's market. my point with the rdbms is that there's something relatively simple (well, relatively simple if you have Google's Engineering resources) google could do to hurt oracle. Now, obviously, for it to really hurt Oracle, it'd need to be marketed by companies that can market to the sort of people who spens money on Oracle, e.g., not google. but, if you release something awesome under a loose enough license, that's what happens. Other people will take the tech, relabel it, and start selling it. Look at all the companies that took ZFS and started selling network-attached storage devices. (granted NetApp is now using it's patents in an attempt to stop that sort of thing... like I said, there would be a legal shitstorm... but it is cutting in to NetApps core market.) The interesting thing about just releasing a RDBMS is that it's a not-very aggressive, very nerdy way to get revenge. it doesn't require Schmidt to talk about blood or anything, just releasing some really cool new software. Now, it would be really hard to actually kill oracle, but hurt it a little, in it's core business? yeah, I think Google releasing an open-source, loosely-licensed Oracle-quality and scale RDBMS under a permissive license would slowly do just that. Hell, I've personally watched managers debate Oracle vs MySQL... and many of those debates were close. many more would have ended up on the MySQL side if Oracle didn't have some significant technical and reliability advantages. My understanding is that Google's core business and nearly all their revinue comes from adwords, adsense, and search. My understanding is that everything else is just fucking around- e.g. gmail doesn't make them money (this may be wrong these days, but gmail is certainly small potatoes compared to adwords and adsense.) There's no way Oracle could put a dent in google's dominance in that area. Just like google wouldn't be able to market to enterprises like Oracle does, oracle doesn't know how to sell to consumers, technical barriers aside... and for Oracle, the technical barriers would be enormous. Oracle is used to customers willing to go spend an order of magnitude or two over the cost of commodity disk on storage. In the search market, you have to very carefully write your software so that it can work okay even though it is running on the cheapest and least reliable hardware you can find. (One of my past jobs was dealing with the flaky hardware at one of the larger search clusters.) I guess my main point is that I can see how google could contribute to others chipping away at Oracle's core business... I don't see how Oracle could contribute to anyone chipping away at Google's core business.