7 ms·

A Story of O(racle)

82 points by bjonathan 16y ago

protomyth 16y ago
> The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business relationship ... The concerns of developers are just not material at the level of that conversation Sadly, this is why Oracle could buy Sun and not the other way around.
- bad_user 16y ago
  Having an engineering culture and fostering developer mindshare ... hasn't been a bad business choice for companies like Google or Apple or Microsoft (at least in their early days). And last time I checked, all 3 companies mentioned are bigger in market cap then Oracle. What strikes me is ... how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different?
  - guelo 16y ago
    > how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different? I'm sure the millions of dollars he got helped him make the decision.
  - TY 16y ago
    To the question of why it was sold to a company with such a vastly different culture. Because it does not matter to the shareholders what kind of culture Oracle has. The only metric that mattered was how much money Oracle was willing to pay for Sun vs another bidder. Using any other criteria would just launch a nasty shareholder lawsuit against Sun's soon to be departed management...
    - maukdaddy 16y ago
      ^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go pubic with an IPO, the shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are elected on behalf of those shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value. If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.
      - jrockway 16y ago
        How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?
        j_baker 16y ago
        Oracle uses a decent amount of Java. It was probably worth it just to control the language's standards and runtime.
        gvb 16y ago
        Recent history suggests for Sun's patents, not their software. Oracle has claimed they bought Sun for their hardware (e.g. so they could do vertical integration selling like IBM), but that remains to be seen if it is true or not.
        ora600 16y ago
        Oracle used Sun's hardware to build the Exadata - which they very aggressively sell as a data warehouse solution. Competing with Netezza, Teradata, Greenplum and the likes.
        maukdaddy 16y ago
        I wasn't claiming that Oracle maximized their shareholder value ;) In fact I'd argue that Oracle simply burned cash.
        eru 16y ago
        And perhaps it was just managers expanding their empire. You know, principal agent problems between managers and shareholders.
        ciupicri 16y ago
        But they still own the brands and for business people it matters. They can also develop various proprietary extensions.
  - chollida1 16y ago
    > What strikes me is ... how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different? What makes you think he had a choice. The CEO isn't the only one, who gets to decide where a company is sold to. Infact his/her vote often counts for very little.
  - brown9-2 16y ago
    "Allow"? In a public company the CEO typically can only recommend to the Board that an acquisition go through. The board can then put it to a shareholder vote. The real question is "why did he recommend it?" and the answer is because the company had no other options if it wanted to survive.
  - quanticle 16y ago
    That's true, but you have to realize that Google, Apple and Microsoft all have to work much harder than Oracle to make their profits. Selling directly to the public is like that. Oracle, on the other hands, sells only to other businesses. At this point, their reputation for being "enterprise grade" is so well established, they could probably sit still for a decade and still retain a fair amount of their customers. I don't think Microsoft, Apple, or Google could say the same for their businesses. Well, maybe Microsoft could, but certainly not the other two.
- narrator 16y ago
  I think Oracle is oriented toward selling to businesses that use technology the way tech startups use office furniture. We don't want to take apart our office furniture and make it work more efficiently, or modify it and resell it to other businesses as part of a breakthrough interior decorating package. We want to sit on it and put our laptops on it and use it to get the other "real" work done. So if you're in the road construction business and you need a HR system or a procurement system or whatever, you call some pricey consultants who call Oracle and you tell your accounting people to explain the problem and ask them how much its going to cost and you tell your IT department and accounting to spec it and do it and you fire them if it's not all done in six months and go back to your real work which is managing your highway building project out in Tallahassee.
  - nkassis 16y ago
    Why do everyone always use Tallahassee as an example of a random town ? (FSU alum ;)) This includes references in LOST, Areosmith songs ... Is it the name?
    - access_denied 16y ago
      It's the first time I heard it. But I wuld do it because the name sounds so funny at the end of a rant.
- DanielRibeiro 16y ago
  Oracle is a watefallish and conservative enterprise product company. The only surprise is that anyone is surprised by what Oracle does and how. "Do no evil" is some other company's motto. That is actually being sued by Oracle.
TrevorBramble 16y ago
Some might miss the significance of the post title: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O
- groaner 16y ago
  Interesting - I first thought of The Wonderful O [1], a children's novel. A wholly different kind of evil there -- the villain would certainly also hate Open sOurce sOftware! [1] http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-O-James-Thurber/dp/1556111894 http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-O-James-Thurber/dp/155611189...
- abeppu 16y ago
  Is there an allusion or metaphor implicit here that I'm not getting?
  - etherael 16y ago
    I'd wager it has something to do with slavery. And I'd wager the development community is not on the dominant side of the analogous relationship.
  - Estragon 16y ago
    Google propaganda suggesting (perhaps fairly) that a developer's relationship with Oracle is unavoidably abusive?
  - TrevorBramble 16y ago
    Bluntly, I assume he's implying it's an appropriate parallel to the relationship between Oracle and its customers, as described in the post. (I may be reading into it too much.)
  - Jun8 16y ago
    On a tangential note, if you think The Story of O is about an abusive relationship, I'd say you haven't read the book or watched the movie: (i) O willingly enters the relationship (ordeal may be a better word here) and (ii) it's not your usual S&M or Belle de Jour story either, because she also gains power over her lover, e.g. see the last scene in the movie. So, the analogy may be more apt than the crude master-slave relationship that people have commented here: many companies willingly choose Oracle, knowing full well its tactics and that they will be locked in.
julius_geezer 16y ago
It has been a while (decade?) since I went to OOW. But as I recall I had no trouble finding technical sessions, if not at a level to engage Tim Bray. Many were about making your database run faster & better; some about using Oracle's favored tools of the moment (BC4J, possibly still some client-server stuff).
rmorrison 16y ago
If you have experience with your startup partnering (or trying to partner) with Oracle, could you please contact me? Particularly, if Oracle added your product to their price lists (or if you were trying to make this happen). Thank you very much.
j_baker 16y ago
Much as I dislike this as a developer, this is a smart business strategy for Oracle. Let's face it: at the companies that use Oracle, the developers aren't the one making the call as to what database to use. That's the call of much higher-ups. About the only solution I can suggest is to avoid working for such companies, but I'm be preaching to the choir to say that.
- jrockway 16y ago
  That's true. The higher-ups can say which database to use and hire a bunch of people to set it up. But if the developers ignore them, they have no way of actually determining this. (Which is what's so great about mandates from Higher Up.)
  - kscaldef 16y ago
    Relying on a conspiracy of the entire technical staff to keep your job seems like a bad idea to me.
    - jrockway 16y ago
      The market is what lets programmers keep their jobs. There aren't enough of them, so they have to settle for what's out there. Might as well make the best of it.
    - CrLf 16y ago
      Sometimes, that conspiracy is what keeps the business running. Whithout it, there would be no jobs. Not that this is the case everywhere and everytime, but if technical decisions were left solely in the hands of people that lack technical skills, the situation would be even worse that it is now, with all the "enterprise software" floating around and causing trouble directly proportional to their cost.
  - euroclydon 16y ago
    I worked at a place that had a huge Oracle RAC license. We ran non-mission-critical data collection apps on it, but the app which dispensed drugs in real-time, all over the world, not only ran Postgres, but 90% of the business logic was in DB functions.
pkaler 16y ago
How is this a bad thing? It's all about building the best applications for your customers. In the enterprise space the customer is other businesses. Apple does essentially the same thing in the consumer space. The user is more important than the developer. This is a good thing. Imagine if airlines treated their relationship with the flier as the most important. Imagine if politicians treated their relationship with constituents as most important.
ora600 16y ago
Maybe I don't understand the concept of "developer mindshare" well enough but it seems to me that Oracle does engage with the user community and not just the business community. They do this through user conferences such as Collaborate and ODTUG (which is developer specific) - those conferences are much more technical in nature than the marketing oriented OpenWorld. Oracle also have the OTN and its ACE program for engaging with the technology people, including forums, beta programs, code sharing site, etc. And of course, Oracle supports the local user groups which are also technology oriented - many of those user groups are highly critical of many Oracle decisions (and you should have heard the noise when Oracle Support site switched to flash) - but Oracle still supports them because they know that an active user community is essential.
- j_baker 16y ago
  Well of course. I don't doubt that Oracle is aware of their developers' existence and gives them some form of support. But how much of Oracle's time and money goes to developer support compared to companies like Microsoft? Much as I dislike Microsoft, I have to give them credit for engaging their developer community.
  - ora600 16y ago
    I'm not sure how to answer that. How do you know how much of Microsoft's time and money goes to developer support? How do you know that Oracle does any less? I don't have any real hard numbers. Microsoft MSDN for developer support and Oracle has OTN. Both companies have developer oriented conferences in addition to business conferences. Both companies employ evangalists that work with startups to help them adopt their technologies. Where do you see the difference?
10ren 16y ago
Sun was a phenomenally successful business - but not at selling software. Software was their way to sell hardware. A few years back, I wanted to buy stock in a software company, because I was in the software business, knew something about it, and owning stock would result in me learning more, which would benefit me doubly. Out of Sun and Adobe, and choose Sun (still love java); but after I placed the order, I realized that Sun wasn't a software company. It didn't draw significant revenue from software. I tried to change the order to Adobe, but it was too late. I sold it years later, for half. I don't regret the loss (it's the stockmarket after all), but I do regret mistaking Sun for a software company.

82 points by bjonathan 16y ago

> The central relationship between Oracle and its customers is a business relationship ... The concerns of developers are just not material at the level of that conversation Sadly, this is why Oracle could buy Sun and not the other way around.

bad_user 16y ago
Having an engineering culture and fostering developer mindshare ... hasn't been a bad business choice for companies like Google or Apple or Microsoft (at least in their early days). And last time I checked, all 3 companies mentioned are bigger in market cap then Oracle. What strikes me is ... how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different?
- guelo 16y ago
  > how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different? I'm sure the millions of dollars he got helped him make the decision.
- TY 16y ago
  To the question of why it was sold to a company with such a vastly different culture. Because it does not matter to the shareholders what kind of culture Oracle has. The only metric that mattered was how much money Oracle was willing to pay for Sun vs another bidder. Using any other criteria would just launch a nasty shareholder lawsuit against Sun's soon to be departed management...
  - maukdaddy 16y ago
    ^ More hackers need to understand this. When you go pubic with an IPO, the shareholders are in charge. The Board and CEO are elected on behalf of those shareholders. The Board and CEO's function is to maximize shareholder value. If a CEO doesn't consider an extremely generous bid then he is breaking his fiduciary duty to those shareholders, and will be out of a job.
    - jrockway 16y ago
      How did Oracle maximize their value by buying Sun? Sun has Solaris, Java, and VirtualBox. All are free. When Oracle took over, everyone that worked for Sun quit. So Oracle paid a lot of money for a bunch of free stuff. Why?
      - j_baker 16y ago
        Oracle uses a decent amount of Java. It was probably worth it just to control the language's standards and runtime.
      - gvb 16y ago
        Recent history suggests for Sun's patents, not their software. Oracle has claimed they bought Sun for their hardware (e.g. so they could do vertical integration selling like IBM), but that remains to be seen if it is true or not.
        ora600 16y ago
        Oracle used Sun's hardware to build the Exadata - which they very aggressively sell as a data warehouse solution. Competing with Netezza, Teradata, Greenplum and the likes.
      - maukdaddy 16y ago
        I wasn't claiming that Oracle maximized their shareholder value ;) In fact I'd argue that Oracle simply burned cash.
        eru 16y ago
        And perhaps it was just managers expanding their empire. You know, principal agent problems between managers and shareholders.
      - ciupicri 16y ago
        But they still own the brands and for business people it matters. They can also develop various proprietary extensions.
- chollida1 16y ago
  > What strikes me is ... how the fuck did Jonathan Schwartz allow the selling of Sun to a company who's culture is so different? What makes you think he had a choice. The CEO isn't the only one, who gets to decide where a company is sold to. Infact his/her vote often counts for very little.
- brown9-2 16y ago
  "Allow"? In a public company the CEO typically can only recommend to the Board that an acquisition go through. The board can then put it to a shareholder vote. The real question is "why did he recommend it?" and the answer is because the company had no other options if it wanted to survive.
- quanticle 16y ago
  That's true, but you have to realize that Google, Apple and Microsoft all have to work much harder than Oracle to make their profits. Selling directly to the public is like that. Oracle, on the other hands, sells only to other businesses. At this point, their reputation for being "enterprise grade" is so well established, they could probably sit still for a decade and still retain a fair amount of their customers. I don't think Microsoft, Apple, or Google could say the same for their businesses. Well, maybe Microsoft could, but certainly not the other two.
narrator 16y ago
I think Oracle is oriented toward selling to businesses that use technology the way tech startups use office furniture. We don't want to take apart our office furniture and make it work more efficiently, or modify it and resell it to other businesses as part of a breakthrough interior decorating package. We want to sit on it and put our laptops on it and use it to get the other "real" work done. So if you're in the road construction business and you need a HR system or a procurement system or whatever, you call some pricey consultants who call Oracle and you tell your accounting people to explain the problem and ask them how much its going to cost and you tell your IT department and accounting to spec it and do it and you fire them if it's not all done in six months and go back to your real work which is managing your highway building project out in Tallahassee.
- nkassis 16y ago
  Why do everyone always use Tallahassee as an example of a random town ? (FSU alum ;)) This includes references in LOST, Areosmith songs ... Is it the name?
  - access_denied 16y ago
    It's the first time I heard it. But I wuld do it because the name sounds so funny at the end of a rant.
DanielRibeiro 16y ago
Oracle is a watefallish and conservative enterprise product company. The only surprise is that anyone is surprised by what Oracle does and how. "Do no evil" is some other company's motto. That is actually being sued by Oracle.

TrevorBramble 16y ago

Some might miss the significance of the post title: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_O

groaner 16y ago
Interesting - I first thought of The Wonderful O [1], a children's novel. A wholly different kind of evil there -- the villain would certainly also hate Open sOurce sOftware! [1] http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-O-James-Thurber/dp/1556111894 http://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-O-James-Thurber/dp/155611189...
abeppu 16y ago
Is there an allusion or metaphor implicit here that I'm not getting?
- etherael 16y ago
  I'd wager it has something to do with slavery. And I'd wager the development community is not on the dominant side of the analogous relationship.
- Estragon 16y ago
  Google propaganda suggesting (perhaps fairly) that a developer's relationship with Oracle is unavoidably abusive?
- TrevorBramble 16y ago
  Bluntly, I assume he's implying it's an appropriate parallel to the relationship between Oracle and its customers, as described in the post. (I may be reading into it too much.)
- Jun8 16y ago
  On a tangential note, if you think The Story of O is about an abusive relationship, I'd say you haven't read the book or watched the movie: (i) O willingly enters the relationship (ordeal may be a better word here) and (ii) it's not your usual S&M or Belle de Jour story either, because she also gains power over her lover, e.g. see the last scene in the movie. So, the analogy may be more apt than the crude master-slave relationship that people have commented here: many companies willingly choose Oracle, knowing full well its tactics and that they will be locked in.

julius_geezer 16y ago

It has been a while (decade?) since I went to OOW. But as I recall I had no trouble finding technical sessions, if not at a level to engage Tim Bray. Many were about making your database run faster & better; some about using Oracle's favored tools of the moment (BC4J, possibly still some client-server stuff).

rmorrison 16y ago

If you have experience with your startup partnering (or trying to partner) with Oracle, could you please contact me? Particularly, if Oracle added your product to their price lists (or if you were trying to make this happen). Thank you very much.

j_baker 16y ago

Much as I dislike this as a developer, this is a smart business strategy for Oracle. Let's face it: at the companies that use Oracle, the developers aren't the one making the call as to what database to use. That's the call of much higher-ups. About the only solution I can suggest is to avoid working for such companies, but I'm be preaching to the choir to say that.

jrockway 16y ago
That's true. The higher-ups can say which database to use and hire a bunch of people to set it up. But if the developers ignore them, they have no way of actually determining this. (Which is what's so great about mandates from Higher Up.)
- kscaldef 16y ago
  Relying on a conspiracy of the entire technical staff to keep your job seems like a bad idea to me.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    The market is what lets programmers keep their jobs. There aren't enough of them, so they have to settle for what's out there. Might as well make the best of it.
  - CrLf 16y ago
    Sometimes, that conspiracy is what keeps the business running. Whithout it, there would be no jobs. Not that this is the case everywhere and everytime, but if technical decisions were left solely in the hands of people that lack technical skills, the situation would be even worse that it is now, with all the "enterprise software" floating around and causing trouble directly proportional to their cost.
- euroclydon 16y ago
  I worked at a place that had a huge Oracle RAC license. We ran non-mission-critical data collection apps on it, but the app which dispensed drugs in real-time, all over the world, not only ran Postgres, but 90% of the business logic was in DB functions.

pkaler 16y ago

How is this a bad thing? It's all about building the best applications for your customers. In the enterprise space the customer is other businesses. Apple does essentially the same thing in the consumer space. The user is more important than the developer. This is a good thing. Imagine if airlines treated their relationship with the flier as the most important. Imagine if politicians treated their relationship with constituents as most important.

ora600 16y ago

Maybe I don't understand the concept of "developer mindshare" well enough but it seems to me that Oracle does engage with the user community and not just the business community. They do this through user conferences such as Collaborate and ODTUG (which is developer specific) - those conferences are much more technical in nature than the marketing oriented OpenWorld. Oracle also have the OTN and its ACE program for engaging with the technology people, including forums, beta programs, code sharing site, etc. And of course, Oracle supports the local user groups which are also technology oriented - many of those user groups are highly critical of many Oracle decisions (and you should have heard the noise when Oracle Support site switched to flash) - but Oracle still supports them because they know that an active user community is essential.

j_baker 16y ago
Well of course. I don't doubt that Oracle is aware of their developers' existence and gives them some form of support. But how much of Oracle's time and money goes to developer support compared to companies like Microsoft? Much as I dislike Microsoft, I have to give them credit for engaging their developer community.
- ora600 16y ago
  I'm not sure how to answer that. How do you know how much of Microsoft's time and money goes to developer support? How do you know that Oracle does any less? I don't have any real hard numbers. Microsoft MSDN for developer support and Oracle has OTN. Both companies have developer oriented conferences in addition to business conferences. Both companies employ evangalists that work with startups to help them adopt their technologies. Where do you see the difference?

10ren 16y ago

Sun was a phenomenally successful business - but not at selling software. Software was their way to sell hardware. A few years back, I wanted to buy stock in a software company, because I was in the software business, knew something about it, and owning stock would result in me learning more, which would benefit me doubly. Out of Sun and Adobe, and choose Sun (still love java); but after I placed the order, I realized that Sun wasn't a software company. It didn't draw significant revenue from software. I tried to change the order to Adobe, but it was too late. I sold it years later, for half. I don't regret the loss (it's the stockmarket after all), but I do regret mistaking Sun for a software company.