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Imagine trying to compete with Microsoft Office (Oracle DB, etc) and adopting this approach out of neccesity, only to discover that the original thing has suppo
by thriftwy 4y ago
Imagine trying to compete with Microsoft Office (Oracle DB, etc) and adopting this approach out of neccesity, only to discover that the original thing has support for all the edge cases in the book, and some of these which weren't even in your book.
Yes, the original product may be bloated / not pretty, but once paying users discover you don't support an obscure edge case they depend on, they'll stop showing up.
- 082349872349872 4y agoOracle is actually a great counterexample. When they started out, they lost the db data frequently, and the IBM folk laughed, wondering how they expected to compete when they weren't even Durable. It turns out Larry started by selling to people doing what would now be called "Business Intelligence", and for them Durable wasn't a necessity, it was just an edge case (they were always side-loading from production anyway). Oracle then used the profits from this beachhead to fix their durability issues before they started selling into segments that expected their databases to, you know, keep data.
- teddyh 4y agoThe purchase of MySQL by Oracle makes a lot of sense in this light.
- thriftwy 4y agoA lot of upstart database vendors do that right now - selling to BI/OLAP because they're not stable enough for prime time. I didn't know that Oracle itself did exactly that, thanks. But I'm talking about the days of mature Oracle.