4 ms·

Larry Ellison Still Hates "Cloud Computing Nonsense" (Video)

40 points by edw519 17y ago

gizmo 17y ago
When there's free publicity in giving old tech a new label, then of course companies are going to take advantage of that. Suppose you're a CEO and some interviewer asks you if you will move your software to the cloud, or interface with the cloud you pretty much have to advocate you have big plans for the cloud (even when it's nothing substantial) or you'll be put on the defensive. Since you can't persuade interviewers or the general public that cloud computing is meaningless for your business (if you already do SaS), it's a no win situation. That said, I do think that cloud computing is innovation, in the sense that you can no longer point to an individual server and say "my software runs on that machine". We're now in an environment where -nobody- knows where your software is, and yet it still works. Cloud computing is way overhyped and suitable for relatively few situations, but there is some innovation here.
nobody_nowhere 17y ago
Oh for the love of god, Larry, shut your smug mouth. It's so easy to sit back on your mega yacht and dismiss cloud as something that's always been around and always will be and blah blah blah, but for a little startup it's MANA FROM HEAVEN. To be able to do massively compute intensive or storage intensive tasks on demand without sinking a million dollars of capital into a datacenter is the difference between success and failure for my little startup. How many times have you heard "oh, there's a ten week lead time on that server" or "there's no more power in the cage" or "there are no more cages at the datacenter" or "i'll be up all night recovering the raid array" or any number of other hidden costs in owning or trying to own hardware? We check our cost projections for buy vs cloud almost every week, and when the time comes we'll definitely buy, but for we couldn't be doing what we're doing without it. Sure it's overhyped, but so was the fucking web. Yes, there's weird performance stuff and not always enough boxes, but so what? Sorry if I'm missing a subtler message he had, but i had to turn off the video after about 30s because it hurt my brain.
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  Amen. For my little start-up in London to be able to unleash the computing power available on AWS has been amazing. We essentially buy desktop machines for the engineers and outsource everything else. All our critical business apps are on Google and we can test and scale our software on AWS. It's funny because the last company I founded (Electric Cloud) was specifically doing distributed computing stuff and we had to buy and install tons of servers just to be able to test our code. Today, founding that company would be totally different... we'd probably buy a few servers for some in house testing of key performance critical elements and then give our credit card to Amazon and buy what we needed as we needed it.
  - nobody_nowhere 17y ago
    The combination of (for example) cloud + Hadoop is a giant slayer. So maybe he feels threatened. But the irony is that EMC, Larry's recent purchase, is making money hand over fist from cloud as it ramps up.
    - jgrahamc 17y ago
      I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs. However, the idea of moving code near to the data is a good one since moving data tends to be the slow part. But that's hardly a new concept, just look at Teradata.
      - nobody_nowhere 17y ago
        Just an example of something which benefits from inexpensive computing scale. Pretty narrow applicability. But it seems like there are plenty of other problems which also benefit.
      - stingraycharles 17y ago
        I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs. You say that as if MapReduce is the only thing you can do with Hadoop. It has a key/value datastore too, and since recently a relational database: http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html
jacquesm 17y ago
If your main business consists of selling very expensive licenses on a per-node or per-cpu basis of a relational database then it makes perfect sense to speak these words. That doesn't make them true though. The cloud is a real game changer, even though we are still working out exactly what it will do for us and how to deal with lots of issues (privacy, responsibility, reliability) it's got the established software businesses that came to power in the 80's and 90's quaking in their boots. This will change the landscape of computing more than anything since '95, but it isn't going to happen overnight. For every CTO that holds off a little longer based on Ellisons words the cash registers may ring one more time. Key-value storage engines combined with cloud facilities go right at the heart of Oracles core business. What else is he supposed to say ?
- jgrahamc 17y ago
  Key-value storage engines combined with cloud facilities go right at the heart of Oracles core business. Really? It seems to me that key-value systems are more of a problem for MySQL databases than Oracle ones. Pop quiz: how many people implementing key-value storage ever seriously considered buying an Oracle database? I'm guessing very few. I think what Ellison is saying is that cloud computing is nothing new. It's just a new name for distributed computing and we've had that for years. In fact, if you go back far enough we had SaaS on time-sharing systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    They haven't considered buying an Oracle database when they're small, but when they grow now they don't have to either. And bigger players are looking at switching from their expensive-software-on-big-iron to the cloud as well, and as a consequence will evaluate key-value storage systems vs rdbms, and some of them will switch.
    - jgrahamc 17y ago
      What I'm arguing is that the trade off is key-value vs. MySQL for small companies. They pick their path at that point. If you go with RDBMS then you might end up at Oracle at some point. If you go with key-value then I guess you stay there. If you've gone with key-value it's because you've decided that you don't need RDBMS features.
dpapathanasiou 17y ago
How is the "cloud" any different from the "net" (as in Net Computer, or NC), which he promoted so heavily in the mid nineties? "That magic part would connect the Network Computer to the Net. There would only be rudimentary software and memory on the Network Computer. Most software and serious memory would be out there on the Net where it could be easily maintained. The system would run on Java and use Oracle databases. Microsoft software would be nowhere in sight." http://www.mondaymemo.net/031103feature.htm http://www.mondaymemo.net/031103feature.htm
- gamache 17y ago
  Ha, you just said it: The system would run on Java and use Oracle databases.
- SamAtt 17y ago
  I think that's the point he's trying to make. He's basically just saying "buzz words suck" and then riffing on the term Cloud Computing for a few minutes. It only seems contradictory because Techcrunch framed it as commentary on cloud computing rather than the silly joking around it's supposed to be. In fact, Techcrunch actually misquotes him. The Techcrunch article opens with "According to Larry Ellison, it’s nonsense and water vapor" when in fact what Ellison says is "[The Cloud] is NOT water vapor" (the point he was making is that the cloud is just actual computers on the other side of a network not "a cloud" which is where water vapor comes in)
- wmf 17y ago
  The cloud mostly works, while NCs never did.
ynniv 17y ago
Please correct this title - Ellison clearly states that he hates the term "cloud computing", not the idea of virtualized services.
- sammcd 17y ago
  Yes, I agree with you here, and I agree with him. When the term web 2.0 came out I hated it. It was just a description for what I was already doing. Similarly I didn't like the term cloud computing at first. However the thing I have missed is that these terms are useful to explain to users what I am doing. If this is the case then these terms have value.
  - ynniv 17y ago
    If you watch the video (which is pretty funny, and rather intelligent), his exasperation comes from the popular insistence that "cloud computing" is a new paradigm, and that businesses that don't use "the cloud" will die. To somewhat paraphrase him: "All a cloud is, is computers and network (in terms of technology). In terms of business model, you could say that its rental." Most of computing industry will remain unchanged, except maybe Dell's small business market, some of Microsoft's licensing revenue, and lots of desktop software that would be more productive as a network service.
tybris 17y ago
To me, Cloud stands for 'a service of which you don't know how it works'. People have been drawing the Internet as a cloud for many, many years. No one knows how his packet actually gets delivered and that's what makes it so powerful. Even this simple piece of text goes through an intricate combination of radio waves, copper and fiber criss-cross through the world. but... I don't have to worry about any of it! All I have is this dead simple IP interface to my NIC (or URL interface to my browser) and I don't have to worry about whatever kind of nasty stuff goes on behind it. That is the most powerful idea in the history of information technology. Cloud Computing is simply applying the principle to computing infrastructure. I don't know how EC2 works, I don't know where they get their machines, I don't know where they get their power, I don't know where they put my instances, I don't know who's managing the cabling, ... and I'm a happier man because of it.
- kingsley_20 17y ago
  I would change that to 'a service of which you don't care how it works.'
kingsley_20 17y ago
Hype aside, there's no denying that the number of business offering and consuming services built on the cloud model have increased dramatically recently. But no, instead of debating what the new services, platforms and business models are going to actually mean to the industry, let's quibble about the terms people are hyping for it. Well played, Mr. Ellison.

40 points by edw519 17y ago

gizmo 17y ago

When there's free publicity in giving old tech a new label, then of course companies are going to take advantage of that. Suppose you're a CEO and some interviewer asks you if you will move your software to the cloud, or interface with the cloud you pretty much have to advocate you have big plans for the cloud (even when it's nothing substantial) or you'll be put on the defensive. Since you can't persuade interviewers or the general public that cloud computing is meaningless for your business (if you already do SaS), it's a no win situation. That said, I do think that cloud computing is innovation, in the sense that you can no longer point to an individual server and say "my software runs on that machine". We're now in an environment where -nobody- knows where your software is, and yet it still works. Cloud computing is way overhyped and suitable for relatively few situations, but there is some innovation here.

nobody_nowhere 17y ago

Oh for the love of god, Larry, shut your smug mouth. It's so easy to sit back on your mega yacht and dismiss cloud as something that's always been around and always will be and blah blah blah, but for a little startup it's MANA FROM HEAVEN. To be able to do massively compute intensive or storage intensive tasks on demand without sinking a million dollars of capital into a datacenter is the difference between success and failure for my little startup. How many times have you heard "oh, there's a ten week lead time on that server" or "there's no more power in the cage" or "there are no more cages at the datacenter" or "i'll be up all night recovering the raid array" or any number of other hidden costs in owning or trying to own hardware? We check our cost projections for buy vs cloud almost every week, and when the time comes we'll definitely buy, but for we couldn't be doing what we're doing without it. Sure it's overhyped, but so was the fucking web. Yes, there's weird performance stuff and not always enough boxes, but so what? Sorry if I'm missing a subtler message he had, but i had to turn off the video after about 30s because it hurt my brain.

jgrahamc 17y ago
Amen. For my little start-up in London to be able to unleash the computing power available on AWS has been amazing. We essentially buy desktop machines for the engineers and outsource everything else. All our critical business apps are on Google and we can test and scale our software on AWS. It's funny because the last company I founded (Electric Cloud) was specifically doing distributed computing stuff and we had to buy and install tons of servers just to be able to test our code. Today, founding that company would be totally different... we'd probably buy a few servers for some in house testing of key performance critical elements and then give our credit card to Amazon and buy what we needed as we needed it.
- nobody_nowhere 17y ago
  The combination of (for example) cloud + Hadoop is a giant slayer. So maybe he feels threatened. But the irony is that EMC, Larry's recent purchase, is making money hand over fist from cloud as it ramps up.
  - jgrahamc 17y ago
    I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs. However, the idea of moving code near to the data is a good one since moving data tends to be the slow part. But that's hardly a new concept, just look at Teradata.
    - nobody_nowhere 17y ago
      Just an example of something which benefits from inexpensive computing scale. Pretty narrow applicability. But it seems like there are plenty of other problems which also benefit.
    - stingraycharles 17y ago
      I don't really agree about Hadoop. MapReduce is interesting for some applications but it's not the only thing out there. We did extensive analysis of MapReduce at my new company and it clearly wasn't suitable for our needs. You say that as if MapReduce is the only thing you can do with Hadoop. It has a key/value datastore too, and since recently a relational database: http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html http://db.cs.yale.edu/hadoopdb/hadoopdb.html

jacquesm 17y ago

If your main business consists of selling very expensive licenses on a per-node or per-cpu basis of a relational database then it makes perfect sense to speak these words. That doesn't make them true though. The cloud is a real game changer, even though we are still working out exactly what it will do for us and how to deal with lots of issues (privacy, responsibility, reliability) it's got the established software businesses that came to power in the 80's and 90's quaking in their boots. This will change the landscape of computing more than anything since '95, but it isn't going to happen overnight. For every CTO that holds off a little longer based on Ellisons words the cash registers may ring one more time. Key-value storage engines combined with cloud facilities go right at the heart of Oracles core business. What else is he supposed to say ?

jgrahamc 17y ago
Key-value storage engines combined with cloud facilities go right at the heart of Oracles core business. Really? It seems to me that key-value systems are more of a problem for MySQL databases than Oracle ones. Pop quiz: how many people implementing key-value storage ever seriously considered buying an Oracle database? I'm guessing very few. I think what Ellison is saying is that cloud computing is nothing new. It's just a new name for distributed computing and we've had that for years. In fact, if you go back far enough we had SaaS on time-sharing systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing
- jacquesm 17y ago
  They haven't considered buying an Oracle database when they're small, but when they grow now they don't have to either. And bigger players are looking at switching from their expensive-software-on-big-iron to the cloud as well, and as a consequence will evaluate key-value storage systems vs rdbms, and some of them will switch.
  - jgrahamc 17y ago
    What I'm arguing is that the trade off is key-value vs. MySQL for small companies. They pick their path at that point. If you go with RDBMS then you might end up at Oracle at some point. If you go with key-value then I guess you stay there. If you've gone with key-value it's because you've decided that you don't need RDBMS features.

dpapathanasiou 17y ago

How is the "cloud" any different from the "net" (as in Net Computer, or NC), which he promoted so heavily in the mid nineties? "That magic part would connect the Network Computer to the Net. There would only be rudimentary software and memory on the Network Computer. Most software and serious memory would be out there on the Net where it could be easily maintained. The system would run on Java and use Oracle databases. Microsoft software would be nowhere in sight." http://www.mondaymemo.net/031103feature.htm http://www.mondaymemo.net/031103feature.htm

gamache 17y ago
Ha, you just said it: The system would run on Java and use Oracle databases.
SamAtt 17y ago
I think that's the point he's trying to make. He's basically just saying "buzz words suck" and then riffing on the term Cloud Computing for a few minutes. It only seems contradictory because Techcrunch framed it as commentary on cloud computing rather than the silly joking around it's supposed to be. In fact, Techcrunch actually misquotes him. The Techcrunch article opens with "According to Larry Ellison, it’s nonsense and water vapor" when in fact what Ellison says is "[The Cloud] is NOT water vapor" (the point he was making is that the cloud is just actual computers on the other side of a network not "a cloud" which is where water vapor comes in)
wmf 17y ago
The cloud mostly works, while NCs never did.

ynniv 17y ago

Please correct this title - Ellison clearly states that he hates the term "cloud computing", not the idea of virtualized services.

sammcd 17y ago
Yes, I agree with you here, and I agree with him. When the term web 2.0 came out I hated it. It was just a description for what I was already doing. Similarly I didn't like the term cloud computing at first. However the thing I have missed is that these terms are useful to explain to users what I am doing. If this is the case then these terms have value.
- ynniv 17y ago
  If you watch the video (which is pretty funny, and rather intelligent), his exasperation comes from the popular insistence that "cloud computing" is a new paradigm, and that businesses that don't use "the cloud" will die. To somewhat paraphrase him: "All a cloud is, is computers and network (in terms of technology). In terms of business model, you could say that its rental." Most of computing industry will remain unchanged, except maybe Dell's small business market, some of Microsoft's licensing revenue, and lots of desktop software that would be more productive as a network service.

tybris 17y ago

To me, Cloud stands for 'a service of which you don't know how it works'. People have been drawing the Internet as a cloud for many, many years. No one knows how his packet actually gets delivered and that's what makes it so powerful. Even this simple piece of text goes through an intricate combination of radio waves, copper and fiber criss-cross through the world. but... I don't have to worry about any of it! All I have is this dead simple IP interface to my NIC (or URL interface to my browser) and I don't have to worry about whatever kind of nasty stuff goes on behind it. That is the most powerful idea in the history of information technology. Cloud Computing is simply applying the principle to computing infrastructure. I don't know how EC2 works, I don't know where they get their machines, I don't know where they get their power, I don't know where they put my instances, I don't know who's managing the cabling, ... and I'm a happier man because of it.

kingsley_20 17y ago
I would change that to 'a service of which you don't care how it works.'

kingsley_20 17y ago

Hype aside, there's no denying that the number of business offering and consuming services built on the cloud model have increased dramatically recently. But no, instead of debating what the new services, platforms and business models are going to actually mean to the industry, let's quibble about the terms people are hyping for it. Well played, Mr. Ellison.