Re: Linux taking over at Oracle

I am afraid we have seen too many 'flavour-of-the-month' fads already. I fear that Larry is about as clueless as I am about the immediate future of IT and Oracle's 'strategy' has more or less been a succession of more or less well inspired tactical moves. I have known Oracle when distribution of everything was all the rage. Concerning Jonathan's reference to the email servers, I remember having read some years ago in a plane in a non-IT paper (FT or Wall Street Journal, can't remember) a longish interview of Larry where he was bragging about his being an engineer, his conviction that it was doable and how he had imposed his will (big effort, when you know how slavish some may be at Oracle :-)), especially against Oracle Singapore, and, if I remember well, Oracle Canada. A few months later, electricians working in Redwood Shores to make electricity supplies redundant or something similar goofed (not the exclusivity of DBAs) and as a result THE WHOLE OF ORACLE, WORLDWIDE, HAD NO E-MAIL FOR TWO DAYS. Note that when it's deep night in California some people at Oracle do not seem to understand that in Asia everybody is working, and in Europe too. It must have been an enormous roar of laughter in Singapore and in Canada. The problem with centralised systems is that there is another company, which I do not understand why it is feared so much by Oracle if their systems really are as slow as the Oracle ads pretend, which has been doing it already for about 40 years, and it doing it rather well.
Concerning the hardware, same story. Historically Oracle was first developed on PDPs, then moved to VAXes. In the mid 1980s development was supposed to be done on Sun boxes, however, strangely, the VMS port still was the first to be available. There has been a time when we heard a lot about N-Cube (remember?), of which Larry was a big shareholder, then about Sequent (ditto). Then it looked like honeymoon with Sun, till the climate deteriorated amongst accusations of unfairness (for what I have heard, Oracle was a bigger customer of Sun than the reverse). Oracle fell for HP. Given the current row about the Compaq takeover, I am not surprised that it has cooled. Larry must wait for Ms Fiorina's head to roll in the sand. It's terrible how much what is usually presented as 'vision', 'strategy' etc. is often hardly more than personal inimities (Bill Gates being to many CEOs what the Taleban were to Afghan warlords) and opportunistic alliances.

My 0.02 euros.

S Faroult

"Deshpande, Kirti" wrote:
>
> Ah!! But 5 years down the road, Larry's Oracle database may not need any
> administration at all. You may just buy the pre-fabricated "OraLintel"
> gadget from him that runs your apps... :-))
> Seriously, he me getting in position to fight the IBM Linux Mainframe
> running DB2(IBM announced the Linux MF not too long ago) and claim/prove(?)
> Oracle+Linux+Intel runs much faster than IBM's Linux mainframe..
>
> - Kirti
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 8:35 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
> Interesting news. Makes me wonder though. Remember when
> Oracle moved to support client-server computing? Now Larry
> derides client-server and distributed computing saying
> that it's cheaper to have just one big system. How many
> times have you heard Larry talk about how Oracle's
> consolidated their email servers? Makes me wonder whether
> five years down the road Larry will be telling us that it's
> "silly to run a database on 50 cheap boxes" because it's
> much easier to administer one big one.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Jonathan Gennick
> mailto:jonathan_at_gennick.com * 906.387.1698
> http://Gennick.com * http://MichiganWaterfalls.com * http://ValleySpur.com
>
> Thursday, January 31, 2002, 2:36:21 PM, you wrote:
> AMG0> Ellison says Oracle's 'whole business' to run on Linux
>
> AMG0> The Oracle chairman and CEO said the company will replace three Unix
> AMG0> servers
> AMG0> that run the bulk of its business applications with a cluster of Intel
> AMG0> Corp.
> AMG0> servers running Linux.

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Author: Stephane Faroult
  INET: sfaroult_at_oriole.com

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