Re: Oracle Open World Exhibition

In article <ddruker-0911961044540001_at_www.algonet.se> ddruker_at_netcom.com (Daniel Druker) writes:
>In article <E0M1DF.Ls5_at_world.std.com>, mew_at_world.std.com (Michael E
>Willett) wrote:
>> I hope someone will be able to post a detailed trip report on
>> this major event, since I was not able to attend myself.

Some brief thoughts:

Many people complained that it had too much marketing hype, and less technical content than the previous years event. Each day started off and concluded with a presentation in a large hall, some of which were pure hype. Good presentations included Scott McNeally ragging on everyone else, and Larry Ellison presenting the Network Computer. The point of the network computer is to be a cheap thin client, so Oracle can make the big bucks with big servers. One device was a telephone/monitor/keyboard, for about $700, which is what many large companies pay for each phone now. They demoed streaming video over ISDN, which was almost acceptable.

There was no abstract or schedule distributed ahead of time, and the one that was distributed had insufficient detail to decide whether a presentation was appropriate. The copy center was way behind on making handouts, although they wound up giving away large numbers of the handouts for free to those willing to suffer through the lines twice (or more).

15,000 attendees, nice book bags, some decent presentations in the expo hall. Sunday night party had excellent food and a decent blues band, Tuesday night had a concert I missed, Wednesday night had '60s and '70s bands (Village People [hey, it's San Francisco!], a Neil Diamond impersonator, Jefferson Starship [the one without Grace Slick], etc.), Thursday was a Hacker's party, with a Beatles impersonation (the Termites?), some disco dancers, good pizza, old video games (Zaxxon! Gorf!), party games like an inflatable "rock-climbing" wall, and hands-on sessions in several rooms. One session was cancelled, so shareware.com immediately got a lot of hits...

They set up Oracle Office on a bunch of terminals, Apple and PC. Of course, there weren't enough, and using netscape as a mail reader really sucked. They had some promotion where you had to "find your twin," which meant match the number on your badge with someone to get a hat. The rules had an ambiguity which made people think they had to find someone with the opposite colors on the badge, so the mail system got totally spammed with "Need number xx with red on the left" messages. I used to not really care about Apples, but now having to use them, I am convinced they suck. Even MS has better email, not mention VMSmail which is how old?

Overall, it was worth it, I'm glad I went. It could definitely use better organization. The IOUG presentations were much better and more useful than the Oracle presentations for the most part, with a split between user week and Oracle World I'd definitely go to the user week. I may revise my opinion when I get around to looking at the proceedings cd and organizing the handouts of the presentations I didn't go to.

I was glad people recognized my name from cdo!

>>
>> Mike Willett
>> Storage Computer
>> http://www.storage.com/
>
>One interesting factoid - by far the top users of the Essbase
>Web Gateway on-line demonstration at http://webgate.arborsoft.com
>last week were network computers from Oracle Openworld. We can tell
>this from the Netscape server log on the web gateway server.
>We got a relatively large number of hits from machines with names like
>nc-XX.nc.oracleworld.com I assume this means that the
>NC folks were looking for something related to real web enabled
>business applications to demonstrate.
>
>Do you think the NC is important or interesting in the world of
>Web-enabled data warehousing / OLAP ?
>
>- Dan
>
>Home: Office:
>Daniel Druker Daniel Druker
>1427 Byron Street Strategic Alliances
>Palo Alto, CA, 94301 Arbor Software Corporation
>ddruker_at_netcom.com 1325 Chesapeake Terrace
> Sunnyvale, CA, 94089
> (408) 727-5800 x4027
> ddruker_at_arborsoft.com

-- 
Joel Garry               joelga_at_rossinc.com               Compuserve 70661,1534
These are my opinions, not necessarily those of Ross Systems, Inc.   <> <>
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