Re: Microsoft meets the Oracle challenge?

In article <36EFFFB0.8F65DB25_at_hershey.com>, Eddie Mars <mars_at_hershey.com> wrote:
>Eddie Mars wrote:
>>
>> Is it true? Or just more of the same you-know-what?
>>
>> http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/990316/wa_msft_sq_1.html
>
>FWIW, Oracle has a different take...
>
>http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990317S0002
>
>...he said, she said.

If you read the MS press release carefully, it appears that all they did was simply to build a 1-Terabyte db. This is no big deal - you just need big enough disks. Nothing was said about performance, which is the key issue. Read carefully - "performance" appears in the title of the press release, but not in the body.

So, it appears they falsely claimed to have met Oracle's published challenge, which includes a performance benchmark. This might mislead potential customers into thinking that MS's system is in the same league as Oracle's (or even worse, the converse :). It seems to me Oracle may have been potentially harmed by libelous remarks. It will be interesting to see what Oracle does about this.

(There is also the fact that MS claimed to have met the challenge when in fact the closing date for the challenge had already elapsed. This is a minor point, but it does reinforce my general feeling that it's hard to trust anything MS says. I mean, what they said was a lie, right?)

--Norm Received on Fri Mar 19 1999 - 00:00:00 CET