I don't know if this is good or bad or what. But at least it seems like Larry Ellison is someone that will never be intimidated by Elon Musk.
Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
141–150 of 358 posts
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon is a majority shareholder in SpaceX.
>Elon is a majority shareholder in SpaceX. And you think the reason Space-x exists is to make Elon richer? Or you think it's because he wants to see humans colonize the universe? The entirety of Oracle's existence is to make Larry rich. While I think Elon needs to get off twitter and never post another message there again, I think his reasons for founding Space-X and Tesla go far, far beyond personal wealth. There ar…
Yeah, Tesla and SpaceX are most certainly related. They share engineering teams. Tesla gets a big bump in the public’s eye with SpaceX’s accomplishments. People call Teslas “a spaceship for Earth” and there’s zero ambiguity about why that specific comparison is made. It’s pretty much the definition of a mutually beneficial relationship.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
My point is that this doesn't bode well for Tesla. My biggest complaint with Tesla is that they don't provide service manuals or have an open parts department for their vehicles. For comparison, pretty much every other major auto maker will sell you a book telling you how to fix anything on your vehicle, and will sell you the parts and special tools to do so. Not Tesla, and given what we know about Ellison, I very mu…
Apple started the path to normalizing this, and I believe it's core to being responsible for the entire user experience. Personally, I'm not a fan of this, but I understand the motives aside from profit. If a Tesla gets poor maintenance by an unskilled shop, when the vehicle crashes and kills the driver, Tesla gets the black eye and has to defend itself in the media and in front of the NHTSA. Tesla's stock takes the…
> When a Mac crashes, it's because Apple's hardware or software has a bug (something in Apple's control). Apple doesn't have an open ecosystem like th.e PC world.
My only consistent hardware error on a Mac was my 2005 iMac (the 42lb one) when I upgraded the RAM and chose the wrong speed/timing. Genius bar told me to replace it with the stock RAM and it worked fine.
So yeah, upgradability and easy-maintenance can easily lead to problems even with a reasonably knowledgeable consumer or repair shop.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#144Yup, that Larry Ellison. I'm not sure whether this is good news or not.
I think it is not good news. Ellison's preferred business model is to keep everything as opaque as possible, hide technical details away from the customer, obtain security through obscurity, and sic teams of aggressive lawyers on almost anyone and everyone.
And that's before I get into describing the Oracle business model of locking customers into platforms that are nearly impossible to migrate away from.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#145Glad to hear Tesla is adding more women. I truly think women in leadership are a grossly underutilized resource. EDIT: Doubly so women of color. If anyone needs a different perspective, it’s Elon. I hope he listens.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And inertia and lockin is the game. Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs". And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effe…
Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange…
The problem is more sunk cost fallacy than just being a capitalist problem.
There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear if they converted.
I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented.
Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. It’s not surprising at all how emotional and “short” sighted people are being about Ellison because “Oracle sucks”. I despise Oracle as much as the next guy but if I were in Elon’s shoes I’d want Ellison on my board. The car business is tough, really tough. At one point the database business was really tough. Ellison achieved a near monopoly. Despite our views on the quality his software. Tech people were not h…
It seems to me that you just made the argument for the opposition. We know that Ellison was successful in a business that involved selling big contracts to a small number of purchasers spending from a budget of company or taxpayer money. But that's not Tesla's business. Does Ellison know how to sell to individuals spending large amounts of their own money on a product with lots of similar competitors? Maybe? But he d…
I think too much executive decision-making is guesswork based on pattern-matching to prior experience
Well now we’re just tossing back and forth our own biases and hypothesis. I understand your point. It makes sense. Not sure I agree.
The only thing I would add is, cars are big purchases for people. Oracle was a big purchase for CIO’s. Don’t forget for a second that Oracle was sold to a person. Talk to some Oracle sales people about this. I think you’ll find it similar to car sales in many ways.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
That really depends on what your definition of "flourish" is. The United States is really the only country that has "flourished" under a capitalist system and that's only if you define that through the definition of capitalism which is to say that there is more capital in the US than in other nations. Attributing that to capitalism, though, and not to years and years of industrial progress, human slavery, and, arguab…
As per `Homo Sapiens` Slavery was a direct result of capitalism. Humans like all other resource were optimized for maximum o/p and profit, and if not for Hitler to have taken racism to home and to extreme. People may not have seen error in the way. Its how as society we don't rise against treatment of cows in factory farming.
How can slavery be a direct result of capitalism, when the latter appeared thousands of years after the former?
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
My point is that this doesn't bode well for Tesla. My biggest complaint with Tesla is that they don't provide service manuals or have an open parts department for their vehicles. For comparison, pretty much every other major auto maker will sell you a book telling you how to fix anything on your vehicle, and will sell you the parts and special tools to do so. Not Tesla, and given what we know about Ellison, I very mu…
"You have to go to a Tesla Service Center to get your wheels aligned. It costs 10x more than an alignment somewhere else but it's for your own safety. If you go to another shop to get an alignment our software will detect it and void your warranty. Welcome to the future!"
This example is a bad one. In fact, when Tesla's repair system is busy, they'll send you to a standard tire store.
Re: Tesla Adds Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as Board Directors
#150Yay, that settles it. Now I definitely can't afford a Tesla. The car maybe, but the legal team that should go with it, nope. Current owners, make sure you have a lawyer on retainer.