In their last quarter Oracle made $8.1 billion in revenue on software. My experience when I run across Oracle software is not one of amazement, elegance, or being impressed. I am more impressed by things I see on Hacker News or in the open source software area. It is almost like there is an arbitrage opportunity to bring the cunning and smarts of the hn/oss to the world of stodgy but lucrative business software. So I ask you, hacker newsers, if you were going to take on one Oracle software segment which would it be? (Some segments include: Fusion Middleware; PeopleSoft, Hyperion, or other Applications; CRM; Enterprise Management). How would you do things differently than Oracle? Corollary question: If Oracle is throwing out $1billion to acquire companies like ATG should we be encouraging each other to build more enterprise-y software as opposed to the next twitter client?
Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
#2Corollary question: If Oracle is throwing out $1billion to acquire companies like ATG should we be encouraging each other to build more enterprise-y software as opposed to the next twitter client?
No, don't be silly. The last thing the world needs is more startups producing enterprise software. The future is Social Media and real-time geo-located, location-aware activity-stream checkins with gamification and photo-sharing, plus Q+A, and a AJAX enabled TODO list. So, yeah, everybody should be working on building something like that, not enterprise crap.
/me whistles quietly to himself, and goes back to building enterprise software that he can sell for money, secure in the knowledge that the threat of additional competitors has now been abated.
Re: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
#3I'm going to quote a Paul Graham quote that I came across in another item (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423054) just a few minutes ago:
> The "next Google" is unlikely to be a search engine, however, just as the "next Microsoft" was not a desktop software company. I used competing directly with Google as an example of a problem with maximum difficulty, not maximum payoff. Maximum payoff is more likely to come from making Google irrelevant than from replacing it. How exactly? I have no more than vague ideas about that. I wouldn't expect to be able to figure out the right answer, just as I wouldn't have expected anyone to figure out in 1990 what would make Microsoft irrelevant.
Don't try to take on Oracle, try to make Oracle irrelevant. Or make the million features their huge, enterprisey systems have irrelevant. Joel Spolsky wrote an essay years ago where he argued that software has to either be cheaper than $500 (the amount a manager can put on their corporate card) or more expensive than $25,000 or so (the amount you must charge if you need to wine and dine and buy lap dances for potential customers).
Do you want to hire a salesforce (and raise the money to pay them) to give blowjobs to IT directors? No, I didn't think so.
Re: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
#4Corollary question: If Oracle is throwing out $1billion to acquire companies like ATG should we be encouraging each other to build more enterprise-y software as opposed to the next twitter client? No, don't be silly. The last thing the world needs is more startups producing enterprise software. The future is Social Media and real-time geo-located, location-aware activity-stream checkins with gamification and photo-sh…
yeah the future is social media....good luck
Re: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
#5I'm going to quote a Paul Graham quote that I came across in another item ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423054 ) just a few minutes ago: > The "next Google" is unlikely to be a search engine, however, just as the "next Microsoft" was not a desktop software company. I used competing directly with Google as an example of a problem with maximum difficulty, not maximum payoff. Maximum payoff is more likely to co…
I think people should use software like oracle and look and read (some of) its enormous amount of documentation to understand what it can do BEFORE saying it is shit.
Oracle is a very very very good database. Stop with this non sense
Re: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
#6I'm going to quote a Paul Graham quote that I came across in another item ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423054 ) just a few minutes ago: > The "next Google" is unlikely to be a search engine, however, just as the "next Microsoft" was not a desktop software company. I used competing directly with Google as an example of a problem with maximum difficulty, not maximum payoff. Maximum payoff is more likely to co…
I think people should use software like oracle and look and read (some of) its enormous amount of documentation to understand what it can do BEFORE saying it is shit. Oracle is a very very very good database. Stop with this non sense
I'm sure some parts of Oracle's database are very good. The part I work with (OLAP), though, is ludicrously bad. New bugs are introduced with almost every database patch, and the behavior of existing functions have changed without notice. For this privilege, Oracle charges license fees by the core.
Re: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
#7Oracle doesn't sell software. Oracle sells suits with warm fuzzy feelings.
Re: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
#8I'm going to quote a Paul Graham quote that I came across in another item ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423054 ) just a few minutes ago: > The "next Google" is unlikely to be a search engine, however, just as the "next Microsoft" was not a desktop software company. I used competing directly with Google as an example of a problem with maximum difficulty, not maximum payoff. Maximum payoff is more likely to co…
I think people should use software like oracle and look and read (some of) its enormous amount of documentation to understand what it can do BEFORE saying it is shit. Oracle is a very very very good database. Stop with this non sense
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
#9I'm going to quote a Paul Graham quote that I came across in another item ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423054 ) just a few minutes ago: > The "next Google" is unlikely to be a search engine, however, just as the "next Microsoft" was not a desktop software company. I used competing directly with Google as an example of a problem with maximum difficulty, not maximum payoff. Maximum payoff is more likely to co…
I think people should use software like oracle and look and read (some of) its enormous amount of documentation to understand what it can do BEFORE saying it is shit. Oracle is a very very very good database. Stop with this non sense
I wasn't thinking about Oracle-the-database but all the other stuff they sell that makes huge, faceless corporations go. No YC-style company is in a position to take on Oracle toe-to-toe, in the lapdance-and-BJ market. The only option is some sort of incremental disruption where a product takes market share from Oracle at the low end, where Oracle is probably happy to see these not-very-valuable customers desert them. (This is straight from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma.)
And for the record, I programmed against Oracle using oraperl back in 1994.
Re: Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?
#10Corollary question: If Oracle is throwing out $1billion to acquire companies like ATG should we be encouraging each other to build more enterprise-y software as opposed to the next twitter client? No, don't be silly. The last thing the world needs is more startups producing enterprise software. The future is Social Media and real-time geo-located, location-aware activity-stream checkins with gamification and photo-sh…
yeah the future is social media....good luck
Good luck not reading things thoroughly.