

Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle? - goodwinb

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?
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mindcrime
_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?_

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.

~~~
goodwinb
I'd like to hear more your experiences about breaking into the enterprise
world and selling your knowledge management software.

~~~
mindcrime
Me too. :-)

All joking aside, I'm still VERY early in this process... I'm in what Steve
Blank would call "Customer Discovery," so I don't have a lot to talk about
yet. But as I get more into it, and when I have some time, I'll be blogging
and writing about my experiences.

------
edw
I'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.

~~~
zooey
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

~~~
edw
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.

------
imechura
Breaking into the enterprise market has it's own difficulties as I am sure you
are already aware of. Having been directly and indirectly involved in several
large IT software purchases I can tell you that more often than not, large
purchases/contracts are not made based on features and/or price. They are made
3 levels above you by personal relationships.

That is why you have huge IT shops wasting countless hours dealing with
clearcase UCM inadequacies when there are comparable and even better options
available for free or cheap.

At the time of purchase the argument given is that the staff required to
administer the free software will cost more than the license and support
contract but in the end you still end up hiring a full time staff of 14 to
manage that clearcase system and blame issues on the hardware.

In the case you can break through the gold-ol-boy sales process with your
revolutionary product the cycle for a product costing as little as 20k can be
upwards of 18 months and if it is terminated at the zero hour you have
literally wasted hundred of man hours chasing a deal that you will not be
getting paid for.

To answer the original question, If I where to take on oracle or attempt to
make them irrelevant I would be Atlassian software (JIRA/Confluence/etc.).
While they are not offering competing products to oracle or IBM they do have
the ability to work from the developer upwards to find there way into even the
largest enterprises.

------
pclark
Often having a large sales team (and operations in general) is as challenging
as the technical hurdles, if not harder.

------
ahi
Oracle doesn't sell software. Oracle sells suits with warm fuzzy feelings.

