
Larry Ellison's Brilliant Anti-Cloud Computing Rant - raghus
http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/09/25/larry-ellisons-brilliant-anti-cloud-computing-rant/
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dmix
This is just part of Larry Ellison's talk about cloud computing, it was made
to keep shareholders happy by downplaying the hype for cloud computing, it's
not about the technology itself.

Larry Ellison doesn't like cloud computing because despite all the benefits of
this advancement it would turn his companies business models upside down.
Oracle would lose large amounts of money because they rely on massive
licensing deals and expensive maintenance (assuming they go SaaS).

They have developed an independent unit to build out their on-demand efforts,
just as Innovators Dilemma recommends when faced with a disruptive technology.

But the market is still to new and if Oracle made a major shift toward it, it
would cannibalize a large portion of their profits. Therefore dropping the
share price.

~~~
gaius
I dunno about that, Oracle have been pushing "grid" computing long since
before "cloud" became fashionable.

~~~
jrockway
The idea behind this is that every company buys their own Oracle-based grid.
This means lots-of-money for them.

If everyone switches to "the cloud" with non-relational data stores, that's
not so good for them. (Even if "the cloud" is Oracle-backed, they still only
sell one copy.) They have made a lot of money convincing people that their
product is magical, and they don't want to lose out on that.

~~~
alex_c
>They have made a lot of money convincing people that their product is
magical, and they don't want to lose out on that.

Couldn't agree more. Oracle currently has this going for them:

[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A-Software-
Problem,-A-Market...](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A-Software-
Problem,-A-Marketing-Solution.aspx)

(to quote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, "it's true even if it didn't
happen").

~~~
gaius
You know, back in the day, Oracle did _exactly the same thing_ themselves -
they released their product on IBM mainframes because no-one would take them
seriously otherwise. They even had to leverage a consulting contract with the
CIA to claim to be "government contractors" to convince IBM to sell them ones.

By no means did they invent this strategy, nor are they the only ones to use
it, they're not even the only database vendor. MySQL relies equally on
"magic". Selling on your technological merits doesn't work. Look at Sybase and
Informix.

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alphamule
Is he really railing against cloud computing, or instead the rush to label
everything cloud computing? It sounds like he embraces the model, he just
doesn't like the dopey name (and inclusion of everything internet-related
under the cloud computing umbrella).

same could be said of "web 2.0" or "information super highway" which were
similarly overly-hyped and overly-applied.

