

Oracle is the Borg: Enterprise Software Development Will Be Assimilated  - gherlein
http://blog.herlein.com/2010/11/oracle-is-the-borg-enterprise-software-development-will-be-assimilated/

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VengefulCynic
_So it’s pretty clear to me that Oracle is playing for keeps, and playing to
own the Enterprise space._

It's not like Oracle's behavior with MySQL and Java is something new for them.
Larry Ellison has always been a guy who buys a company, streamlines their
processes, figures out a way to squeeze every last cent out of their products
and then hires 1,000 new sales reps to sell it to enterprise customers. More
than anything, I'm puzzled that it took this long and I'm puzzled that this
hits anyone as something unexpected.

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fiveo
I'm actually flirting to move to everything Oracle for my career (seriously).
There's a big money and (hopefully) less work for those who know how to use
10% of Oracle's other software aside from their database.

Now I can go home by 5 and have a side project/job on the evening and weekend
using Emacs, Ruby, Rails, and jQuery.

I'll be set for the next 10 years!

~~~
tom_b
Careful. What you say is somewhat true. But that side project/job doing what
you really love is going to be increasingly starved for time. You may want to
have a family or friends or hike or read or learn to play piano at some point.
You'll be stuck with a somewhat non-enjoyable day job where much of the focus
is on Oracle's tool stack.

That said, I completely poked my head-up after grad school, saw that there was
some demand for skills that started with the "Oracle" adjective, and have
found reasonably stable and lucrative work in those spaces.

I've also been able to move to a more open shop, where I've been able to sneak
in some RoR and am currently hacking some Lisp to do, of all things, some
ETL/data transformation stuff to make my life a little easier.

My bigger issue is that if you position yourself as the Oracle stack expert is
that you may windup stuck in that professionally. I laughed when I read it,
but I remember PG saying something about never being worried about competitors
to Viaweb who advertised for Oracle programmers. It's a bit of an
exaggeration, but the hackers I respect the most have been somewhat
disappointed in their corporate "big IT" careers.

~~~
fiveo
Thank you for your response and to share your experience as well. Greatly
appreciate it. It would be great if I could have some stability in my career
and yet still able to work on something else (be it RoR or LISP or something
else).

<rant> I've been working in a few, of what people would call "software
product", companies. The one that Joel mentioned a lot in his essay.

First of all, if I were in Silicon Valley, I wouldn't probably even think of
Oracle. I would hone my CS skill so bad that I could hack my own compiler.
Alas, I don't live there. Even if I do, I have an expiration date stamped on
my head: good only for 10 years after graduation. Silicon Valley wants hot-
shot, young, energetic, red-bull-drinker, all-nighters type of programmer. So
if I can't be a "product manager" or "CTO" or management material by the time
I'm 32-35 years old, time to get out from SV.

Product based company tend to be unstable in where I live. I also noticed this
trend isn't particular to where I live, it's everywhere else too. When the
product is not selling well, lay-off happens. The first to go are usually the
QAs.

Once the QAs are gone, the next one to go are the "internal" tools developers:
these are the ITs and the tool developers. The last one to go are the junior
developers and weak performers. The ones who left must work super hard to
prove that their worth of their salary.

Product based company is cool during their first 3 years. After that, it's all
maintenance of legacy and hacked-up code. I don't know which one is worse:
maintaining half-ass, hacked-up, badly designed product with tight-deadline
(that usually leads to OTs) or writing PL/SQL or customizing Oracle modules.

Here's another problem: standards, scrum, xp. These are great things to have
in a software product house for quality and longevity of the company. But at
the same time, they are a double-edged sword.

Let me explain why: once the standards are in place, most people are
replaceable. Take Scrum/XP for example. One of their important points is that
we all should share knowledge (via Pair Programming, or something else).

They want to make the unknown to become lesser unknown or to be known. Once it
is repeatable and known, you have no value anymore to the company.
Intermediate becomes Senior, Junior becomes Intermediate, and you're being
let-go and they will start to hire new people.

The choice is either to move up to management or not to do scrum/xp (which is
equally horrific). Not doing scrum/xp would lead to bad result, bad quality,
unhealthy working environment, and the need of a hero-like effort to fix some
bugs.

I have seen my friends keep changing job within 2-3 years. That might be okay
with them but not with me. I don't like to waste my time preparing for
interviews, cleaning up my resume, every 2-3 years. I don't mind learning and
improving myself, but not for the sake of that kind of cycle.

Here's another problem with software development: programming languages. Too
freaking many of them. People have too many opinions. Some like LISP, some
like Java, some swear by .NET, some would invent a company based on F#, some
deal with Struts1/2, some would want PHP/Drupal/Wordpress. This leads to a
very fragmented field.

I rarely see a company that is looking for the bare minimum (say, Java, or C#,
or Ruby) but with X-years of experience. I often see companies looking for
specifics (must know Java, Struts, XML, XQuery, XPath, XSLT with 7 years of
experience).

I thought about doing Rails and iPhone for a while until a couple days ago
where it hits me that you can actually outsource iPhone app development. Those
2 guys that were being interviewed by Mixergy did exactly that.

I also see a few consulting offers lingering in a local job-board looking for
an iPhone/Android developer. But most of them are unstable due to the nature
of consulting. I don't think they're willing to pay the premium ($100-$125)
anyway.

Some consultants might be able to charge premium during the first few years of
a new technology (like iPhone), but they need to find the next big-thing again
every 2 years.

The point is this: low entry barrier sucks.

When I look at Oracle, the barrier to enter is a bit higher (or so it seems)
than being a developer and not too many people want to do the job. It's a
niche. Just like what one of the HN-ers mentioned about how he did quite well
with his freelancing/consulting gig (he's doing PHP, Drupal, and Wordpress)
</rant>

~~~
umjames
So, if I understand you correctly, you'd like a 9-to-5 job where you won't be
forced into management and be able to keep your valuable skills to yourself
while you work on more interesting things after hours?

I think I am currently in that situation. It's not all it's cracked up to be.
First off, your time on nights and weekends is not as long or of the same
quality as 9 to 5. You don't have the same energy level or focus.

As for the job, no job is immune to change. If you have skills that are
valuable to your employer, you'll find that either your employer will
overwhelm you with work and/or they'll seek to have your co-workers gain those
skills to distribute the workload. This kind of stuff will make you more and
more unhappy with your job and this will surprisingly make it harder to work
on your side projects outside of work. If you put all your eggs in one basket
by anchoring yourself to the Oracle stack, when you go to look for another job
(because you're tired of your current job), prospective employers (and
especially recruiters) will see mostly Oracle stuff and you'll be pigeonholed
into jobs that are similar to your current job.

Don't make perceived stability the central focus of your job search (unless
you have others that depend on you financially). Choose jobs that will serve
you better with respect to your career goals. That may mean changing jobs more
often than you'd like (but not necessarily so), but you'll get to where you
want to be sooner.

~~~
fiveo
I don't mind occasional OT (with compensation). Fact is, in where I live,
companies can get away with lots of OT and not compensating them. I don't mind
to go to management position late in my career. Not now, but maybe later.

Interesting things can have different means. To me, Google architecture (GFS,
BigTable, MapReduce) are all interesting, but I have no desire to learn them
for the sake of learning. Rails is interesting in the sense that I'd like to
learn it, make a website using it, and take a poke at running a small
business.

I'm also interested at the business of iPhone apps. I'd rather pay someone
else to write the app than writing it myself. I prefer to focus on the
operational side: making sure we have a website with good SEO and graphics
design. Promote the iPhone apps and start making money (even with a low
profitability margin).

But at the same time, I'm not a big gambler or a risk taker. Steady fixed
income and experimental on the side is my sweet spot.

In short, I'd like to be able to run my own side business, be it iPhone apps
or selling stuff online. That excites me more vs toying with various
programming languages or solving hard algorithm problems. I prefer to talk
with people than with machines. I don't mind to do occasional programming
cause I like to build stuff. I just don't want them to dominate my whole life.
I prefer not to be 40 or 50 and still hacking C, UNIX, Java, C# or Ruby for a
living.

------
KevBurnsJr
YAY! Oracle is going to drive MySQL into the ground! Thank god.

I'm getting really tired of cleaning up relational disasters.

~~~
spudlyo
This is wishful thinking on your part. I know it's _cool_ to hate on MySQL,
but it's too big now for Oracle to kill. It has too large of an installed
base, too much mindshare, and too strong of a community to be killed by
anything Oracle does.

If Oracle were to stop developing, supporting, and licensing MySQL today it
would not stop MySQL. There would still be Percona, Facebook, Google, Monty
Program, Drizzle, and a large ecosystem of others supporting, patching,
releasing, and blogging about it.

Love it or hate it, it's probably not going anywhere soon.

~~~
jijoy
They wont kill it . They will increase the price of it. That will make MySQL
to less popular for sure .

~~~
spudlyo
I don't think so. In my experience, the only folks who pay for MySQL are big
conservative companies who must have support contracts, and companies who
bundle MySQL with their closed source products.

My gut feeling is that folks who will be directly impacted by Oracle price
increases represent a tiny percentage of MySQL users.

------
carson
I think people often forget that Oracle also owns Peoplsoft, another big
enterprise play.

~~~
pandakar
I am unfortunately reminded of this every workday. The money spent on licences
and inept consultants is obscene. The tools are ancient, the code unreadable,
modules grafted on after various other companies were bought. I often get told
how much money there is to be made in consulting, and alternatively how one
can never learn all of Peoplesoft. As much as the former is comforting, the
latter is depressing. I just want to be able to code in emacs for a living...

------
adulau
This is a recurring pattern in history of "enterprise software" (for whatever
it means) the fade of technologies and the high-cost of maintainability for
those legacy systems. This is a common business model in the software (or
hardware) sold to large corporation. Usually the customer wants just something
that works for their business and don't always understand the implication on
relying on their ancient systems. And by extension, those large corporation
just paid (a lot) for maintaining the legacy system up and (somehow)
running...

As mentioned in another comment, this is allowing some space for better
designed software where the large corporation can't find something versatile
enough. The history in software is just a circular loop with a feedback input
(where the innovation is coming from other companies or individuals).

Oracle is only playing on the field of legacy systems to maintain. At the end,
this is great for start-ups, free software developers or individuals who are
innovating. For us, this is a brand new world opens with plenty of
opportunities...

~~~
regularfry
You could look at their JVM play and continued MySQL Community Edition
development (presuming _that_ happens) as giving them a foothold in the non-
legacy fields; there's a _lot_ of fun stuff happening on the JVM these days,
and MySQL is still (for better or worse) the default first open source RDBMS
that people tend to use for new projects.

Whether they see it that way or not is a _completely_ different matter.

------
binarymax
...so how long now before Oracle makes a bid for Red Hat?

------
leandrod
Ðe irony… : Error establishing a database connection

------
j_baker
...because there are _no_ other database vendors out there. There's definitely
no such thing as Postgres, SQL Server, or DB2.

~~~
regularfry
That would be to completely underestimate Oracle. It's not just about
databases any more.

They now own two major database platforms, a major software deployment
ecosystem, a decent OS or two and a decent hardware platform. You can bet that
they'll be integrating and up-selling the rest of the stack like _crazy_ into
any customer of any single part of it. It just doesn't make sense to have
bought them otherwise.

The comparison shouldn't be with DB2. It should be with IBM.

~~~
j_baker
Regardless, the point is that Oracle isn't without competition. IBM and
Microsoft aren't going away anytime soon.

------
w1ntermute
Any chance of getting a copy of the text? Site is down and neither Google nor
Coral have it.

~~~
megamark16
Here you go.

Oracle is the Borg: Enterprise Software Development Will Be Assimilated

By gherlein, on November 6th, 2010 - No comments

Oracle made some moves this week that look like the opening pawn moves in a
master chess game. The end game will have Oracle having a controlling position
in every aspect of Enterprise software development.

First of all, Oracle has removed InnoDB from the MySQL Classic Edition. Now,
you can still get the GPL community edition that has InnoDB in it. But if you
want support, you’ll have to buy their version. Oh, and they just raised the
price on that. I’m not sure if they require it or not, but if you use Linux
Oracle prefers that you run their software on THEIR version of Linux – a
customized Red Hat. This week they also released plans for the JVM that will
include a free version and a premium paid version. Oh, and if you want some
new hardware that will really make it all work well together, they can sell
you that too (they bought Sun, remember?).

So it’s pretty clear to me that Oracle is playing for keeps, and playing to
own the Enterprise space. Want to use a database? Buy Oracle, or use MySQL…
but if you want support, you pay them. Then you pay them for Linux. Then
license the JVM. Then license the app server (they bought BEA last year, so
WebLogic is all theirs now too). Want to code in Java? Well, they own that
too. Business folks call this “owning the vertical.”

Watch for them to take even more steps to make sure that they have control
points around as many places they can. Nearly all software that gets written
is business application software. Clearly Oracle has been embedded firmly
there for a long time – but these moves are enveloping and will sink hooks
into so many more places. I predict that when Google and Oracle settle – and
they will eventually, since the cost to litigate a huge patent battle does no
good for either party – that Oracle will get some hooks into mobile as well.
Maybe some email integration, or provisioning, or something deep and
fundamental.

So watch out, stay alert, and think about your tools. Or you too will be
assimilated.

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greenlblue
Ah yes, capitalism at its best.

