Paul,
I tend to agree with Ernie. Oracle does what it does well..,
relational databases. It isn't a hardware company and it won't
gain much if any $$$ off of the "take off" of an NC system. All
it really does is provide a lobotomized PC with no guts, and no
glory. This does hark back to the old glass house days and quite
frankly, I'm astonished to think that Sun is so heavily advocating
it.
A recent Gartner Group (Dataquest) conference I went to suggests
that Oracle will be the top dog in the relational database market
over the next five years. Their research suggests that they will
be challenged by aging in the database product unless they make
a concerted effort to take their database product to the next
level (objects). Their research suggests that they will experience
heavy pressure from Informix (due to their acquisition of Illustra)
and this will decide what the future holds. Until then, Oracle
will continue to benefit from data warehousing and conservative
corporations who believe that Oracle is the "safe" decision.
On the NC issue, they claimed that only 15% of the entire market
will even consider NC as a viable tool. Of that, they expect that
Oracle not gain any sufficient $$$ to make this worth anything
to talk about. So I ask what Ernie asks....why waste good money.
Can you really expect to challenge the Wintel platform? I read
today that a combo of Microsoft, Intel, HP, and others are also
working on a diskless system with the Intel chip. So where does
that leave Oracle?
Finally, it is clear from what I even saw at the latest Sun
Technology conference that Sun agrees that a $500 utility is
far reaching. Their reasoning was that you need quite a bit
of memory, CPU speed, and a fast graphics system to be able to
do Java. The internet won't stop with HTTP/HTML. It will soon
progress to VRML and Java scripts that will run sophisticated
video. This won't be accomplished by a device that doesn't have
the capability to perform those functions.
Lets get real here folks. Oracle is showing some pretty erratic
behavior.
Thanks, Kent. |
