paul - re: you come across as fair minded but reading your postings on the Microsoft thread you clearly are biased against Sun.
Unlike some on this thread, I regard MSFT, SUNW, and the rest of the tech companies as investment opportunities, not religious commitments. I like to take positions that stimulate debate. I am under no obligation to be fair or even handed, and I'm not - the opinions I present are, I think, facts-based but are not always my "deepest convictions" and sometimes I jerk chains to get people off their high horse, or to get them to think a little more before they post.
I like the culture at SUNW, I like the attitude of management, including Scott's "in your face" approach, but that does not mean I am blind to the excessive cost structure of SUNW's development and manufacturing, their execution failures on some key development, or their exaggerated claims in some market segments. On balance I have been impressed enough to take a small SUNW position - 90 LEAP contracts - which has been quite profitable for me. The advisor I listen to most closely is my wallet, and that advisor says I should continue to pay attention to SUNW. I have owned MSFT since the late 80s. I had a position in SUNW back then also, but sold it in the mid-90s, so I'm not as smart as some on this thread regarding SUNW.
If you actually worked at Oracle in 1997 we probably passed in the hall - I was doing so much consulting with them in 96 and 97 that I had an apartment in San Mateo and an office on campus in Redwood Shores. You might be aware that CPQ and ORCL co-developed a simulation-based demand-planning tool which also did configuration, which was released in mid-1997. There was no comparable tool for the Unix world. I could point to a number of other key investments that ORCL made at that time to stimulate growth of their NT business. I could not talk about any of that work at that time, and can't talk about much of it now, but ORCL was certainly interested in getting as much NT business as they could without damaging their high end Unix market.
What I was talking about in our earlier discussion was not the internal Oracle applications but the base of applications using Oracle. Oracle's own figures from 96 and 97 showed that growth of sales of Oracle on NT were more than twice unit growth on Unix. Given the difference in "street price" that meant almost equal in revenue growth terms. 1997 was the "crossover" in terms of new sales of ORCL databases on a units basis.
Oracle may have been slow to port their own apps to NT but the rest of the market was not, and customers doing custom apps were not. And growth of NT above the file server space in '97 and '98 was very impressive. MSFT's own execution failure on NT5 / Win2K is what stalled them in 1999.
My experience with SAP is deeper and goes back farther. I worked with HP and SAP in 1991 and 1992, and had a team in Germany working the linkage between HP and SAP... I spent more time in Germany in 1992 than I did in the States. In 1993 through 1996 I worked closely with the SAP NA team as they developed the close working relationship between MSFT, CPQ and SAP which included big spending by all three partners on joint development, joint porting centers, joint marketing campaigns. I am not presenting anecdotal evidence here and you can get the same story from SAP - the record is available.
WOW- you can pull those percentages out like there's no tomorrow
After pulling together the analysis for marketing programs for several of these companies, I'd BETTER be able to pull the percentages out - otherwise why do those folks pay me the big bucks?? But the stuff I quote is for the most part public record, or easily derived from public record. |
