The article mentions important issues, but then it just quotes a lot of people with axes to grind and concludes that "maybe this is the end of the world, or maybe it's the beginning of Utopia".
ORCL has a terrible app server product at the moment, but I expect it to get better very quickly (I know a number of the people working on it, and the project now has first-rate technical people and real management support -- it's always been pretty much a joke in the past). But they don't have long to get their act together. BEAS is a bigger threat here than IBM, in my opinion, because big blue just can't react to anything quickly and they apparently can't write new software anymore.
As far as the database goes, I see no signs whatever that ORCL has let up in their investment on their core business. Analysts may be distracted by ORCL's barrage of marketing releases, but ORCL has a couple of thousand long-time (and very competent) engineers working on their database product, and the ones that I know show no signs of taking their eye off the ball.
I don't know much about the back-office apps people (I don't even know anyone who works in that part of ORCL), but I doubt that it's much different there than in the parts of ORCL that I do know about. I know that where I work the most important thing to me is not what the company is currently blowing a horn about, but what I get paid to work on, and I think that most engineers are similarly focused.
ORCL has always been in a competitive environment (that's practically synonymous with lucrative), and MSFT and IBM have always had lots of money. MSFT may emerge as real competition someday, but it still looks to engineering-driven to me, and SQL Server and Windows are still pretty unreliable as server platforms. |
