Welp... I would like to lend a hand here. I Worked for Sybase/Powersoft for a while - now with an Internet Tools company called HAHT. Microsoft and Oracle have a lot in common. Oracle's keystone technology is their DBMS. Microsoft's keystone is their OS. Neither company will be unseated as the #1 provider of these keystone technologies for a long time. And just as Microsoft builds all of their revenue on top of their Operating System by improving it and expanding it with new applications and technologies, so does Oracle. Oracle's applications, tools, middleware, messaging systems etc. are all built to move more servers and to solidify their very firm hold in the DBMS market.
To me, the NC does not feel compelling just yet. It is incongruous to their business model of moving more Oracle servers. But let's look at a recent announcement this week...
Has anyone looked into their announcement this week about NCA? Network Computing Architecture? If not, go check it out. It is compelling and brilliant and ties the whole story together. I spend a lot of time in corporate IS. As such, I see that the Web is not ready for "primetime" until we replace HTTP with something useful like CORBA or IIOP. Microsoft's competitor to this is COM/DCOM. This is where the action will really heat up in the next year, not at the browser level, but on both levels (browser and server simultaneously.) Oracle's NCA is basically CORBA with a few extensions. You see, HTTP is fundamentally flawed in that it stops/starts/stops every time you ask for anything. It is nothing but a resource locator. Finally, CORBA has a legitimate place to succeed. CORBA would keep persistent connections to active objects, maintain current "state" information for all of them and allow unlike objects (activex and java for example) to communicate together.
Now Oracle has a way to build a consistent architecture around the web and her independent unlike components. Netscape is already on board for it. Actually just about every player is - minus Microsoft. The trick here is that the place where these objects will be stored will be in the Oracle Universal Server. Another example of them building upon what they do best. Microsoft's COM model is accessible from NCA as well. Oracle will succeed with this over Microsoft's COM/DCOM as it is infinitely scaleable, unlike anything Microsoft has to offer. This thing could sit on a mainframe or NT or whatever.
The NC could tie into NCA naturally and force Microsoft to at least break a sweat. We are talking about serious architecture here, not ease of use. So Oracle's marketing is more appropriate than Microsoft's in this space anyhow. OK. that's that. Give me your thoughts.
-Matt |
