> In the Microsoft world, portability means nothing. ...
> If you wanted scalability and 24X7 reliability, you wouldn't
> choose NT in the first place.
This is the key observation. Oracle has tried many times to make it with a mass market product (Oracle Card, Oracle Lite, Personal Oracle, Oracle Power Objects, Power Browser and so on...) and hasn't really been able to execute. I have my doubts that they ever will. Oracle is not going to add another $1B in revenues annually from people buying their products at Egghead.
Oracle's bread and butter is large organizations that require both scalability and 24 X 7 reliability. Organizations that are getting out on the web and starting to look at electronic commerce are going to realize (some sooner, some later) that betting the future of their company on NT does not give them the same warm fuzzy feeling that buying another IBM mainfame used to. SQL Server on NT may be great for a workgroup inside the firewall, but bet my organization's web presence on that platform? Only if my resume is up to date (see earlier discussion in this thread about MSN dropping dead from load).
Oracle is very good at selling their database and tools to large organizations with substantial IS budgets. There are a whole lot of them out there, and with support revenues of 15% and consulting at better than $1200 a day, the cash will keep rolling in. Microsoft built their revenue stream on VOLUME, VOLUME, VOLUME. Oracle does not need to move quite as many licenses at $25,000 to $250,000 a pop to keep up.
There is still plenty of legacy data out there on big iron. Do you think it will be easier to sell the CICS set on migrating to Oracle on a cluster of Unix based DEC Alpha machines with unlimited scalability or will they just take the plunge and scale down to NT? If they haven't trashed the mainframe yet, don't bet on them snapping up dual Pentium Pro boxes as a replacement.
The whole NC crusade is Larry's attempt to exorcise Bill Gates from the desktop. As one of my clients put it: "I hear that those dumb terminals are coming back." If everyone has a Network Computer, who do you think will be serving out everything to it? Larry may get to sell a few more of those NCube boxes yet!
Forget about NC. Oracle has a solid product that real businesses are willing to bet the farm on. That's the upside. |
