Michelle,
I'm a very recent ex-Oracle employee; even so, it pains me to see the beating that ORCL is taking. Great to see your active involvement on this thread.
I do, however, have take exception to your comments about Lane/Henley. While at Oracle I had the good fortune to have worked with them directly and I can tell you that they are hardly full of themselves; quite the contrary. Both Ray and Jeff are excellent managers and leaders; I really cannot see how you think that they are the cause of the downward spiral. I believe internal problems lie elsewhere.
I really think that things would be MUCH worse if it weren't for the likes of Ray and Jeff. In my opinion the problem is not at their level but a couple of levels down where coordinated execution is an energy sapping exercise. Oracle has a ton of great, really smart, people and a pretty compelling product set; somehow it's just really hard to get things done efficiently. It comes down to that classic line: ideas are a dime a dozen, it's execution that counts.
Larry gave a presentation a short while back that basically said Oracle has two businesses Database and Applications, everything revolves around that. I think that if this was the drumbeat around which everyone at Oracle did the daily dance that it would be much more productive and consequently successful. Unfortunately, too many people at Oracle are into their own limited view of things. That's my perspective of the internal situation at Oracle; it's still basically going through an adolescent phase. The good news is that it has "good bones" to grow on.
I think that the stock performance is only minimally related to whatever the internal situation is at Oracle. In the big picture of things it is no better or worse than almost any other large organization when it comes to overall management. The sales execution, especially with applications, is probably the single biggest factor leading to the current distaste that the market seems to have for ORCL.
My own guess is that the second half of Oracle's FY99 will show it delivering on better overall growth. I'll keep my fingers crossed hoping that things will pick up sooner, but I've pretty much resigned myself to have to wait until at least December to see some real improvement in the stock price.
I expect that Oracle's apps growth will be better but may not necessarily beat that of it's key competitors; too many environmental factors that can affect the entire market for the next couple of years. On the database front, the core business, Oracle should continue to entrench itself in the enterprise side of things and hopefully will continue to hold it's own on the lower end against Microsoft. I don't know if it will be able to maintain its current share leadership on NT; but I definitely think that Microsoft will have a very difficult time taking too much share away from Oracle, even in the face of price pressures -price is not everything.
I think that the company is solid from a product portfolio perspective, has awesome distribution potential and keeps the market interesting with vision possibilities. It will all come down to execution at the lower levels. The thing that would make me really worry is, what if Ray and Jeff weren't there? They do have their job cut out for them and yes, ultimately, they are responsible for the execution at lower levels. I'm simply saying that they have their heads screwed on right and I don't think that they are leading Oracle astray. They certainly are not the carpet baggers that your comments come close to portraying them as.
Anyway, I'm very long on Oracle at this point and I'm comfortable with that.
Thanks for the the contributions; hopefully I've also been able to provide some food for thought.
Regards,
Jesse |
