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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL)

ORCL 219.85

-1.3%

3:59 PM EST

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To: TigerPaw who wrote (10389)	4/7/1999 2:52:00 PM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (2) of 19079

If I could give advice to the company founders it would be to come out with small but functional products that they could almost give away to small users. This is not the marketplace that Oracle is in. Oracle will never make it on sales volume and thin margins. Their products are industrial strength, enterprise-wide beasts. They have significant market share on "small" platforms like NT because they provide a more stable product than the competition (Microsoft SQL Server) and because their NT version is the same product as their "industrial strength" server running on a million dollar Sun box. The product scales and migrates almost effortlessly. I can't believe that there is a lot of profit in a $1200 copy of Oracle Workgroup server (especially if you don't purchase support). What can Oracle do for the small user? They tried a few years ago with Oracle Power Objects, but the product was a complete disaster. WebDB could be the type of product that you are talking about. If a small user could build a web-based application quickly and easily, coupled with the ability to deploy it via the internet through a choice of ISPs, you have a killer-app. A user could set up a small WebDB site to track scores and statistics for the local Little League and make it available to players and parents over the web. Or build a site to maintain a database of your Beanie Baby collection and let others store info about their collections as well. Sell ads to the local stationery store that sells the things and put that on your site. The front end access is simple and the data and application are both stored in an industrial-strength, professionally maintained Oracle database. I have many custom applications that have been developed for small business using tools like MS-Access that would run infinitely better in an Oracle database with a browser front end. The cost of the Oracle server license is always the biggest impediment. I need an ISP to host my WebDB apps for a flat monthly fee. Then I deploy to my clients via the web and they can access the app from the office, from home, on the road, wherever. And they don't worry about maintenance or backup because the ISP does all of that for them. One of the members of the steering committee of the NY Oracle User's Group is building a self-service membership application using WebDB. He'll be presenting it at the Group's meeting at the end of the month. Then, if we can find someone to host it, we'll deploy it and I don't have to deal with address changes in the membership database anymore. Oracle can never get the RDBMS server out to the masses because it is just too complicated. They need to make it simple to get access to an Oracle database that someone else maintains. Point and click with WebDB is Oracle's best effort in that arena so far. -Michael

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