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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (7215)	5/27/1998 8:14:00 PM
From: Eric	Respond to of 19080

Michelle, I don't think status quo cuts it for Oracle or any other companies. I just won't blame Oracle for everythings they might have missed in the past while fighting other wars. 5 years ago Oracle was still fighting the database war with sybase, its apps was just being born (far from being a leader) and they were not the leading db vendor. But I do agree with you that Oracle should put a focus on apps and release a GUI version of apps much earlier than they did. NCA w/ Oracle's db at the center is Oracle's imitation of MSFT O/S; if you buy the idea then ORCL will sell you the software. It is a good try, but it looks like users aren't quite ready to embrace the concept. Oracle is kind of in a limbo now. Frankly I am also disappointed that Oracle didn't come out with any new exciting plans. -Eric

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (7215)	5/28/1998 9:38:00 AM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 19080

Michelle: Last night I had started putting together a long reply about E.F. Codd, relational database history, System*R, SQL, relational algebra vs. relational tuple calculus, and so on when I realized that there is really no point in debating if Larry or Bill is a bigger innovator. Personally, I think that Larry has better technological vision and Bill knows a lot more about how to sell. The better technology vs. better marketing wars have been played out many times (VHS vs. Beta is a prime example), and better marketing seems to work most of the time. I have to take issue with your assertions that Oracle has dropped the ball in the apps arena. I think that Oracle never did really get the apps business going full-tilt in the first place. I cannot agree with your assertion that Oracle was an apps leader 5 years ago. At that time, it was pretty near impossible to find people who had done more than one Oracle Financials implementation, at least in the NY metro area. Oracle was still getting started developing their vertical market apps. They were even spouting nonsense about being everyone's "strategic partner" and building industry application templates for their case tool (now Designer/2000) that you could modify in house and through the miracle of 100% code generation (a debate for another day), roll your own customized "Oracle Financials" application. Yeah, so they had row-level locking in the database and the apps took advantage of that. They still were more difficult to get up and running that other vendors' apps and were lacking in non-db related functionality. Oracle needs to leverage their strongest assets and those are all server related right now. Oracle has been able to use reliability, scalability and run-anywhere to push the server since day one. They now need to extend this to the applications business. NCA is how they do that. The new NCA applications release is the first step in that direction. As far as the other apps vendors go, I think that the most important thing for Oracle today is to make sure that even if they don't sell the front end application, that they have the back end database server (SAP on Oracle, PeopleSoft on Oracle, BAAN on Oracle, etc). This will help provide the leverage that they need to move customers back to Oracle's own applications as Network Computing takes hold. I don't see how buying an applications vendor (unless they plan on then rewriting the vendor's apps to be NCA friendly) will do anything besides gain some market share at the expense of their own applications development effort. Oracle's tools business should also start to grow again. They are getting extremely positive reviews in the trade press. Personally, I have been able to move a client-server based reporting system to a web-based system in just 3 days using Oracle's Web Applications Server and D2K cartridges. One last thing regarding Microsoft: It is pretty much a done deal that Microsoft will bundle SQL Server 7 with its OLAP tool. When Bill moves everyones desktop to NT (2 more upgrades, including Win98?) and decides that users want a database as part of the OS (he is already willing to give his database server away), will that be OK? -Michael