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

To: lml who wrote (7220)	5/28/1998 1:58:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

LML, I was in the center of the apps business at the time, and I am speaking from memory only. These were my interpretations of the situation however. Oracle had come out with Oracle 7. It was vastly superior to the sybase offering. Packaged apps were just coming into the fray. There were lots of areas (sales, customer support) where most big shops wrote their own app - so the customers wanted the new Oracle7 product immediately - there was intense demand, and you can see that reflected in Oracle growth rates at the time (maybe 1993? I dont remember which year). Meanwhile Oracle apps were out but they didn't have mfg yet. For a brief period of time, oracle financials were really the only app that rode the train of the Oracle dbms's. Sap was just getting going with their US operations. When Sap finally was released - IT DID NOT RUN ON THE LATEST ORACLE ENGINE. And it did NOT use the std Oracle tools which were VERY important to people at that time! I'm talking about a situation where, your shop writes a customer service app, you use SAP for mfg, it is very difficult to extrapolate the customers from the mfg package just to get them into std Oracle sql - not acceptable. Customers voiced major problems with this - they didn't want to use ABAP (the SAP tool). In addition, and in some ways even more important, were the locking/latching issues SAP had with Oracle, this was a huge problem. Sap was slow. So here was the deal: Oracle engine of key importance to customers, Oracle in a position to leverage that, Oracle didn't. I don't have an MBA myself so its hard to say who has more leverage, msft with browsers or Orcl with apps (5 yrs ago). But, I don't think there was ever a situation where a browser WOULD NOT RUN on the most current msft OS that everybody just had to have, right? If Orcl had some foresight at that time they would have acquired some companies (the psft strategy) and come out with a SOPHISTICATED app solution that was within 80% of the functionality that sap offered and Orcl would be where SAP is today - many, many people think this. And as far as Orcl today - it seems that Larrys approach is to hire these class of's and other young aggressive sw devt types and have them go off and create something that barely works in half the time it takes to do it right. Well thats fine, and it worked for engine devt in the early 90's. But apps are not like the engine! You need REAL WORLD experience to know what to do in the apps space. Get some senior people in there, and come up with some NEW technologies. If you can't figure out which new technologies are the right ones, then buy some companies (like psft). Otherwise, its bye bye Orcl apps. Michelle PS It might surprise you all to know that I really like Orcl and it kills me to see them decline like this but at least Im a realist