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

To: joe who wrote (9191)	12/16/1998 12:14:00 PM
From: Mark Palmberg	Respond to of 19080

OK, let's assume for the sake of argument that Windows is a piece of trash. Golly, I don't know. Well...all right! I'm talking about Oracle, not Windows. Me too. I want to know where Oracle quality and future trend stands, not MSFT's Window. Ask someone who uses the product. Don't nine of the 10 largest e-commerce sites on the Web use Oracle products? There's your quality right there. As far as the future trend goes, well, if we knew that, investing in the market would be a no-brainer. All things being equal (which of course they're not), I'll side with Larry over Bill. I don't really care about standards. Larry's living in a world that has as its sole purpose for existing the destruction of current standards and the creation (or at least implementation) of a new way of computing. I wonder how much more successful MSFT would be if the company upped its quality control? Mark

To: joe who wrote (9191)	12/16/1998 12:50:00 PM
From: Michael Olin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

I want to know where Oracle quality and future trend stands, not MSFT's Window. That's my point. Oracle is the undisputed leader in market share (since that seems to be a criterion that matters to you) in the RDBMS marketplace. I happen to believe that they are the leader in technology as well, but I also know that better technology does not necessarily move the stock price up. Windows is not a semi-standard, it is a monopoly. Microsoft intends to leverage that monopoly to push its (my opinion) technologically inferior products in various areas. Personally, I am a lot less concerned with MS Office killing Corel WordPerfect Office or Lotus Smart Suite than I am with MS giving away SQL Server. Microsoft's market capitalization is no more a reflection of their technological prowess than the market cap of Amazon.com or Yahoo! reflects their stellar (or is that nonexistent) earnings history. The core value of Microsoft is the never-ending stream of revenue that is derived from the licensing fees paid by OEMs for installing their monopoly OS on every PC sold. That out of the way, where are Oracle's prospects for future growth? Well, there are some estimates that as much as 70% of the corporate legacy data that is still out there lives in flat-file type data stores on mainframe computers. If that data is to be used effectively in data warehouses, migrating the data to Oracle is a fine way to accomplish that goal. This is the main reason I disagree with those who say that the RDBMS market is already saturated. Oracle is already powering the largest e-commerce sites and is continuing to gain mind and market share in that arena. This has nothing to do with Java. It is all about the back end database being able to handle the transaction volume and massive amounts of data. Even if Oracle never sells another internet development tool license (Application Server, Developer 2000, J Developer), their database is still going to be the only viable option for most large e-commerce sites. Egghead.com tried to go with a SQL Server solution and it did not scale for production deployment. An offer of $500,000 in free consulting from MS was not enough to stop them from going Oracle end-to-end. Oracle's applications business and vertical market solutions are continuing to grow. Their latest applications release (here, Java is relevant) has been well received and many companies find their architecture allows low cost client deployment. There are others on this thread who can talk to Oracle's apps business with far more authority than I can. I generally stick to the database and applications development areas. I don't know exactly what percentage of NCI is owned by Oracle, but the company continues to do quite well (although it is generally ignored) and Oracle plans to spin it off with an IPO in the next year. When all of these internet appliances being described in NCI press releases get deployed over the next year or two, a new revenue stream will materialize. I think that the "potential future market" for SQL Server is greatly exaggerated. The product has not been proven in mission critical use. Even on the low end, where price becomes the overriding factor, Microsoft's licensing scheme (buy a seat for each workstation that ever needs to access the database) makes the cost of ownership as much or higher than a comparable Oracle installation. Oracle has put out several TCO comparisons showing that on NT, Oracle Server is still less expensive to deploy than SQL Server. MS is also positioning SQL Server as a replacement back end for Jet-based Access databases. This is not the marketplace to be in if you are claiming to have a robust product capable of handling mission critical applications. Everyone views Microsoft as the main threat to Oracle, probably because of the rhetoric emanating from Larry Ellison. Larry may think that Bill Gates' vision is bad for computing, bad for society, or just plain evil. That does not make Microsoft a viable competitor. IBM's DB2 is a much stronger competitor to Oracle on the enterprise database end. Sybase and Informix (as irrelevant as they may be now...) are bigger threats in the RDBMS space. They come much closer to Oracle technologically, and their installed base is far larger than SQL Server. The SQL Server threat to Oracle will collapse under the weight of failed attempts to deploy the product. -Michael

To: joe who wrote (9191)	12/16/1998 1:29:00 PM
From: John Wright	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19080

Joe, I'm currently accessing all my financial apps(located on a central application server), through my Netscape browser. I do not have any of the actual applications loaded on my desktop/laptop. This "Internet" computing approach would seem to offer a much cheaper and more practical approach to enterprise computing than having a thousand copies of bloatware loaded on a thousand machines. How do you see this approach in relation to WIndows and MSFT's stranglehold on the desktop? Thoughts, opinions? John