Oracle: We are the Borg?
Local venture cap/tech blogger Paul Kedrosky recent posted that:
Larry Ellison has allegedly cooked up a plan to do a wide-ranging roll-up of companies in the open-source space. Not just JBoss, but a host of others, from Spikesource to Zend, and more inbetween. About the only sizable o/s company left standing would be Red Hat.
This may be an effective short term strategy to preserve Oracle's revenue - if Oracle's customers are uncertain enough, they won't risk switching away from Oracle's products.
Consider Oracle's general strategy in this area in the last five years. When it comes to Free Software/Open Source products, it seems to me that they:
- praise and support the FS/OS software products that give them an edge over their competitors and …
- spread FUD about the FS/OS products that compete with them
Point in case, anyone remember this gem from an interview with Larry Ellison in late 2002?
[Larry is speaking about Free/Open DBMS at this point in time.]
It's not just scale. There's no security. [There's no] scalability, security, or reliability. If you give up any of those, you can't do this. Another reason you'd be out of your mind to use them is because you'd have to buy twice as much hardware. We run, I don't know, ten times, a hundred times faster than they do on the same hardware.
(Linux's Proprietary Booster, Linux Magazine, November 2002)
In just a few sentences, Larry runs the gamut from "possibly accurate" to "demonstrably out-to-a-five-martini-lunch".
Oracle has gotten more sophisticated in their approach in the last few years. Buying up a core part of MySQL's technology stack was a great move on their part, though MySQL did a plausible job of pointing out that Oracle tipped their hand in the purchase.
In the long term, unless Oracle undergoes a miraculous change in culture, Borging up a whack of FS/OS companies will just end up removing these companies from the market and will encourage the growth of strategies that can serve customers but not get scooped by the big players.
(Disclosure: I have worked for MySQL AB in the past. See http://zak.greant.com/affiliations)
Update:
See http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2006/tc20060209_810527.htm for more info (and their spin on things).
Link Summary
- http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/
- http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/002588.html
- http://en.wikipedia.o...uncertainty_and_doubt
- http://www.linux-mag....02-11/ellison_01.html
- http://www.linux-mag.com/
- http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-11/
- http://www.databasejo...l/article.php/3561731
- http://www.planetmysql.org/kaj/?p=20
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg
- http://www.businesswe...tc20060209_810527.htm
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Posted on Friday, February 10th, 2006 at 16:58
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February 11th, 2006 at 21:22
Let me give you a hint… if they bought up three, what companies turned them down?
There are at least two.