At the tail end of my time working for the big O Larry introduced the Network Computer. From memory it was the talk of the town at Oracle Openworld 1997. I remember being in a client briefing with a senior Oracle Marketing VP telling the client that in two years time they would have replaced their PC's with NC's.
I have to say that I bought into the concept of the NC and so did Sun and IBM (with their respective Javastation and Netstation). I'd recently finished a site visit for a large telco who had basically locked down their SOE PC build so that the PC barely used the local C: drive anyway. The logical extension of this was to produce a computer that would boot directly from the network and store eveything on network drives.
Funnily enough it wasn't any theoretical limitations that did for the NC but more than when it was released the price of PC's dropped from thousands of dollars to hundreds of dollars undermining any potential cost savings that Network Computers may have introduced. Shame really becuase I still think the idea had legs.
Showing posts with label IBM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IBM. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Back to the Future
Back in the post 'The IT Wars' I referred to an RDBMS war that was fought between Oracle and Ingres. In reality competition in the RDBMS space has always been a little more complex than that.
The Oracle/Ingres battle just happended to be the main one at play when I entered the fray. FYI - my first RDBMS was Ingres and I have to say that from the developers perspective it was a far superior product to Oracle. Ultimately it is recognised that Oracle won out because of superior sales and marketing prowess, although this simplistic argument undermines the fact that Oracle was the more reliable and scalable database (row vs page level locking anyone?).
In reality Oracle has seen off the following RDBMS competition over the years:
- Ingres in the late 80's
- Sybase in the early 90's
- Informix in the late 90's
Along the way the big O has also also gobbled up Rdb and MySQL databases.
The interesting thing is that when I worked for Larry in the mid to late 90's Oracle always saw the following two as being their major database rivals:
- IBM with DB2
- Microsoft with SQL Server
So it comes as no great surprise that with the acqusition of Sun Microsystems and the plans that Oracle has for its Database Machine that the likes of IBM and Microsoft are scathing in their response calling it a return to the bad old days of the 1960's.
So how does the combination of software/hardware affect the big players:
Microsoft - SQL Server runs on any platform so long as its Windows/x86 so no change there.
IBM - The various forms of DB/2 run on various hardware platforms - so long as they're IBM that is. Again no change.
Oracle - I'm struggling to see a downside here. Larry has picked up Sun at pretty much a rock bottom price and with the new capability can attack integrated hardware/software threats from IBM, Netezza and Teradata who have all espoused the integrated harware/software solution. The combination of hardware and software is not unlike that taken by Apple, but it doesn't preclude Oracle's regular business of selling database on pretty muuch every major platform out there.
He's also picked up Java which was the lynchpin of Oracle's development platform anyway and moved a long way to removing the potential threat from Open Source by picking up the most successful of the Open Source databases in MySQL. In short, it's a win win because it's unlikely that he will alienate any of the existing hardware partners as they know that they cannot ignore Oracle.
Does it herald a return to the heyday of the 1960's, however, or for anyone following this blog, does that mean that we can look forward to fully integrated corporate data model as I've referred to in a few prior posts. Not likely. When Larry refers to an integrated server platform I think you have to look deeper than the marketing blurb to understand that apart from improvements to the systems management space and perhaps better performance integration there really isn't anything new here. Im not saying that the Database Machine is a bad concept, but I'd be wary in thinking that it herald's a return to when life was simple.
The Oracle/Ingres battle just happended to be the main one at play when I entered the fray. FYI - my first RDBMS was Ingres and I have to say that from the developers perspective it was a far superior product to Oracle. Ultimately it is recognised that Oracle won out because of superior sales and marketing prowess, although this simplistic argument undermines the fact that Oracle was the more reliable and scalable database (row vs page level locking anyone?).
In reality Oracle has seen off the following RDBMS competition over the years:
- Ingres in the late 80's
- Sybase in the early 90's
- Informix in the late 90's
Along the way the big O has also also gobbled up Rdb and MySQL databases.
The interesting thing is that when I worked for Larry in the mid to late 90's Oracle always saw the following two as being their major database rivals:
- IBM with DB2
- Microsoft with SQL Server
So it comes as no great surprise that with the acqusition of Sun Microsystems and the plans that Oracle has for its Database Machine that the likes of IBM and Microsoft are scathing in their response calling it a return to the bad old days of the 1960's.
So how does the combination of software/hardware affect the big players:
Microsoft - SQL Server runs on any platform so long as its Windows/x86 so no change there.
IBM - The various forms of DB/2 run on various hardware platforms - so long as they're IBM that is. Again no change.
Oracle - I'm struggling to see a downside here. Larry has picked up Sun at pretty much a rock bottom price and with the new capability can attack integrated hardware/software threats from IBM, Netezza and Teradata who have all espoused the integrated harware/software solution. The combination of hardware and software is not unlike that taken by Apple, but it doesn't preclude Oracle's regular business of selling database on pretty muuch every major platform out there.
He's also picked up Java which was the lynchpin of Oracle's development platform anyway and moved a long way to removing the potential threat from Open Source by picking up the most successful of the Open Source databases in MySQL. In short, it's a win win because it's unlikely that he will alienate any of the existing hardware partners as they know that they cannot ignore Oracle.
Does it herald a return to the heyday of the 1960's, however, or for anyone following this blog, does that mean that we can look forward to fully integrated corporate data model as I've referred to in a few prior posts. Not likely. When Larry refers to an integrated server platform I think you have to look deeper than the marketing blurb to understand that apart from improvements to the systems management space and perhaps better performance integration there really isn't anything new here. Im not saying that the Database Machine is a bad concept, but I'd be wary in thinking that it herald's a return to when life was simple.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Welcome to the Social .... (Social Security that is!)
When I started in IT the dominant player was IBM. It's mainframes were just starting to be challenged by the likes of AS/400's, also from IBM, Dec VAX machines and the UNIX upstarts from the likes of Sun, HP and, you guessed it, IBM.
Big Blue dominated the IT landscape in a way that is unimaginable in today's market. PC's were referred to as genuine IBM's or inferior clones. Disk was often called DASD (Direct Access Serial Device), Errors were referred to as Abends. Job ads like "COBOL retrain to RPG/400 or PL/1" were commonplace. All IBM speak.
So what happended? Well nobody came along and built a better mainframe so IBM's fall from the top perch wasn't through like for like competition. It dominance was eroded on all fronts by the arrival of client server computing whose winners were the likes of Microsoft, HP, Sun, Oracle, Ingres, etc. For the record IBM didn't die, it adapted and is still a very successful IT company - but it doesn't dominate IT like it used to.
Many portray Microsoft as the natural successor to IBM and to my eyes Microsoft has started is downward decent from Top Dog to Also Ran. It still dominates the desktop OS and office productivity suites but apart from this its hits are thin on the ground. It does well with its RDBMS offering, SQL Server and the Xbox has made them a few quid. Where it has failed spectacularly was its inability to leverage its market dominance in the internet and now mobile internet. Bing, Zune and Windows Mobile are hardly destined for greatness, are they? Microsoft's great cash cow has always been Windows and Office software, mostly sold by default on the back of new PC and Laptop sales.
My question is that if we accept my previous assertion that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm of mobile computing driven by smartphones and especially tablet computers then what happens to the PC. If it goes out of fashion, initially in the home and laterly in the workplace, then what will become of Microsoft once its cash cow is slain? I suspect this is the question is keeping the lights burning in Redmond right now. And Cupertino and Mountain View
Big Blue dominated the IT landscape in a way that is unimaginable in today's market. PC's were referred to as genuine IBM's or inferior clones. Disk was often called DASD (Direct Access Serial Device), Errors were referred to as Abends. Job ads like "COBOL retrain to RPG/400 or PL/1" were commonplace. All IBM speak.
So what happended? Well nobody came along and built a better mainframe so IBM's fall from the top perch wasn't through like for like competition. It dominance was eroded on all fronts by the arrival of client server computing whose winners were the likes of Microsoft, HP, Sun, Oracle, Ingres, etc. For the record IBM didn't die, it adapted and is still a very successful IT company - but it doesn't dominate IT like it used to.
Many portray Microsoft as the natural successor to IBM and to my eyes Microsoft has started is downward decent from Top Dog to Also Ran. It still dominates the desktop OS and office productivity suites but apart from this its hits are thin on the ground. It does well with its RDBMS offering, SQL Server and the Xbox has made them a few quid. Where it has failed spectacularly was its inability to leverage its market dominance in the internet and now mobile internet. Bing, Zune and Windows Mobile are hardly destined for greatness, are they? Microsoft's great cash cow has always been Windows and Office software, mostly sold by default on the back of new PC and Laptop sales.
My question is that if we accept my previous assertion that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm of mobile computing driven by smartphones and especially tablet computers then what happens to the PC. If it goes out of fashion, initially in the home and laterly in the workplace, then what will become of Microsoft once its cash cow is slain? I suspect this is the question is keeping the lights burning in Redmond right now. And Cupertino and Mountain View
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