In an earlier post I extolled my beliefs from 1997 that the Network Computer would be big. Of course it flopped and the PC carried on as the main business tool of choice but one of the revelations from Steve Jobs biography is that the iMac that Apple launched in 1998 upon Steve Jobs return to the company was originally intended to be a Network Computer. It's not surprising that given the closeness between Larry Ellison, the NC's father, and Steve Jobs and their shared ambition to take a chunk out of Microsoft that they will have discussed such things and shared ideas.
Of course the price of PC's plummeted and undercut the savings of the NC. So whilst I may have been wrong in my beliefs at least I was wrong in good company - namely Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison.
Showing posts with label Oracle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oracle. Show all posts
Monday, November 7, 2011
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
And the award goes to .... The Hurt Locker
OK I know the Oscars are long finished but I just saw 'The Hurt Locker' at the weekend and I've wanted to tie it into a post for ages.
My two cents worth - I desperately wanted 'The Hurt Locker' to be a worthy winner of six oscars, especially as it won out over 'Avatar'. However, I was disappointed. Whilst it is a good film, it certainly isn't a great one. Best Film and Best Director - I don't think so. But this just reaffirms what I've always believed about luck and timing playing their part in awards ceremonies.
At my last ever Oracle Consulting conference I was led to believe by my Practice Manager that the project team I had lead was up for an Outstanding Performance Award. We had just finished a difficult 4 month project that was a great success. The client was happy and referenceable, the systems integrator couldn't praise us highly enough and was lining us up for more work. And we had achieved all of this with the minimum of fuss. OK, we'd worked a few weekends and late nights but nothing out of the ordinary.
So there I sat at the dinner at the final night of the conference fully expecting my team to be one of those to pick up an award. You guessed it though - we didn't even get a mention. I have to admit I was desperately pee'd off. The project that claimed the prize we'd been promised, by contrast, had been classic car crash IT. Badly managed, poor quality, late, over budget, all hands to the pumps, client threats, the whole lot. Some hours later my Practice Manager came skulking over with some lame explanation that the award was given as recognition for all the 'above and beyond' efforts put in by the other project team.
So my advice to you. If you want to win awards and get recognition go ahead and fcuk up your project and then flog your staff for 18 hours a day to correct your mistakes. Don't, whatever you do, just run a successful project without drama. I left Oracle a few months after that and the irony was that I got a posthumous award for another penultimate project I'd been on. Too little, too late.
My two cents worth - I desperately wanted 'The Hurt Locker' to be a worthy winner of six oscars, especially as it won out over 'Avatar'. However, I was disappointed. Whilst it is a good film, it certainly isn't a great one. Best Film and Best Director - I don't think so. But this just reaffirms what I've always believed about luck and timing playing their part in awards ceremonies.
At my last ever Oracle Consulting conference I was led to believe by my Practice Manager that the project team I had lead was up for an Outstanding Performance Award. We had just finished a difficult 4 month project that was a great success. The client was happy and referenceable, the systems integrator couldn't praise us highly enough and was lining us up for more work. And we had achieved all of this with the minimum of fuss. OK, we'd worked a few weekends and late nights but nothing out of the ordinary.
So there I sat at the dinner at the final night of the conference fully expecting my team to be one of those to pick up an award. You guessed it though - we didn't even get a mention. I have to admit I was desperately pee'd off. The project that claimed the prize we'd been promised, by contrast, had been classic car crash IT. Badly managed, poor quality, late, over budget, all hands to the pumps, client threats, the whole lot. Some hours later my Practice Manager came skulking over with some lame explanation that the award was given as recognition for all the 'above and beyond' efforts put in by the other project team.
So my advice to you. If you want to win awards and get recognition go ahead and fcuk up your project and then flog your staff for 18 hours a day to correct your mistakes. Don't, whatever you do, just run a successful project without drama. I left Oracle a few months after that and the irony was that I got a posthumous award for another penultimate project I'd been on. Too little, too late.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Monkey See Monkey Do
I remember seeing a Rodney Dangerfield film in the 1990's which was pretty much forgettable except for one scene. The scene was set in a typical university ampitheatre with a lecturer and say 200 students. Over time as the weeks passed many of the students opted to skip the lectures but record them on a tape recorders, until finally even the lecturer himself failed to show and simply played an audio recording of the lecture to the non existant students.
So what's the connection with IT. I worked with some Oracle PreSales in the 1990's. They were always a pretty busy bunch responding to RFI/RFP's and doing demos. At the time Oracle has a graduate recruitment program and one of the grads I knew was on secondment to PreSales.
Chatting one day I asked what she was doing and she said that she was responding to an Oracle Financials RFP. I was impressed, actually more baffled, that given their lack of experience that they were entrusted with this work that would normally be entrusted to a senior Financials PreSales resource. Digging a bit deeper the answer became obvious. I found out that the grad was pretty much cutting and pasting answers from previous RFP responses into the new one.
How could they do this? Easily, really, becuase the RFP's at the time we being generated by grads sitting in the Big Six consultancies and contained a random subset of the stock RFP Financials questions they had.
The difference is that our grads were working for free (chasing new business). Somehow I don't think that the client would be paying the Big Six consultancy grad rates for their RFP work.
So what's the connection with IT. I worked with some Oracle PreSales in the 1990's. They were always a pretty busy bunch responding to RFI/RFP's and doing demos. At the time Oracle has a graduate recruitment program and one of the grads I knew was on secondment to PreSales.
Chatting one day I asked what she was doing and she said that she was responding to an Oracle Financials RFP. I was impressed, actually more baffled, that given their lack of experience that they were entrusted with this work that would normally be entrusted to a senior Financials PreSales resource. Digging a bit deeper the answer became obvious. I found out that the grad was pretty much cutting and pasting answers from previous RFP responses into the new one.
How could they do this? Easily, really, becuase the RFP's at the time we being generated by grads sitting in the Big Six consultancies and contained a random subset of the stock RFP Financials questions they had.
The difference is that our grads were working for free (chasing new business). Somehow I don't think that the client would be paying the Big Six consultancy grad rates for their RFP work.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Keep it Simple Stupid or Keep it Stupid Simpleton
There's an urban myth that says NASA spend millions designing a pen that would work in space whilst the Russians got by with pencils. This is a perfect example of KISS. In reality the pen was developed cheaply by an independent contractor and sold to both NASA and the Soviet Space Agency.This myth and its ilk often used to be quoted when comparing the Cold War forces pitted against each other. By all accounts the MiG 29 is very low tech when compared to the F-15 Eagle for example and there was a time in the 80's when supposedly F-15's were only serviceable every 4 days out of 10 because of their inherent complexity.
This phenomenon has parallels with some of the choices we face in modern day IT. During the internet boom I was engaged bya dotcom to define a server architecture for their new revised classifieds website. The brief was that it needed to be scalable and have a very high availability. I provided the client with three options at the time which were:
- simple - a single highly resilient server with no failover capacity
- moderate - a hardware based failover cluster which required a hardware reboot to failover between nodes
- complex - a hardware/software based load balanced cluster which could handle a gracious soft failover
Being accustomed to having to cost justify these options I fully expected the client to select the simple or moderate solution. To my utter surprise they didn't blink an eyelid as went for the most expensive and complex option. They perceieved that the risk of an unplanned outage was so serious that they would literally spend millions to guard against the risk. They also explained that the sort of kudos they would get in the industry by following the likes of Amazon and announcing an infrastructure purchase in excess of a million dollars would enhance their perceived market valuation pre IPO.
In hindsight, I wish I had never proposed the complex option or that I should have been more vociferous in opposing it. Previously I'd had great success in applying the moderately complex model at previous sites. However, these were heady times and so long as the client understood the risks I was prepared to give it a go. The result, despite all my best efforts, was a disaster. We had severe performance issues from day one and our reliability was worse than it would have been had we picked either of the simpler options. It was humbling for me and a great reminder to me to always apply KISS.
The interesting thing though is that if we don't ever try to stretch ourselves now and again we'd all be building Mig 29's. For the record the F-15 supposedly has a 104 to 0 kill ratio.
This phenomenon has parallels with some of the choices we face in modern day IT. During the internet boom I was engaged bya dotcom to define a server architecture for their new revised classifieds website. The brief was that it needed to be scalable and have a very high availability. I provided the client with three options at the time which were:
- simple - a single highly resilient server with no failover capacity
- moderate - a hardware based failover cluster which required a hardware reboot to failover between nodes
- complex - a hardware/software based load balanced cluster which could handle a gracious soft failover
Being accustomed to having to cost justify these options I fully expected the client to select the simple or moderate solution. To my utter surprise they didn't blink an eyelid as went for the most expensive and complex option. They perceieved that the risk of an unplanned outage was so serious that they would literally spend millions to guard against the risk. They also explained that the sort of kudos they would get in the industry by following the likes of Amazon and announcing an infrastructure purchase in excess of a million dollars would enhance their perceived market valuation pre IPO.
In hindsight, I wish I had never proposed the complex option or that I should have been more vociferous in opposing it. Previously I'd had great success in applying the moderately complex model at previous sites. However, these were heady times and so long as the client understood the risks I was prepared to give it a go. The result, despite all my best efforts, was a disaster. We had severe performance issues from day one and our reliability was worse than it would have been had we picked either of the simpler options. It was humbling for me and a great reminder to me to always apply KISS.
The interesting thing though is that if we don't ever try to stretch ourselves now and again we'd all be building Mig 29's. For the record the F-15 supposedly has a 104 to 0 kill ratio.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
The Big Six
I have previously worked as a Consultant and in both cases they have been for software houses. I always felt that if you were going to pimp out yourself then you might aswell have the inside track and worked for the company that wrote the software. Despite the supposed prestige associated with them I was never ever tempted to work for any of the then so called 'Big Six' (now known as the Final Four) consulting firms as I don't believe that our personalities would have been compatable.
Why? If you had witnessed some of the things I've seen the Big Six get away with you'd understand. Some classics include:
- A 'Big Six' female PM lodging a sexual misconduct complaint against a male client PM who sought to challenge the success of a major project. I can't say whether the complaint had any grounds but it was clear that it would never have seen the light of day had the client PM kept his mouth shut.
- A Big Six firm getting a project I was working on shutdown because we were close to delivering more in 3 months than they had in two years and promising to finish out Project within a month. This one ended up in litigation I'm pleased to say.
- Rigging RFI scoring to pick the most expensive packages to implement rather than those that best fit the client requirements.
- Attending onsite training courses with the client staff and then advising the client on configuration against the advice of the consultant trainers.
- An Big Six 'oracle development practice' that was running around Sydney in the 90's developing applications. Only was that they'd never discovered what an Index was!
- Big Six consultants sitting onsite doing a online SQL training course whilst billing a grand a day.
I'm sure there are lot smore examples out there and I'm not saying that the consultancies I worked for were whiter than white but there's a long way between them and what I've seen of the Big Six.
Why? If you had witnessed some of the things I've seen the Big Six get away with you'd understand. Some classics include:
- A 'Big Six' female PM lodging a sexual misconduct complaint against a male client PM who sought to challenge the success of a major project. I can't say whether the complaint had any grounds but it was clear that it would never have seen the light of day had the client PM kept his mouth shut.
- A Big Six firm getting a project I was working on shutdown because we were close to delivering more in 3 months than they had in two years and promising to finish out Project within a month. This one ended up in litigation I'm pleased to say.
- Rigging RFI scoring to pick the most expensive packages to implement rather than those that best fit the client requirements.
- Attending onsite training courses with the client staff and then advising the client on configuration against the advice of the consultant trainers.
- An Big Six 'oracle development practice' that was running around Sydney in the 90's developing applications. Only was that they'd never discovered what an Index was!
- Big Six consultants sitting onsite doing a online SQL training course whilst billing a grand a day.
I'm sure there are lot smore examples out there and I'm not saying that the consultancies I worked for were whiter than white but there's a long way between them and what I've seen of the Big Six.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
More jokes at Larry's expense
Don't get me wrong - I think Oracle are a great company and I enjoyed working for them immensely. It's just that if you're going to work for them you need to develop a pretty thick skin. Besides which I think Larry can weather a joke or two.
So here are the best two jokes that used to do the rounds when I worked at the Big O.
"What do you call an optimistic Oracle Sales Rep?". Somebody who irons five shirts at the start of the week.
"What's the best platform that Oracle runs on?". Powerpoint.
So here are the best two jokes that used to do the rounds when I worked at the Big O.
"What do you call an optimistic Oracle Sales Rep?". Somebody who irons five shirts at the start of the week.
"What's the best platform that Oracle runs on?". Powerpoint.
Thin is the new Fat
Back in the mid 90's and arguably towards the end of the client server period there was a debate still being had on the relative merits of Thin versus Fat Client.
At the time Oracle Apps has just introduced 10SC (a gui fat client) replacing the previous green screen block character interface. I remember one PreSales technical slide from an Oracle Applications presentation in particular extolling the virtues of Fat Client over the three-tier Thin Client model that was used by SAP. The thin client was even given the derogatory label as a 'screenscraper'.
The funny thing is that just a short while later after the IT world had taken the browser to its heart I saw the same Tech PreSales giving the same presentation and giving exactly the opposite message with regard to Thin client after Oracle Apps has adopted the model.
So how do you know when an Oracle PreSales presenter is lying? Probably when their lips are moving.
At the time Oracle Apps has just introduced 10SC (a gui fat client) replacing the previous green screen block character interface. I remember one PreSales technical slide from an Oracle Applications presentation in particular extolling the virtues of Fat Client over the three-tier Thin Client model that was used by SAP. The thin client was even given the derogatory label as a 'screenscraper'.
The funny thing is that just a short while later after the IT world had taken the browser to its heart I saw the same Tech PreSales giving the same presentation and giving exactly the opposite message with regard to Thin client after Oracle Apps has adopted the model.
So how do you know when an Oracle PreSales presenter is lying? Probably when their lips are moving.
My Year of Living Dangerously
For exactly one year I gave up being technical and concentrated on the client relations side of the IT business. I remember the year exactly because FY96 (mid 1995-1996) was possibly the worst year of my professional life. FY96 was going to be Oracle's year of Customer Service.
I was picked out as having the prerequisite soft skills to work as one of twelve ambassadors within the customer base with the aim of improving overall referenceability. I was flattered as it meant reporting to a Director and I saw it as a great opportunity. Ultimately, however, the role came undone because:
- Halfway through the financial year it looked like Oracle Australia wasn't going to make its country numbers. Customer focus was dropped like a hot potato and sales targets re-emerged as the only real measure of success. My Director was given another portfolio related to Support Sales and given targets.
- Support and Sales could never agree on what our role was supposed to be about. Support (my organisation) wanted to us focus on the Tier 1 accounts and Sales wanted us to work as a Tier 3 Account Manager.
The long and the short of it was that whilst it was a poor year for me professionally I did gain a valuable insight into the inner workings of the sales organisation of a very successful software house.
It's easy to write of Salespeople as low, unscrupulous, pond life but that would be a generalisation and incorrect in many cases. The really successfull account managers were smart, driven and hard working. Were they honest? Well that's the 64 million dollar question. I prefer to think that they inhabit a world of greys rather than black and white. After a year of swimming with the sharks let's just say it was a relief to re-enter my technical world again. Binary, after all is pretty much a black and white sort of thing.
I was picked out as having the prerequisite soft skills to work as one of twelve ambassadors within the customer base with the aim of improving overall referenceability. I was flattered as it meant reporting to a Director and I saw it as a great opportunity. Ultimately, however, the role came undone because:
- Halfway through the financial year it looked like Oracle Australia wasn't going to make its country numbers. Customer focus was dropped like a hot potato and sales targets re-emerged as the only real measure of success. My Director was given another portfolio related to Support Sales and given targets.
- Support and Sales could never agree on what our role was supposed to be about. Support (my organisation) wanted to us focus on the Tier 1 accounts and Sales wanted us to work as a Tier 3 Account Manager.
The long and the short of it was that whilst it was a poor year for me professionally I did gain a valuable insight into the inner workings of the sales organisation of a very successful software house.
It's easy to write of Salespeople as low, unscrupulous, pond life but that would be a generalisation and incorrect in many cases. The really successfull account managers were smart, driven and hard working. Were they honest? Well that's the 64 million dollar question. I prefer to think that they inhabit a world of greys rather than black and white. After a year of swimming with the sharks let's just say it was a relief to re-enter my technical world again. Binary, after all is pretty much a black and white sort of thing.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
What no disk?
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Slumdog Billionaires
Congratulations are due today to Larry Ellison and his BMW Oracle Racing team for bringing home the Americas Cup to, err, America. Back in 1998 I was working as one of Larry's minions when he came down under to win the ill-fated Sydney to Hobart so I know how important this win will mean to him.
What is of interest to me, however, is that the Americas Cup has essentially become a massive ego contest between some of the world's richest billionaires. In this case between one Lawrence J Ellison, 65, US software billionaire and 4th richest man on the planet versus Ernesto Bertarelli, 44, Swiss Biotec billionaire and 52nd richest man.
Checking a list of billionaires on wikipedia I wasn't surprised to see that the computer industry contains more than its fair share including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen from Microsoft. Not present was Steve Jobs but at a rumoured $5bn and with Apple's remarkable growth he can't be far off joining that list.
Fortune has shined on Bill, Steve and Larry as some point, aside from dropping out of college, they were at the right place (Silicon Valley) at the right time (early 1970's and the advent of the silicon chip) with the right idea (hardware and/or software for the PC, or database for client server).
My query for today is where and when will the next set of billionaires be sourced. Obviously Larry and Sergey are the real winners from the Internet boom, but it looks like they are the exception of their age rather than the rule.
With hindsight it becomes clear that the early days of the personal computer and client/server computing presented opportunities for hobbyists working for love not money in their garages and with like minded friends in clubs (like the Homebrew Computer Club).
My suspicion is that this was a one off and it is unlikely that the next set of billionaires will be from the hobbyist fold. They will be from the likes of the Biotechs and it's more likely that they will complete their studies than drop out from the likes of MIT or Stanford.
I don't know why but I,for one, find that quite sad.
What is of interest to me, however, is that the Americas Cup has essentially become a massive ego contest between some of the world's richest billionaires. In this case between one Lawrence J Ellison, 65, US software billionaire and 4th richest man on the planet versus Ernesto Bertarelli, 44, Swiss Biotec billionaire and 52nd richest man.
Checking a list of billionaires on wikipedia I wasn't surprised to see that the computer industry contains more than its fair share including Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen from Microsoft. Not present was Steve Jobs but at a rumoured $5bn and with Apple's remarkable growth he can't be far off joining that list.
Fortune has shined on Bill, Steve and Larry as some point, aside from dropping out of college, they were at the right place (Silicon Valley) at the right time (early 1970's and the advent of the silicon chip) with the right idea (hardware and/or software for the PC, or database for client server).
My query for today is where and when will the next set of billionaires be sourced. Obviously Larry and Sergey are the real winners from the Internet boom, but it looks like they are the exception of their age rather than the rule.
With hindsight it becomes clear that the early days of the personal computer and client/server computing presented opportunities for hobbyists working for love not money in their garages and with like minded friends in clubs (like the Homebrew Computer Club).
My suspicion is that this was a one off and it is unlikely that the next set of billionaires will be from the hobbyist fold. They will be from the likes of the Biotechs and it's more likely that they will complete their studies than drop out from the likes of MIT or Stanford.
I don't know why but I,for one, find that quite sad.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
ROLAP smolap
One of the first ROLAP tools that I came across was Oracle's Discoverer product. As one of Larry's consultants I lead a Data Warehouse Team that delivered our reports using it when it was a brand new product. So new in fact that the client didn't realise that the paint hadn't dried on it and it was actually pre production software. They assumed that Discoverer 3.0 had been preceeded by versions 1.0 and 2.0. and there's another story in there about trusting Oracle Sales and Marketing, but I digress.
Some 12 years later I came across Oracle Discoverer again. To my suprise very little appears to have changed. The EUL and full client looked almost identical. I'm sure that under the hood there have been some changes for intranet, pdf's and web delivery but I'm still a bit amazed about the lack of innovation in the ROLAP world.
Business Objects finally seem to be getting things together with BOXI R3 and I have to admit that I haven't seen Cognos's stuff for a while so for them I can't comment.
The only real innovation I've seen in the last few years was ProClarity, before they were swallowed up by Microsoft, but that's OLAP and not ROLAP offering.
A few years ago I started to believe that the Reporting tools were stagnating and that cubes - whether OLAP or ROLAP weren't the answer. I hoped that the move into RIA (Rich Internet Applications) and tools like Curl would fill that gap but as yet nothing seems to have developed there.
Maybe new platforms like the iPhone and more importantly the iPad will spur the sleeping Reporting giants into a new series of innovation. I hope so.
Some 12 years later I came across Oracle Discoverer again. To my suprise very little appears to have changed. The EUL and full client looked almost identical. I'm sure that under the hood there have been some changes for intranet, pdf's and web delivery but I'm still a bit amazed about the lack of innovation in the ROLAP world.
Business Objects finally seem to be getting things together with BOXI R3 and I have to admit that I haven't seen Cognos's stuff for a while so for them I can't comment.
The only real innovation I've seen in the last few years was ProClarity, before they were swallowed up by Microsoft, but that's OLAP and not ROLAP offering.
A few years ago I started to believe that the Reporting tools were stagnating and that cubes - whether OLAP or ROLAP weren't the answer. I hoped that the move into RIA (Rich Internet Applications) and tools like Curl would fill that gap but as yet nothing seems to have developed there.
Maybe new platforms like the iPhone and more importantly the iPad will spur the sleeping Reporting giants into a new series of innovation. I hope so.
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