Ask HN: How would you take on Oracle?

5 points by goodwinb 15 years ago | 13 comments

In their last quarter Oracle made $8.1 billion in revenue on software. My experience when I run across Oracle software is not one of amazement, elegance, or being impressed. I am more impressed by things I see on Hacker News or in the open source software area. It is almost like there is an arbitrage opportunity to bring the cunning and smarts of the hn/oss to the world of stodgy but lucrative business software. So I ask you, hacker newsers, if you were going to take on one Oracle software segment which would it be? (Some segments include: Fusion Middleware; PeopleSoft, Hyperion, or other Applications; CRM; Enterprise Management). How would you do things differently than Oracle? Corollary question: If Oracle is throwing out $1billion to acquire companies like ATG should we be encouraging each other to build more enterprise-y software as opposed to the next twitter client?

mindcrime 15 years ago |

Corollary question: If Oracle is throwing out $1billion to acquire companies like ATG should we be encouraging each other to build more enterprise-y software as opposed to the next twitter client?

No, don't be silly. The last thing the world needs is more startups producing enterprise software. The future is Social Media and real-time geo-located, location-aware activity-stream checkins with gamification and photo-sharing, plus Q+A, and a AJAX enabled TODO list. So, yeah, everybody should be working on building something like that, not enterprise crap.

/me whistles quietly to himself, and goes back to building enterprise software that he can sell for money, secure in the knowledge that the threat of additional competitors has now been abated.

goodwinb 15 years ago | |

I'd like to hear more your experiences about breaking into the enterprise world and selling your knowledge management software.

mindcrime 15 years ago | | |

Me too. :-)

All joking aside, I'm still VERY early in this process... I'm in what Steve Blank would call "Customer Discovery," so I don't have a lot to talk about yet. But as I get more into it, and when I have some time, I'll be blogging and writing about my experiences.

zooey 15 years ago | |

yeah the future is social media....good luck

mauriciob 15 years ago | | |

Good luck not reading things thoroughly.

edw 15 years ago |

I'm going to quote a Paul Graham quote that I came across in another item (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423054) just a few minutes ago:

> The "next Google" is unlikely to be a search engine, however, just as the "next Microsoft" was not a desktop software company. I used competing directly with Google as an example of a problem with maximum difficulty, not maximum payoff. Maximum payoff is more likely to come from making Google irrelevant than from replacing it. How exactly? I have no more than vague ideas about that. I wouldn't expect to be able to figure out the right answer, just as I wouldn't have expected anyone to figure out in 1990 what would make Microsoft irrelevant.

Don't try to take on Oracle, try to make Oracle irrelevant. Or make the million features their huge, enterprisey systems have irrelevant. Joel Spolsky wrote an essay years ago where he argued that software has to either be cheaper than $500 (the amount a manager can put on their corporate card) or more expensive than $25,000 or so (the amount you must charge if you need to wine and dine and buy lap dances for potential customers).

Do you want to hire a salesforce (and raise the money to pay them) to give blowjobs to IT directors? No, I didn't think so.

goodwinb 15 years ago | |

26% of Oracle's expenses are sales and marketing. (Those strip club trips add up.) In all seriousness, is it just a necessary evil? If you could hold your nose and do it would it not be a barrier to entry for your competitors also? Could you do enterprise software without the sales army?

zooey 15 years ago | |

I think people should use software like oracle and look and read (some of) its enormous amount of documentation to understand what it can do BEFORE saying it is shit.

Oracle is a very very very good database. Stop with this non sense

edw 15 years ago | | |

I wasn't thinking about Oracle-the-database but all the other stuff they sell that makes huge, faceless corporations go. No YC-style company is in a position to take on Oracle toe-to-toe, in the lapdance-and-BJ market. The only option is some sort of incremental disruption where a product takes market share from Oracle at the low end, where Oracle is probably happy to see these not-very-valuable customers desert them. (This is straight from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma.)

And for the record, I programmed against Oracle using oraperl back in 1994.

sdz 15 years ago | | |

I'm sure some parts of Oracle's database are very good. The part I work with (OLAP), though, is ludicrously bad. New bugs are introduced with almost every database patch, and the behavior of existing functions have changed without notice. For this privilege, Oracle charges license fees by the core.

imechura 15 years ago |

Breaking into the enterprise market has it's own difficulties as I am sure you are already aware of. Having been directly and indirectly involved in several large IT software purchases I can tell you that more often than not, large purchases/contracts are not made based on features and/or price. They are made 3 levels above you by personal relationships.

That is why you have huge IT shops wasting countless hours dealing with clearcase UCM inadequacies when there are comparable and even better options available for free or cheap.

At the time of purchase the argument given is that the staff required to administer the free software will cost more than the license and support contract but in the end you still end up hiring a full time staff of 14 to manage that clearcase system and blame issues on the hardware.

In the case you can break through the gold-ol-boy sales process with your revolutionary product the cycle for a product costing as little as 20k can be upwards of 18 months and if it is terminated at the zero hour you have literally wasted hundred of man hours chasing a deal that you will not be getting paid for.

To answer the original question, If I where to take on oracle or attempt to make them irrelevant I would be Atlassian software (JIRA/Confluence/etc.). While they are not offering competing products to oracle or IBM they do have the ability to work from the developer upwards to find there way into even the largest enterprises.

pclark 15 years ago |

Often having a large sales team (and operations in general) is as challenging as the technical hurdles, if not harder.

ahi 15 years ago |

Oracle doesn't sell software. Oracle sells suits with warm fuzzy feelings.