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Ellison: Linux Will Soon Decimate MS Windows
cioxx writes "Speaking to a few-hundred ISVs at an Oracle-sponsored event in New York, Larry Ellison made a bold prediction , also covered in Infoworld, stating: "(Microsoft has) already been killed by one open-source product. Slaughtered, wiped out, taken from market dominance to irrelevance [...]", referring to Apache's displacement of MS IIS server. He continues on with a claim that battle for datacenter dominance is looming with a clear advantage on the side of Open-Source platforms, and desktop would follow once Star Office becomes completely "usable" to compete with MS Office. "And it's going to happen to them again on Linux." Newsforge also has a related article on Oracles ongoing linux efforts.
IIS never had a chance. IIS came late. Everyone wanted a web site so they learned/ran Apache. IIS was never and has never been dominant. I do agree that Open source will take over for alot of things and Microsoft will be relegated to either another Linux distro or a application and hardware only company.
Gorkman
You should study language a little more. Definitions change, and the real meanings of words are defined by their usage. Meaning is defined by language, not the other way around.
Just as an example, the word car is no longer used to describe a two-wheeled Celtic chariot. That doesn't mean you go around sneering up your nose at all those people who oh-so-incorrectly use car instead of automobile.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Q.: What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?
A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison
Lets face it- Allison likes to needle MS and make outrageous claim. He can afford to, since he is one of the richest men on Earth. But before we all stand and cheer "MS is dead! Long live Linux!", let's remember that Apache is one of very few open-source projects which can compete with MS products in terms of market share. And you can bet your pants that in any of those areas, including web servers, MS is doing all it can to reverse that situation.
So don't applaud Ellison's high words- they may do your ego good, but what the open-source world needs is better software, better marketing and less fragmentation. We are still a long long way from beating MS, so don't rest on your laurels just yet...
Just my 2 cents worth...
on PostgreSQL and MySQL.why should the market forces that apply to MS not apply to Oracle? Build those yachts while the sun shines, Larry!
At a conservative estimate, MySQL is 25 years behind the state of the art. No, I'm not even kidding or trolling, it's a fact - compare the state of relational databases in the late 70s to where MySQL is now. According to the press release, MySQL last week got features like relational integrity, row level locking, transactions and caching that products like Oracle and DB2 have had, quite literally, for decades. MySQL still does not have subqueries, stored procedures, or procedural constraints. And neither Oracle nor DB2 are standing still, they are continually adding new features. Larry has no need to lose any sleep over MySQL.
I have limited experience (managed to install and set up RH 8.0 as a router for my home network) with linux but here are a few thoughts.
Linux is not ready for the dsesktop. The recent discussion about mozilla incorporating smooth scrolling illustrates a fundamental problem within the linux community. Most *nix users who want to see linux replace windows on the desktop aren't willing to compete with MS in the areas which really matter to a non techie user. Many people here laughed and scorned the screenshots of the recent longhorn builds where you had lots of new UI features, admittedly most of them will probably not amount to anything but the UI does matter.
For a non techie user the choice at the moment is windows which is very easy to use but is prone to crashes amnd viruses, alternatively they have linux which is very difficult to get the hang of when coming from a windows background. Reliability means nothing if the user can't get anything done with linux. I'm no MS fanboy but I do beleive that they have gone in the right direction with the XP interface, and I also don't think you can really argue with the fact that games, multimedia and simple office apps are all easier to use for a non techie user on a windows platform.
Now whether MS dominace is down to a genuinely more instinctive UI or whether people are just more familiar with it (and hence more productive) is down to debate. I'm sure many linux advocates will dismiss the idea that MS's windows UI is "better" that any of linux distos but they are reeally missing the point.
If you want linux on the desktop then linux developers need to compete with MS. This includes making sure there is support for all types of multimedia, improving choice of games, improving window responsiveness, and all the other little MS UI elements that most *nix users would probably consider frivolous.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
True, definitions change, but it's still reasonable to encourage people to use a more appropriate word instead of morphing the meaning of a similar but different word. An example is the American adoption of the word "momentarily" to mean "in a moment" when it really mans "for a moment". When an American Airlines hostess announces that "we will be landing momentarily" I always picture us doing a touch-and-go!
Following your argument, microsoft hadn't a chance when they (finally) got into the internet hype and launched Internet Explorer. They were very late to acknoledge the importance of internet, and netscape had by then achieved a pretty dominant position. However, they did succeed in displacing Netscape, and didn't succeed in displacing Apache. Obviously, there are other reasons why IIS never really got any foothold, Apache being open source and a really good product being the most import one, I think.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
Larry Ellison has about zero credibility. Remember "Network Computers" and how they were going to take over the world? Sure, Larry. There have been many other examples over the years. His crystal ball is more tarnished and cracked than Miss Cleo's.
Larry is just being a cheerleader because he sees economic benefit in the vision of a Microsoft-less future. He'd also like to see Bill Gates take a hit. That's it. No facts here, move along.
You people _really_ lack historical perspective, by and large.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I think it'd be interesting to see the number of times Ellison has come up and claimed 'this or that will kill Microsoft' over the last few years.
I seem to remember something about network computers. As far as I can tell that was the biggest bit of vapor hardware ever. I've never seen anything like that in the enterprise.
Were there any others?
But not to say that I don't think that LInux has a chance. From where I sit I see lots of 4 Way Xeon MP servers coming along that are being at least tested against a Sun box. I've seen them save some companies over $2.0M a year in just hardware maintenance costs alone. So it can be done. However, they're moving Sun out of the datacenter with these, not Microsoft. Mainly because Microsoft was never in that space (yet).
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
MySQL is a lot faster than Oracle on comparable hardware and it's progressing quickly towards including the more useful features of big db suites like Oracle. The majority of the websites that use a db use MySQL. Oracle is way to expensive for small websites and doesn't provide what most large websites need. That's a big market Oracle is missing out on.
PostgreSQL isn't bad either but MySQL tends to be the favorite of web developers. They compete with each other and help drive each other forward.
I don't think either MySQL or Postgres are a challenge to Oracle in the data center but as they mature they will be more so. They have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight too so they can mature much faster than products such as Oracle. They are missing features but they are adding those as demand grows or someone is willing to sponsor the addition.
Everything said about Apache vrs IIS and Linux vrs Windows does also apply to MySQL vrs Oracle. It's all a matter of time. I think Oracle may bite the bullet a lot harder than Microsoft though because they are less diversified. Unless of course they open source Oracle and manage to adapt to the change. They have more time to adapt than Microsoft though sense they are more specialized.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Nonsense, in most enterprise environments your big smart Windows clients are completely blocked if "the server" or "the network" is down. You can't login, can't use outlook, can't access your documents etc etc etc.
What people hated was the lack of GUI capabilities of old terminals. And yes, some people hate not having any control over their "own machine". I fear however there is no place for such people in todays enonomic climate: those are the ones playing all day with windows settings, new programs etc, I think todays CIO shall be happy to get rid of such people.