Oracle Fined For Benchmark Claims

pickens writes "Information Week reports that the Transaction Processing Council, which sets benchmarks for measuring database performance, has fined Oracle $10,000 for Oracle's ads published August 27 and September 3 on the front page of the Wall Street Journal which violate the 'fair use' rules that govern TPC members by 'comparing an existing TPC result to something that does not exist.' The ads said to expect a product announcement on October 14 that would demonstrate that some sort of hybrid Oracle-Sun setup would offer two-digit performance on the TPC-C online transaction processing test compared to IBM's 6 million transaction per minute result on its Power 595 running AIX and DB2. The TPC Council serves as a neutral forum where benchmark results are aired and compared. 'At the time of publication, they didn't have anything' submitted to the council says Michael Majdalany, administrator of the council adding that that Oracle is free to use TPC numbers once it submits an audited result for the Sun-Oracle system. Fines by the TPC are infrequent, with the last action — a $5,000 fine — levied against Microsoft in 2005 for unsupported claims about SQL Server. 'It takes a fairly serious violation to warrant a member being fined,' says Majdalany."

Comments

Solution: Match the punishment to the sales

[justthinkit]

Gear the punishment to sales. For example, in Europe the traffic fines are related to the person's income. So the head of Nokia got a speeding ticket for 12 million dollars.

In this case estimate how many sales were affected by this lie, and make the fine equal to the estimated profit on those sales. Then this type of problem would never happen again.

Wait, never mind, I forgot we are talking about a company based in the United States of Corruption.