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Larry Ellison Believes Apple Is Doomed
Nerval's Lobster writes "Oracle CEO Larry Ellison thinks that Apple will collapse without Steve Jobs at the helm. In a televised interview with CBS News, scheduled to air August 13, Ellison called the deceased Jobs 'brilliant' and compared him to iconic creators such as Thomas Edison and Pablo Picasso. When asked about Apple's future now that Jobs is dead, Ellison didn't hold back: 'We already know, we saw — we conducted the experiment, it's been done.' Raising his hand above his head, presumably to indicate the rise of Apple's fortunes during Jobs' initial reign, Ellison said: 'We saw Apple with Steve Jobs.' Then he lowered his hand: "We saw Apple without Steve Jobs." In other words, the period following Jobs' ouster, when the company's revenues declined and it launched whole portfolios of consumer products that failed. 'We saw Apple with Steve Jobs,' Ellison continued, raising his hand above his head again — this time, to suggest that incandescent period following Jobs' return to the company, when it released the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and a variety of bestselling PCs. 'And now, we're going to see Apple without Steve Jobs,' he finished, and his hand fell."
later, a bear eats fish and takes a dump in the woods. Story at 10
When Jobs was ousted they went from a $1 billion a year revenue company to a $10 billion a year company a few years later. It was Sculley's ouster that doomed Apple ;)
He's right - Android is eating iOS's lunch. I can see it in my own family. My oldest boy remembers when having an Apple product was cool. My next son could care less - he picked up his first tablet for under $100 and hasn't thought about Apple since. My elementary-age daughter calls her tablet an "iPad", but it too is an Android device. All my family's phones are now Android phones. If I was ever going to buy another laptop, it would be a Chrome book. Etc, etc, etc.
Yeah, Larry Ellison's advice ...
Bringing you such commercial successes as The Network Computer.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
It feels like Apple has lost direction since Jobs passed. For example, look at iOS 7: It's a mishmash of awkward design language, with inconsistencies and a flat, boring look that likely never would have been approved by Steve. All that lovely texture that iOS had is gone. People are already complaining about it and I'm sure there will be an even bigger uproar once it goes public. They took inspiration from MICROSOFT for crying out loud!
Look at the rumored (but very likely) "low cost iPhone". It's made of cheap plastic, which Apple had been trying to get away from for years with Jobs at the helm. Steve would have likely insisted that they find a way to build the iPhone out of its current materials but less expensively, and I'm sure the engineers would have lived up to the challenge.
He was a perfectionist, and while I didn't agree with all his decisions, his absolute refusal to compromise and insist that everything be exactly right is what led to Apple becoming what it is. I already see things going downhill and it's not going to be pretty moving forward.
More to the point, Larry thinks the NSA program of collecting everything is "excellent" and "necessary".
Larry also is whining about Google adhering to the Sun Java license as it was written and intended. Larry would prefer they send him large amounts of money instead.
Larry can go to his private Hawaiian island fuck himself.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Brilliant as a salesman, yes. As a tweaker, and idea thief, yes,
As an inventor - "like Edison", an innovator?? HECK NO!!!
Jobs invented NOTHING, as far as technology.
Edison was a dick who took credit for work that his underlings did. Jobs is of the same cut.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
The main difference between Apple without Jobs the first time 'round and now is that The Apple Jobs left the first time wasn't shaped by him but by the people who ousted him. This Apple however has Jobs stamp all over it, it has the people he picked, he trusted and he trained. If you think Jobs was a genius, which Ellison does, then that has to count for something.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
it sounds kind of hand wave-y to me.
At Tanagra.
Wow, that is as dramatic of a story summary as I have ever seen on Slashdot. Made me tingle all over...
No one would argue that Steve Jobs made important contributions to modern computing. However, it's hardly surprising that a CEO, such as Ellison, would have an inflated perception of the importance of one individual (i.e. the CEO) to the success of a company. If he didn't believe that, then it would be hard to justify the millions he pays himself every year.
Apple hates java maybe?
Apple can get in line behind the rest of us.
#DeleteChrome
Oracle hates java...
If only a bear would eat Ellison, but unfortunately bears have too good a taste to eat sacks of shit.
CEO's get paid obscene amounts of money. It's reasonable to expect them to justify such a lavish outlay by telling the public how "unique," "indispensable," and "valuable they are.
News at 11.
Nonsense, Steve had a lot of ideas. Screwing over his friends for money, parking in handicapped spaces because he was rich, ending Apple's charitable giving programs--all Steve ideas!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Clearly you don't work with databases. They are the 900 pound gorilla of that market.
Apple, and the computing industry, was different in 1993. Apple wasn't making smartphones and iPods; Microsoft could kill small companies merely by issuing a press release implying that the features being developed by these small companies would be included in a new version of Windows NT ... 'soon'; Google didn't exist, on-line digital media didn't exist apart from binary groups on a certain use-able net that we're not allowed to mention.
Time for this fellow to update his examples.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
He was also the reality check for the ideas.
Just look at how iTunes has spun out of control since his death. The versions released since then are disasters, with common tasks now obscured or seemingly not available anymore.
Steve would have torn the whole team new assholes and then fired them for the POS that is iTunes today.
When the marketing weenies take charge, the company is doomed. All they know is a stupid check list of what's supposed to be cool and competitor's features.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
One of the issues with all the "media marketplaces" like iTunes, Google Play and yes, the MS Store, is that they're not going to disappear anytime soon. I'm not sure how many people are going to abandon an entire app platform once they've sunk a lot of money into it. Before the smartphone era, changing phone carriers meant that you would have to rebuy a few ringtones and other carrier specific stuff, but an Apple to Android or reverse switch means you have to rebuy a lot more. I've specifically avoided buying tons and tons of apps on any platform for that simple reason...it becomes much more expensive to switch later on. So even if the music is sort of DRM-free, either inertia or a very large collection of purchased software is going to keep a lot of people on one platform or another for a while. Since Apple charges premiums for new hardware to access this stuff, they're in good shape for a while.
With the new online store model, the store owner is guaranteed a very good chance of long term survival even if their market share drops over time. Microsoft and Adobe are taking it one step further and introducing stuff like Office 365 and Creative Cloud. Previously only large businesses signed month-to-month rental agreements with software companies, and now consumers are being dragged in as well. Guaranteed revenue stream vs. one-time perpetual license.
So why hasn't Microsoft collapsed? (and for people saying it has....yeh uhm ok).
Microsoft aren't ever going to be the company that rolled out Windows XP and was threatened with anti-trust around the world ever again. Someone else, perhaps Google will end up in that boat, but Microsoft have their own future to sort out now that they are a follower, again.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Because Ellison is so credible.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Because publicly traded companies breed and promote people who stay within the box, and apply the model that the investors, accountants, and whoever else are OK with. Bureaucracy and politics are self perpetuating cycles that assimilate good ideas to meet their wold view.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
"...wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence." -Larry Ellison
I don't "do" Apple but hearing Larry Ellison postulate about the future is laughable. The guy got all his money through vendor lock-in and insane licensing models. If he was that bright, he'd be more innovative.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Apple stands behind no one. It would cast a shadow on the shiny.
Here's why.
Disclosure: I've been using the Mac as my preferred platform wince 1985.
The recent releases of the Mac OS (post Snow Leopard) have been weird and much less useful. Everything is animated, you can't turn the animations off and often, you are forced to wait for the animations to finish.
This causes the UI to get in the way of productivity.
Many times the animations are distracting. Small, darty animations distract many and make them uneasy, since these are the same motions of a mouse or roach. These reactions are felt way before the human mind has a thought formed on what they have seen. It's a more innate reaction. The more you use the system, the more uncomfortable you get with it. And you can't turn them off.
Also, there has been this push to push UI metaphors from iOS on to the desktop. THIS IS TERRIBLE. On my 17" Macbook, in Lion, my scroll bars became the width of a quarter. How is this better than the previous OS? It isn't. Also, auto termination of apps, where the app isn't really auto terminated, but just the UI is? All to save 5 MB of RAM? I don't know about you, but I actually use my File: Open menu to open docs and when I can't tab to an app because it quit behind my back without my permission, I hate this.
iOS 7. OMG. Where to start? Simply by looking at the publicly released images, the design inspires "weak and feeble", with overly saturated (painful) colors against too much white. The functional gears Settings icon of the past has been replaced with a weak looking non functional design that can't work. It doesn't do anything. It's not connected to anything. It's thin and weak.
On this front, the initial releases looked terrible and were panned by many. Even the creator of the font that they used (Helvetica Neue) stated so. One terrible thing is that many elements that were buttons or tappable, used to have a button treatment that made the UI instantly more understandable since a button LOOKED like a button. Now, text is simply blue. Unless it's in another application and then it might be purple, or yellow. This is bad. This is a step back. This forces the user to guess more as to what is a clickable/tappable element and makes the elements harder to see. This isn't helping make an easier to use UI.
Sandboxing. This is the WRONG way to do security. I don't know what the right way is, but this is a royal PITA.
Devices. Gluing the contents to the case? So you can't even update your own machine? Even with the 2011 models, it's not rosy. Simply to replace the keyboard on my 17" MacBook will cost me 500 dollars. 500 damn dollars on a two year old Machine. Sweet mother of suck.
iTunes 11 shipped with a really easy to find data loss bug that cost me 6000 archived podcasts.
There may be some great engineering going on under the hood, but all I've seen coming out of Apple since Snow Leopard have been substandard OS releases that are slower than Snow Leopard, with questionable features that do not make the Mac easier to use. Even the look of the new software is not what it once was. Look at iTunes 11 (fugly) vs. iTunes 10 (crisp).
And no more 17" MBP? Look. We're all getting older and cramming more pixels into a smaller space isn't going to make the screen easier to read.
Airdrop? Who cares! Give me a FAST UI that doesn't burn my eyeballs off.
I'm really upset with the direction Apple's taking. Snow Leopard was the last release that I could use to get work done and from the publicly released photos of iOS 7, I'm sadly counting my days as a Mac user.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Edison was a dick who took credit for work that his underlings did. Jobs is of the same cut.
CEOs like NFL quarterbacks always get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when they go badly. It's the nature of the position. Jobs didn't usually take personal credit for much of what happened while he was in charge. His speeches seldom revolved around his own contributions. Rather he got credit for it from outsiders whether he deserved it or not. Apple has a LOT of very talented people working there and while Steve Jobs clearly was a very effective CEO, he could not possibly have been responsible for everything that happened. Business is a team sport and even if you have a standout player they can't do it all on their own.
Apple is dying, but not because Steve Jobs left the helm. It's because of greed and poorly designed devices.
As a recent example, my friend's iPad battery recently went belly up. She *loves* her iPad. But they want $289 to replace the battery, so she bought a $700 touch-screen all-in-one computer from Sony and is pleased as punch.
How can you expect to retain market share when replacing a freaking BATTERY costs half the price of a device?
And how many *entire* Android devices can be had for $300?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Oracle man hates Java man
They have a fight, Oracle wins
Oracle man
You fail horribly at reply direction.
Don't know why people are bashing on Larry Ellison so much. Larry Ellison & Steve Jobs were close friends (Steve was even the photographer at Larry Ellison's wedding). So of course Ellison knows what he's talking about when he says that Apple is doomed without Steve Jobs.
I can't think of any Oracle product that competes with Apple.
Oracle 12 and MySQL 5 compete with Apple's Filemaker.
We are all doomed.
In a billion years or so the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our galaxy.
A few billion after that the sun will run out of Hydrogen and Helium and turn into a red giant.
Theres also a risk of a major meteor impact wiping out 90% of all life on this planet.
And global warming etc.
Larry's comment parallels those that rant that Microsoft is doomed because Apple will eat its lunch. Or those that laugh at Apple and Microsoft saying they are both doomed because cheap Android devices will be their end. Those are extreme comments. Apple, Google, and Microsoft will both continue making record profits that will just increase. For a company, profit is the only true measure of success. They're all adapting. I think the only true change that has come about is that now coders like myself have to be knowledgeable of cross-platform methods so they can hit all the markets, both present and future. Peace out.
resentment over the sky-high support fees, snaky sales pitches, bait-and-switch product lineup, and failure to patch Java holes has never been (climbs on ladder, out window, up fire escape, stands on chimney, raises hand) higher...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
As a yacht salesmen I must respectfully disagree.
I'm starting to get tired of this Thomas Edison comparison that I read from time to time. Thomas Edison's inventions inventions fundamentally changed the human condition. Specifically the light bulb. Suddenly the entire human race can get a lot done inside larger indoor spaces and at night where previously limited lighting prevented many activities. The iPhone did not in anyway change the human condition on these scales. Combined with Edison's other inventions Jobs looks even less important. He made a few good devices using existing technology. He did not reinvent the light bulb.
Apple is about fashion. iPhones are still selling like hot cakes, and people don't give a damn wether some Android device is more powerful. iStuff is hip, looks flashy, has a ton of accessories available and never will stop being hip, cool and well designed. It's like the Zippo Lighter or the Vespa Scooter.
To detail the Vespa example and why it comes to my mind: I just went looking at Scooters these days - Piaggios Vespa sells at least 700 Euros more expensive than the rest of the lot ... and that's with bargain deals. There are Scooters of simular quality from the far east, yet at my dealer of choice, of all 50ccm Scooters on display 25% of them were Vespas. Not Piaggio, but the actuall Vespa, in all colors and variants. They even got a new luxury model that sells for 7500$(!!), the Vespa 946. A friggin' 50ccm Scooter for 7500+$!!
And I tell you what: if I had the money, I'd probably buy one. You know why? I don't want to think about Scooters. I want mine to look cool and timeless and be fun to ride. Most people are like that when it comes to Smartphones and computing devices - I'm not, but then again, I'm an expert. With Scooters I'm not. I'm like "Oh, this one looks cool, rides nice and also comes in black & chrome and real metal. And you can get flashy jackets and gear with the same logo. I'm sold." There was a mechanical engineer there today with her 9 year old son. She didn't even look at the quality Taiwan models. It had to be a brown metallic touring Vespa with original Vespa topcase, 3500 Euros vs. 2000 Euros be damned. And I bet she has an iPhone for the same reason. It's like Levis vs. cheapo, Coka Cola vs. no-name Coke. People by the "original", no matter the price.
No, Apple isn't doomed by a long shot.
Apple has turned owning an iDevice into a fashion statement - an advantage that Oracle, MS and quite a few other companies would kill for. Unless Apple really screws up and breaks their *very* sophisticated product development pipeline - which I don't see happening - Apple will to just fine. Especially with gross margins still well north of 30%. Margins and mindshare even Oracle probably can only dream of, btw.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
BS. Filemaker is more of a competitor to MS Access.
Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL also all run fine on OSX.
Apple has no dog in that fight. Filemaker is NOT going to do well as a massive enterprise database and has never claimed to be able to.
... Johnny Ive and the rest of the folks working for him did. Jobs did three things: he specifically insisted on being a premium brand and quality to justify it, he hired people that could execute on that, and as the voice of the company he sold the brand and it's products very well.
The same people are there and I don't suspect that they are being asked to do much different. I think that a lower-cost iPhone is not a bad idea -- BUT, it better adhere to the overall quality mantra and still be a premium device in the price-point or that will be deleterious to Apple.
However, Tim Cook, bright as he may be, seems utterly dispassionate about Apple and Apple products. When he gives a keynote address, it's as though he's selling the proverbial widget; he doesn't communicate that he's devoted to the product or that he is earnestly striving towards some grand vision. When Cook talks, you know he's there to sell you widgets - no vision, no excitement, just a product that he feigns a vague interest in so that he can sell them. Cook needs to be replaced - if not as CEO, then as the public face of Apple.
Apple's got a pretty nice tech stack going for it. There's a lot of possibilities there, and while the future of Apple is still in play, it's on pretty good footing. What it really needs to do, though, is pick up the pace on development of it's products. Jobs had a habit of making sure that there was always something new to keep the press coming back to report on the latest and greatest from Cupertino. Whether intentionally or not, Cook is not following that pattern. Jobs would rather suffice for a small but important upgrade than wait unknown periods of time for a show-stopper, and he'd always have product lined up to go when it was announced (again, Cook is behaving more like HP/Dell/Microsoft/Sony in not keeping with that tradition).
What we saw before was Apple being run by Sculley, Spindler and Amelio, none of whom can hold a candle to Tim Cook. What Apple has today is an executive team who were pretty much all hand-picked by Steve. Sculley was Steve's great recruitment screw-up, and he was far more careful after that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Re:CEO badmouths competitor & tries to demoral
Truncated header sounds a bit kinky. But I won't judge.
Nothing was mentioned about Bill Gates being as key to the structure and operation of Microsoft as Steve Jobs seemed to be in Apple. Just because they are both prominent founders of similar companies does not mean, in any way, that the occupy the same role or function in each company, both having completely different cultures and structures.
Bill never saw the internet coming. If he hadn't dropped out of college he might have got into telnet, gopher or archie servers and seen some potential. That he saw Java as a major threat to Microsoft says something about how myopic he could be. Ellison must have enjoyed quite a few laughs will watching Bill and Steve Ballmer thrash around at Microsoft. Is it any wonder Oracle haven't come out with a video game console, such as an O-Box?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Since Jobs' death, they've been riding on the coattails of his work. Once his ideas run out, they'll be done-for. Unless Woz can pull magic out of his pocket and take over the reigns at Apple, that is.
I generally sympathize with predictions of gloom for Apple's long-term outlook. But they are based on changes in the market that Apple has been unsuccessful in adapting to. And to some extent, this difficulty started when Jobs was still around. Specifically: - Android eating into their market share on Tablets and handhelds - Changing business models. Less and less people are buying paid apps, making advertising the main source of revenue for app developers. Admob (Google) controls 90% of the market. What this boils down to is that Google gets a significant cut of revenue on the Apple App Store. This fraction is increasing and Apple's attempts at competing in the space (iAd) have failed dramatically. Having admitted a negative outlook, it is impressive to see that the current leadership is trying to define their own vision, rather than trying to guess "what Steve would have done." Making iOS 7 non-skeumorphic, i.e., not using physical analogies in the user interface was a complete departure from Jobs' vision of a "beautiful, immersive user interface that you already know how to use." Apple's leadership is trying to redefine Apple as a company and trying to evolve its ideas to the world today. I disagree with some of the comments that the iOS 7 UI sucks. The home screen is kind of ugly when you look at the 80's style icons, but I've been using it for a few months I significantly prefer it to the old interface. You have to use it for a while to feel the difference. When you look at a 3d beveled button with a shadow, you subject your brain to a lot more information than you do when you look at a simple rounded rectangle. Your brain has to exert itself just a tiny little bit more. It's hard to explain because it happens at the subconscious level. This bit of saving adds up over time, making the interface easier and more pleasant to use. The decision to ditch arguably one of the iPhone's biggest assets - its skeumorphic interface - and start from scratch must have taken a humongous amount of courage, especially for a company Apple's size. With the way things are headed (Android, Ads, competition from Amazon, Google) it's clear that they cannot do without this kind of courage and determination. I wonder, though, if it would have been possible at all under Steve's reign....
...ok, I'll bite. I bought my android phone because it has a physical keyboard, a better processor, the same amount of RAM, and the same amount of storage as an iphone, while being cheaper and giving me more control over the software than Apple does. Does this make me a "fandroid"? Dunno, you tell me. All I care about is that my mobile device needs are met. Apple can't do that for me.
Comparing memory and CPU of an Android phone with an Apple phone makes little sense - from the reviews I read, phones with similar or equal specs to Apple's then top of the line often run sluggishly. Android needs more memory to run. Personally, I think being able to use Java and using more memory is a trade off well worth taking - but it means you don't compare oranges to oranges in this area.
Android's great strength is it's flexibility - you want a phone that's way too big to be practical? Check. Got a small, nice one that fits in your pocket? Check. Got a rugged, water tight phone? Check. Want a really cheap phone that's basically a feature phone? Check. Apple has decided on what is the best form factor - and I'm inclined to agree that it's the best single one. But Android has that, and every other base covered....
later, a bear eats fish and takes a dump in the woods. Story at 10
What kind of bear? What kind of fish? How was the fish caught? How big was the dump and what are the coords (for geocachers)? 10 PM or AM? Which timezone?
Come on manz, this is Slashdot and we expect details!
Sheesh, people try to measure apple in dollars or think of it as a bauhaus design center of shiny curved minimalist objects just don't understand what the vision always has been. Once you understand what Job's vision was, you can then decide if apple has it still or not. I'm undecided because on fiscal year of change is not the way to measure this.
When I think about the Jobs trajectory from apple through Next to the iphone I used to see it as a story about early adoption of technologies that let software replace hardware. e.g. the apple had refreshing of dynamic memory backsided on the video, and soft sectored disks, and replacing of parallel ports and UARTs with software system.
But when the iphone came out I finally realized that his vision was really fulfilling the Eberharts vision of the future in the mother of all demos. He was the translator of high concept computer science into consumer products. The iphone was the first truly practical ubiquitous reconfigurable hardware widget. It instantly transformed itself from one single purpose specialized appliance to another at the press of a single button. Each concrete form was single purpose and specialize not some do-it all device making it easy to on the user.
I think that is what jobs was shooting for all along. He always wanted to change the world and while we might have seen each brilliant little improvement as changing things (e.g early adoption of Postscript and WIMP interfaces) the real change that's never going to go away is this universal pocket device. He gave us something that even star trek didn't have. But when you watch Eberharts video you realize he was grasping in his crude way at simple universal interfaces to.
So I think Jobs actually completed the primary aspect of his journey.
Where would he have gone next with it? I think there's three things left to complete. First, Eberhart also enuniciated the cloud future of colloborative remote interaction on data sets that could be represent themselves in different ways depending on what viewing device each user was applying. (early model view controller, but for concrete devices). So number one is the iphone's becoming the physical manifestation that connects the clouds to points in the environment. It's going that way already as iphones control our cars and become networked games and video phones. Jobs just would have come up with some magical version of that which would delighted and surprised us with its simplicity. Perhaps that's where siri was going. The other thing that's not done more coupling between the cloud and the device. You shouldn't have to care where the computation is happening. And the third is enrichment of the devices ability to sense and interact.
All of those but the last one are obvious and thus incremental now. What does it mean for devices to interact? In the time of eberhart computer scientist thought that machines would learn to reason and thus learn to communicate on their own. So machines would be able to make requests to each other that exceeded some pre-defined "API". You would be able to communicate with them to, more along the lines of stating what you wanted and less along the lines of stating how to achieve it. That's the one thing there doesn't seem to be any progress in.
So where should apple go now? Well fulfilling the cloud dream of ubiquitous sensing and computing occuring transparently to enable handheld devices to become super powered tools has a long road ahead. Perhaps its a pre-requisite to the next step of interaction based on goals not defining process.
THe one thing I'm on the fence on is the current counter reaction against Jobs skewmorphic interfaces. I'm of the opinion that these contain powerful intuition and tap subconscious mental models we don't appreciate. I'd like to see machines adapt to our biases not try to make us like their natural interfaces.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Somebody should check whether or not he short sold Apple stock prior to the interview. Not a bad strategy, sell stock at today's price, bad mouth Apple, predict the end is near, when the price falls, purchase the shares to settle the sales. Works great, unless you get caught, that is.
Seriously, though, of course Apple is doomed. Every company that is at the top is dislodged eventually. In the tech world, at one time it was IBM, then they were doomed, then it was Microsoft, then they were dislodged. Then Apple seized the crown and eventually they will be dislodged, too. Whether that is today or down the road, only time will tell, but it is inevitable.
What is important is what you do after you are dislodged. People forget that back in the late 70s and early 80s Apple was at the top of the heap and was knocked off of it. They had the education market locked up. It wasn't IBM and the PC that dislodged them, it was Microsoft and Windows. Now whether it was because Jobs had left or because of Microsoft making a number of key alliances with business partners, people can argue all day long.
The important thing is that Apple, like many before them, was knocked off the top of the heap, and reinvented themself with a new product line and a new OS and a bunch of new consumer goods that just worked. When Apple switched to OS X, the pundits all cried out what a terrible mistake it was. They were wrong. Just like Larry Ellison is wrong. Apple isn't doomed. They are destined to be replaced as the number one tech company, nobody can hold that position indefinitely. But, as their shareholders laugh all the way to the bank, not being number one is a far cry from being doomed.
Then again, maybe we should listen to Mr. Ellison, he seems to have first hand experience on how to run a company that was top in its field straight into the ground.
Microsoft aren't ever going to be the company that rolled out Windows XP and was threatened with anti-trust around the world ever again
Right, because they learned their lesson and grease the right palms now. You can violate anti-trust all you want if you pay the right bribes.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Competitor? Nah. Ellison and Jobs were actually close friends, based on comments both of them made over the years. If anything, this is a case of one person thinking that their friend's life work simply can't exist without the friend. And, despite being an Apple fanboy, I have to admit that he's likely right.
I'm not with the doom-and-gloom naysayers thinking it'll happen immediately, but I do think that, as many other companies before them (e.g. Sony), Apple has had its day and will generally be going down from here (whether they've already peaked or are nearing it, I don't know, since they're expected to have some big announcements this autumn), and it's only a question of how steep the descent will be and when/if it will stabilize eventually (quick note: I'm not talking about the stock market when I talk about descent, so much as the distinguishing characteristics that separate Apple from an average company). I think that Jobs did a good job of getting the right people into leadership and inculcating a culture of excellence in the company that he left behind, so that should ensure that the descent will be a gradual one, rather than a rapid one, but eventually they'll start hiring bozos (to borrow Jobs' term) who will drag the company down.
When Tim Cook hired Browett as their Senior VP for retail, a lot of us assumed that Apple had already begun that process, since the guy looked like he was completely the wrong fit for the company, even though he may have managed to do decently well at the place where he was before. Kudos to them for canning him a few months later after he engaged in a series of highly-publicized screw-ups, but the fact that they hired him in the first place is actually one of the most worrying developments to comes out of the post-Jobs Apple, since their die-hard fans read it as an indication that the soul of the company is fragile and in danger of disappearing sooner than expected.
mySQL?
... That he saw Java as a major threat to Microsoft says something about how myopic he could be.
Remember, Microsoft's initial business idea was to sell BASIC interpreters to Atari. That is, programming language design was Bill's thing, so it is not him being myopic, it is more of him seeing somebody else riding his horse.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
What products did Microsoft invent on their own, that didn't come before them?
Windows 95 -- to create a graphical environment and rich user experience on top of a massively vulnerable operating system, years after mainframe operating system architects hammered out network security, that took some real ingenuity.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar