More on Oracle (Dave Dargo)
I should have looked to Dave Dargo's blog first when the Oracle news hit. Dave, for those who don't remember, was a longtime Oracle employee and started and ran Oracle's open source program office. He knows quite a bit about Oracle and Linux.
And he's calling "foul" on Oracle's announcement today, with a great deal of insight into why.
He persuasively argues that Oracle's discounted support will actually be dramatically more expensive (like a gazillion percent more :-), the service won't be as good (for reasons similar to those that I argued), and that Oracle has no history of providing superior value at a lower cost, while Red Hat has that in spades:
But what about the other part of that quote, that support has to be better. There's a survey from CIOInsight [PDF] that shows Red Hat is the number one vendor for value as rated by CIOs in 2004 and 2005. Where does Oracle fit on that chart? Glad you asked, they ranked 39 out of 41. [Emphasis mine.]Good points, Dave. Head over to his blog to get more. It's fascinating analysis.
The other thing I'm most curious about is the concept of Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). The claim is that it takes less than a minute to switch from Red Hat's Network (RHN) to ULN. It's going to take more than a minute, and a fair amount of cost, to get through the legal agreements and process of switching over. But even with that aside, I'm mostly curious as to why Oracle's first real support network is for someone else's product. Where's the Oracle Database Network and Applications Network and PeopleSoft Network and Siebel Network? Where are the support infrastructure networks for Oracle's own products to automatically distribute fixes, patches and alerts? It's amazing that they can provide all that for a mere $399 for a competitor's products, but not for their own $200,000 product.
At the end of the day they still haven't answered the basic question of how eliminating choice benefits the customer, and that's bull*&#%.
1 comments:
Matt, This move is typical of Oracle: Smart and aggressive. IMHO, Oracle get high marks for making a lot of nice moves:
Own the Apps: PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle
Control persistence: InnoDB, Sleepycat and of course, Oracle.
What's left? More control over the OS.
When Oracle bought Sleepycat, Larry said:
"We are moving aggressively into open source....We're embracing it, we're not going to fight this trend. We think if we're clever we can make it work to our advantage."
Even if you assume everything about Red Hat's terrific support is true and they keep almost everyone, there are tons of Red Hat servers out there that run Oracle and nothing else. Why should they care about all the interoperability when the only thing they care about is Oracle on Red Hat?
If Oracle only captures some these servers, its great. For Red Hat, maybe not so good.
Imagine the Oracle rep and the Red Hat rep sitting down with a customer. The customer hands Oracle some money and Red Hat some money. The Oracle guys says: Hey, some of those server's you've got are running nothing but my software, how about you let me support the whole stack. Oracle will scream and you'll only have to go one place to get it all working. Why don’t you give me a little bit of that money you're paying Red Hat, and you can keep the rest.
If this is better for the customer, he'll say: OK. If not, he'll say: Nope.
The market will decide. Nothing foul about this.
As for the bigger impact on Red Hat's overall pricing, I won't predict, but one thing I remember from Econ 101 is: When you've got perfect competition, long term economic profits tend toward zero. This might not be perfect competition, but with GPL'd code you can get pretty close.
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