[edw]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.