Yahoo is up for sale. Microsoft has a tradition: You mess with them twice they never talk to you a third time. Would Google buy Yahoo? No. Who else? SAP? Not a fit, not happening. Oracle? Hmmmm – let’s think about that one.
Oracle just bought Sun and turning Sun into a cloud computing power house. Probably rearrange the software part, integrating professional services, shutting down MySQL, and decommissioning the hardware box sales over time.
Now – Oracle is thinking Social-CRM, they have a cool online community, they are very much SaaS and Web 2.0 aware (even if they don’t produce yet). While maintaining their existing enterprise business, they will migrate carefully into the networked world – built from ground up on: yes, their own cloud.
The first meaningful application: Search. A search server farm is a cloud on its own. So here is a fit too. Oracle is bold and crazy enough to pull this off.
Oracle could even become the SaaS, Search, Social Web cloud provider for their own acquisitions plus the rest who is out there.
The benefit for the users? Huge. Oracle is the last company that would build an advertising based business model. Hence search may become a whole new user experience.
Search is over 10 years old and there was zero progress for the user – only for the advertiser. We still struggle with 10,000,000,000 search results generated in 0.0007 seconds. We still have no structured search, we still have no geo based search, we still have no social search, we still have no crowed search, we still have no ranking, selection or filter based search, we still have no…. – Simply there is zero evolution in the single most used software application on the planet. Right?
I would even pay 10$ per year for a search that does a good job. With a billion users that is $10 Billion per year.
And that is just the obvious beginning….
Strike – done – we will see.
Hmm, some interesting points Axel. I think the logic stacks up but there is an elephant in the room (well maybe two).
Firstly, in relation to the Sun acquisition how do you think the developer/IT community will react to MySQL being shut down? Oracle could in one move turn tens of thousands of (potential) enterprise customers against them and alienate millions of developers and IT personnel – the MySQL evangelists. Many of these MySQL evangelists are this way because of the abusive, questionable, non-collaborative practices of Oracle and Microsoft in years gone by.
Whilst it’d be nice to see Oracle keep Sun as kind of a community ideas incubator where Oracle contributes some of their intellectual muscle whilst allowing the Sun community to contribute to the enterprise – my gut feel is this is too big a culture shift for Larry’s troops.
Whilst it’s fine to call Oracle SaaS aware, I’m not convinced they really want this SaaS/cloud computing model to keep developing in the direction it’s going. And this to me is the elephant in the room. Can Oracle really break it’s addiction to the traditional software license model of big fat license fee up front then annual maintenance revenue (maintenance or protection money?)? How much are they banking annually in maintenance revenue? Is it $10b yet?
I don’t agree 100% with your comments about search. In my opinion one of the underlying problems is that users have become lazy and simply “Google” something and then read maybe the first page of results, possibly the second. So whilst the search engines are trying to contextualise results (like you’ve outlined) the missing link is the user. Can search be turned on its head? I’ve no doubt. But the users need to come to the party as well; and coming to the party means offering up meaningful contextual information that will allow these search server farms to do their magic.