Friday we had an all-hands meeting for our division. Mark Barrenechea did most of the talking, saying how well we're doing and giving us a peek at some new technologies that our division is developing. Standard question and answer session afterwards although few people asked questions. But the really big thing was that Larry Ellison made an appearance.

It's my first time seeing Larry live and it was quite an experience. First he had to tape a speech for some Oracle Expo in Japan. He talked slowly (because his speech will be translated on the fly) and gave a good overview of the direction that Oracle wants to go. Afterwards he took some questions and was quite informative in his answers.

The plan for Oracle is to be as dominant as Microsoft, we haven't made any secret of that goal. If Larry does his job well (he said), in a few years he'll be the one talking to the Justice Department, not Bill Gates. Microsoft dominated the PC marketplace with basically two products: Windows and Office. We're going to do the same using our database as the foundation and our application suite as the add-on. We're no longer going to sell 300 individual products, it's all either the database or the application layer.

There have been three main computing paradigms. The first were mainframes, the second PCs and client/server computing, the third is Internet computing. In the mainframe era IBM was king, in the PC era Microsoft was able to usurp that dominance because the playing field changed. Now in the Internet era Oracle has that chance to usurp Microsoft in this new arena.

Someone asked what happens when the playing field changes again. Larry didn't think it would. Things have been getting more and more interconnected and the Internet is about as interconnected as computing is likely to get. Besides (I add), you don't see paradigm shifts until you're in the middle of them.

Why do people want a big database? The simple reason is that the more you concentrate data, the more useful that data becomes. Larry called it Oracle's Law (jokingly saying that when he coined it a few years ago he was hoping people would rename it to Ellison's Law). With a bunch of databases each holding some information, you can't do efficient queries that span the databases. That's why getting all the data together adds more value than a simple sum of the data would suggest.

Someone else asked why a consortium of our top competitors can't be formed specifically to compete against us. Larry was saying that best-of-breed doesn't work because it really means that every business has a unique setup. The current model is businesses buy components from vendors and then have to assemble it all themselves, either by hiring consultants or developing the glue code and processes in-house. That's a bad model, and not the model you see in the consumer electronics or automobile markets. Standardize and you can develop it better, support it better, sell it better. Which is why Oracle is reducing it's product line to two products.

Back to the previous question. Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft, etc won't be able to mount a creditable solution that competes with ours. The simple fact is that because they are different companies, they have different models for their products, different schedules, different goals. It is extremely hard to get just the dozens of groups in Oracle working in unison, it's impossible to get a consortium to work together and make a competitively seamless whole.

What about Open Source Software? Again, not a threat. Open Source has not shown that it can create a truly large piece of software like we have. Linux is a few dozen utilities that sort of work together (but are not seamless other than at too low a level to matter to most users). There is not going to be a database or business suite from the Open Source camp that will threaten us.

So it all comes down to: if we execute, we win. There are no realistic competitors to Oracle. Scary thoughts, and maybe a bit too much hype from our glorious leader. But we bought it up, and I personally think we do have a good chance to become *the* dominant company in the world.