Re: Linux taking over at Oracle

In a previous life in the 1980s, an IBM salesman has told me a funny story about an IBM marketing guy who was a specialist of strategy speeches, future of IT, etc. The salesman took a customer to a presentation once, and was very impressed by the speech in which the marketing man was demonstrating, extremely logically, that the future of IT was centralized big servers. As he had been so impressed, he took another customer to the same presentation a few months later, and, as he had already heard it, listened a bit less attentively. He began to startle around the conclusion, which no less logically than the first time was proving beyond any doubt that the future of IT was made of distributed processing power (IBM had announced the PC in the meantime). The salesman told me he had never understood where the logic had derailed.
I have heard the marketing guy myself, he was VERY good.

Rachel Carmichael wrote:
>
> it's not just Oracle, this tends to be a trend in all businesses. Just
> as there are fads in clothing (shorter hemlines, longer hemlines etc),
> there seem to be fads in the "right" way to manage your computer
> systems.
>
> I've seen the cycle turn a number of times "centralize all software and
> systems, one data center to serve them all, standards cross-company"
> then suddenly it's "decentralize, one big center makes no sense, we
> don't get the things we need fast enough from them"

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