>> > > Agreed, the database software industry is about the most vicious example of > naked aggressive capitalism that I have seen anywhere. > > But I don’t think it has got worse since Oracle started trying to wipe out > their competitors in the mid 80s. It has always been that bad.
Michael, believe it or not, I think it got worse since the days of Larry Ellison (as bas and aggressive as it was… :-) The first generation of databases grew organically, with their customer base … they were busy fighting SPLITTING an exiting market which was naturally growing. Those databases were DB2(IBM), Oracle, SQL Sever. None of them had a VC behind it…. The new generation of databases (Cloudera, DataStax, Mongo. CouchDB. MarkLogic…etc) are NOT growing organically. They are all financed by Venture Capitalists. They all took between 100M and 200M, sometimes more, investment money from VCs. (And I can tell you, lending money from VCs is worse then lending money from the mafia….. if you don’t give it back… they’ll find you ….) A VC naturally wants his investment returned 50X (or whatever X they want) in a fixed amount of time (2-5 years, or whatever). This is how VC world works. So…. this new generation of databases, being financed by VCs, CANNOT grow naturally and organically with the market….. Their growth speed is imposed by the VCs, and not by the market growth. They have to pull customers out of their a..s. They have to create artificial customers. They have to go to each other’s throat for the meager number of customers. Hence the general hysteria. =========== Hence all the horrible things that happens right now in the “database” industry, marketing screams all over the place, idiotic marketing messages (scale to the level of the “universe”..), bogus benchmarks, query languages that don’t NEED a specification, proprietary syntaxes to cover an existing standard — because a standard would reduce the value of the company— bullying every single blogger in the industry to say what you want, physically abusing people who dare to say something else, bribing of officials of all kinds….. Gold rush, here we come again. Science ( temporarely I hope ), left this field. How good a product is irrelevant right now. You can see that by watching the amount of money spent by this generation of databases in marketing and sales vs. engineering. Usually it’s 10X. This was not true for Oracle, even if they did spend a large amount on sales. My hope is that when the database bubble will crash, soon, VCs will finally get disappointed, and finally move away to another field, like locusts, so we can come back and bring some scientific interest into this field. But, yeah, I’ve never seen ANYTHING like what’s going on right now with the database companies in Sillicon Valley….. Best Dana _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
