I just read this article on Java Developers Journal (JDJ) that Oracle is looking to buy BEA. This should be interesting. If Oracle does buy BEA then Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, and his company will have the Weblogic stack, Aqualogic stack and their supporting products. These products will have add to the Oracle collection which consists of:
Oracle Application Server,
Oracle Database technologies,
Oracle Fusion Ware,
PeopleSoft,
Stellent, etc., etc.,
However after working with Oracle's non-database technologies and hearing other voices in the developer community, Oracle's non-database products are not that great. Unlike Microsoft's products which emphasize user interaction and user experience, Oracle products don't integrate well and they are quite buggy. I don't know if Oracle needs to hire more effective product managers who can build better products. Like Google, it needs to promote innovation and creative. There are reasons why Google is the best company to work for. Among other benefits, Google offers free gourmet meals, 20 % of the work done is on personal projects. As these projects evolve into product ideas, Google inturn takes these ideas and produces great products. Here are some products they created:
Gmail
Google Talk
Google Reader
Google Map and other APIs
Google Labs
Google Apps
Google checkout
Most of these ideas were built on technologies they acquired like:
YouTube
Blogger
Keyhole (Google Earth)
Orkut
To please its shareholders and client base, Oracle simply acquires companies and their products however they don't spend much time in making their products "cool" or "nitch" after they acquire them. Larry Ellison, if you are reading this, learn from Google's model. Software is cool, fun and it meets business and user needs. If you forget cool and fun then what you end up with a boring, expensive and bulky products like Mainframe computers which eventually joined the dinosaurs in extinction.
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