Re: Informix vs Oracle, alleged trade secret theft

I worked at Informix Portland in the past and know several of the "defectors", so I'll need to be very careful about what I say... bobgo@best.com wrote: >With Informix seemingly doing so well in the market, and with their technology >lead, it would appear that a buyout of major proportions occured or that >the Informix management team in Portland is asleep at the switch. This is not necessarily true. It's important to remember that companies change over time. Kelley is the sort of guy who is most comfortable in a small-group, roll-up-your-sleeves engineering lab environment. He is also a person who is willing to take big organizational and personal risks to establish the kind of environment he prefers. Kelley founded the Portland office around 1990 (I may be a year or so off on that date) when Informix was a much smaller and (frankly) more struggling organization. Given these corporate circumstances, it was possible over time for the small group in Portland to have a very large effect on Informix' product line and direction. Of course, this was also due in no small way to the fact that Kelley's technical vision for the product (DSA, PDQ) was solid and has proven out in the market. Compare the success of Informix during this time to Sybase' fiasco with System 10, for example. The problem is that the kind of environment Kelley fourishes in has become a victim of its own success. The little lab in Portland is now a big engineering organization with a big management hierarchy. And Informix has a successful high-end product for the Unix data center. This means that the Informix engineering organization is now measured primarily on predictability of the product stream and the reliability of the resulting products, not on the clever creations of a small group in a lab. Finally, Informix acquired Michael Stonebraker and chose to place an advanced development organization the Bay area headed by Stonebraker. As Bob comments, the likelyhood of anybody moving out of Portland to the Bay area is just about zero; I'd leave the computer industry before I'd leave Portland. Now I realize that there must have been some precipitating event here. But the real message is that this kind of thing is about personalities and the normal lifecycle of corporations. It's not safe to conclude that Informix management was "asleep at the switch". And despite the history and the fact that some good people left with Kelley, it's not safe to conclude that this will have either a major impact on Informix or a major impact on Oracle. Kelley's ability to have a big impact on Informix was due in a significant way to the fact that Informix was ripe for it. But now both Oracle and Informix are huge organizations primarily answerable to their enterprise customers, not easily affected by clever ideas coming from a lab. No matter who is running it. >Eleven people in one mass defection! I am curious as to what Oracle had to >offer to get the Informix folks to move. Considering the animosity that >competitors like Informix and Oracle usually harbor for one another, there >must have been substantial salary increases, stock, etc. I have no idea, but I hope they got some good guarantees that they would actually be given something to do. The risk for those eleven people is that the budget to keep them going is so small compared to Oracle revenue that Oracle could afford to just let them sit and rot there for PR purposes alone. I'm not saying this is what will happen; I have absolutely no idea. But I sure hope for their own sake that they thought about it and got some guarantees. >And is Oracle going to start a development lab in Portland? I suppose that's >what the plan is (tho I haven't heard for sure). Portland residents have >no love lost for Bay area living. I'm confident some of those folks would never move to the Bay area. So I hope for their sake that Oracle plans to keep the lab in Portland... because it's a safe bet that none of them are going back to Informix any time soon ;-). >Hmmmm.......it's all very surprising. Not so surprising in context. Companies change internally faster than people change their needs, skills, and views on what they want to be doing. And the world doesn't change in smooth, continuous ways: it muddles along unchanging for a long time, and then changes by sudden dislocation. "Punctuated equilibrium" in the computer industry. >/Bob -- Jeff Berkowitz jjb@netcom.com