Re: Computer World, 1/27/97: Informix charges Oracle [and former employees] with theft......
In article <01bc1373$38b230a0$afc652a6@Deslowka>, F#&^!0 <fucsm@vnet.net> writes >Hey Phil White, your technology ain't that great! Ever look at what XPS >lacks? Like? >How about that support? > I don't get any problems with support - called Informix UK Tech Support with an engine down recently in a live enviroment (Online 5.01.UC1). An engineer called me back within 30 seconds (I was at a collegues desk and didn't even have time to walk about 15 feet to my desk, pick up my coffee cup and walk >5 paces towards the kitchen!). Heasked for modem info/passwords (2 sets of modem passwords, including dailback + then a UNIX login), dailed in whilst I was on the phone and cut the call short to focus on the problem. He then spent 2 min 27 seconds (I timed him) before calling me back to say it was back online. I immediately asked for a bug number, he quoted it without hesitation and told me it was fixed in 5.04 and above (He even had time to find the bug number whilst I was timing him. Sorry pal I have no problems with support like that (< 5 minutes to get a live system back online!). >So, why did your eleven (11), yes that's eleven, employees leave? Is this Probably a) Offers of big money,flash cars etc. Oracle has sufficient market share to be able to pay it's top people more money. b) Offers to be there own bosses, no-one would argue with them if there are the geese that lay golden eggs at Oracle. Plus if the chance to innovate a new engine from scratch, remember intentive types get bored once the inital design/devlopment is done and start to look for new challenges. c) The number one by market share would look better than number two on a CV and is more of an ego boost. d) Chance to move to a prefered area E.g. family is closer. e) Something else??? >a statement about Informix as a place to work? Certainly must be some >underlying reasons there! Philosophical irreconcilable differences? >Certainly can see this happening with one or two employees, but eleven, en >mass? Based on support experiences and timeliness of delivery with Yeap, they are a very tightly knit team - what you don't have these at Oracle... >Informix promises, was that the whole development lab? Nope. > >Who cares whether their product is better than yours, or yours is better >than theirs? With all technology, there are trade-offs with both. What I do and so do customers with large data warehouse/large transaction volumes. i.e. a real need for high performance parallel processing. >customers really want is to transact business with a solid company that >projects a positive image of its worth and employees and keeps its >promises. Drop the suit and publicly apologize. You shouldn't be going Go away. >after people! If Informix is so great, this should not even be a setback, >right? Instead of paying attorneys, pay your people to keep them. Wrong, it's not the loss to Informix but the gain to Oracle that is at the heart of the matter. Internal online algorithms are at stake. > > > > Informix has a better engine which scales much better than Oracle. Informix put in a lot of effort completely rewriting the engine to be truely multi-threaded and have parellel features truely in the core of the engine. No other major database vendor did and Oracle should not try to cheat in the database race but stealing poeple if that is what happened. -- David Williams