Re: Informix vs Oracle, alleged trade secret theft
On 26 Jan 97 at 18:30, Jeffrey J Berkowitz wrote: > 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. Sorry, I just had to ask: what the hell made him think he was going to find that at Oracle? :-) > 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 Hm, I can't argue that, but I'd be inclined to say it would be easier for him to arrange for that environment again at Informix rather than Oracle. And while I certainly don't run a company of that nature, I believe it's folly to for Informix to assume that they don't need that kind of creativity any more.... > 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 A *very* good point. > both Oracle and Informix are huge organizations primarily answerable > to their enterprise customers, not easily affected by clever ideas > coming from a lab. But I must reiterate my opinion that it would be near-suicidal to lose the access to that R&D flexibility. Hell, Michael Stonebraker started out in that kind of environment...I think all the big names in databases did. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what happens next. -- Ciao, Billy I'd be in favour of apathy, but I just couldn't be bothered...