Oracle’s secret business plan
October 28, 2010 6 Comments
So it is becoming more and more apparent that Oracle wants to kill Java. The big question I was pondering the last couple of days is why? Isn’t this totally counterintuitive? After all, most of Oracle’s business is based on Java. Right? We need to start thinking outside of the box.
The most important clue to the solution I got from my own job. Basically, the directive is to not produce any code, to avoid introducing bugs. (I am exaggerating, but you get the idea. And honestly, I am not that good at not producing code.) Just think about it. We all know that each and every piece of software is buggy. The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that in order to become bug free, we need to stop producing code. (If that sounds funny to you, just look at Microsoft. At some point in 200x they decided to re-start producing code. Vista. Win7. IE8. The end result was a long line of failure.) So in order to become successful, the only real way to go is to hire as many people as possible that don’t produce any code (those are the highest paid guys because they manage to resist the natural urge to churn out code). Just imagine what hassle that would save you. Your software will be the smallest, fastest, most portable and most importantly, most bugfree piece on earth. It will run on about every device, however fast you want it and never fail. The key here is that you need an army of marketing people who provide a suitable definition of ‘run’. But then again, if you look at some of the most successful software companies in the world, this is exactly the setup. As many software gurus as possible that don’t code anything plus an army of marketing guys. (And for other reasons, an army of lawyers..)
Now, how is that related to Oracles latest moves? Easy, they want to *really* make sure nobody ever produces any more code by killing Java. I believe it suddenly all makes sense now. I suspected for a couple of days already they would be more clever than everybody else and have a *really* smart business plan behind all this. They kill Java, by doing so make sure that nobody produces any more code (except of their poor competitors Microsoft who don’t use Java) and most importantly they themselves don’t produce any more code. The overall relative quality of their products will skyrocket and the end result will be LOTS of $$$ — which is the only thing that counts for Oracle (even more than other shareholder owned companies).
