NEW YORK - The last thing Larry Ellison wanted to do today during his afternoon keynote at Internet World was address Tuesday's horrific plunge in Oracle's share prices. But even while trying to forecast the future, and promote Oracle's network computer initiative, the database-maker's CEO couldn't help but bow to the pressure of Wall Street.
"If you lost a lot of money in the market yesterday like I did, you can save a fortune by moving to network computers," Ellison joked, before waving at the raft of photographers flashing away at him below the lip of the Javits Center stage and saying, "I wonder if I would have been this popular yesterday." Oracle stock did recover today a couple of points from the 30 percentage points it lost Tuesday.
Except for a brief repeat of his first joke, that was the last from Ellison about his company's current performance. Instead, he laid out in the most practical (indeed, at times boring) terms possible his vision for what he called the "third generation" of computing - focused primarily on the corporate customer.
That third generation is, of course, that of the network computer, the natural successor (in Ellison's worldview) of the earlier mainframe and then client/server computing generations. And there's a big role, of course, for Oracle products in the third generation, where two servers - one for data, one for applications - hold all the marbles for hundreds if not thousands of low-cost NCs.
"Computing will be as common as telephony, as common as television in American households," Ellison predicted, basing his forecast on the low cost of boxes like RCA's US$199 consumer NC, which can connect cheaply to a network of consolidated, but not centralized, servers. That, he said, was markedly different from Microsoft's plan. But he offered few details about how consumers would actually use these NCs.
"Oracle is saying that we should have a manageable number of data servers, with all data on the servers," Ellison said. "Microsoft says the unification point is not the data server or the database, but the Microsoft NT file system," he said, rattling off a list of the many different pieces of software - including data server, email server, and image server - that would need to still be managed and backed up under NT. "There are not enough skilled people on the planet Earth to run all those [services]," Ellison said.
Ellison claimed that 100 percent of Oracle applications are now being moved from a client/server architecture to a network computer architecture. "We think 100 percent of our clients will move with us," he said, and claimed that 90 percent of them have already committed.
