Some classic Larry Ellison reality checks from Oracle OpenWorld... Excepts from a WSJ summary:
Speaking to analysts at a meeting in San Francisco, Ellison said that cloud computing, alongside industry trends including software as service and open source computing, were overhyped, ill-defined buzzwords, embraced by companies largely to market products and compared them to fashion trends in the women's clothing industry.
In most cases, he said, these services aren't making money for their providers.
"You won't see us opening any cloud centers, because the economics don't work," he said. "What the hell is cloud computing?"
[...]
"Amazon has huge compute power and excess capacity. So it makes sense for them. But for us to go out and build a data center specifically to do this - it doesn't compute.
"Who makes money in cloud computing?"
Ellison also took aim at on-demand software, or software as a service, saying that like cloud-computing, many companies offering these services were struggling to drive profitability.
"Back to the other great fashion - software as a service. Salesforce.com, which I was a founding investor in, barely makes any money at all. And they're a giant of the industry."
Tangent on Salesforce.com: interesting that Marc Benioff was dumping 10,000 shares a day through mid-August (down from 20,000 shares/day last year); check this summary. Quite a contrast with Larry Ellison, who has held most of his Oracle stock since founding the company more than 30 years ago.
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