Kindle Notes & Highlights
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December 2, 2020 - February 20, 2023
hoopla
digression:
bestrode
paradigm
If you can use Yahoo! or Amazon without any training, you should be able to use most business software with little or no training.
‘burn rate,’
“plain vanilla”
blasé
tarmac
extol
perplexed
soliloquy
The mayor suddenly asks what Oracle can do to put the city’s customs operations online.
lowballing
contortions
Adroitly,
piously.
there’s a need to link an individual’s records from different academic institutions to create a single lifetime learning record to support accountability and validate credentials.
altruism.
Ellison needs to say something funny: “The good news is that our E-Business Suite is brand new. The bad news is that our E-Business Suite is brand new.”
“take-no-prisoners”
macho
sprawling
unencumbered
verging
It’s an opportunity for Ellison to do what he does best—inspire, flatter, amuse, and, finally, steamroller skepticism with his own massive certainty.
The core of his business philosophy is that you can’t get rich by doing the same thing as everyone else.
wheezy,
raison d’être
The Road Ahead
christened
newfangled
aqueduct
Moore’s Law
epiphany.
pernicious
Software from different vendors will have different semantics—even something as simple as defining what a “customer” is may differ—different underlying data schemas, which have to be coordinated but will scarcely ever be fully reconciled, and different user interfaces with conflicting design conventions and display elements.
Even if the consultants have a proven integration method to link two pieces of software, APIs (application program interfaces) still have to be specially constructed to pass messages among distinct database schemas, limiting the amount of information that can be extracted as well as duplicating storage requirements.
Our customer data was fragmented into four hundred separate customer databases. Worse still, it was just about impossible to combine the customer data into a data warehouse because the customer data was not consistent across all those separate operational databases.
saddled
“shelfware”
The starting point was to see the database as the hub and the applications as the spokes.
If you draw a picture of Oracle’s application architecture, the database is at the center and the applications are attached around the periphery.
A single global database connected to a single global network—the Internet—is the ideal architecture.”
A further problem was the inclusion into the data model of what are known as “multis”—languages, places, currencies, contact addresses.
“It can’t be simple if it’s not complete” had become Ellison’s latest mantra.
Nirvana,
Even today, most customers split their applications software purchases between the software provider and the system integrator. While the software provider sells the software for a set price, the system integrator will provide only a cost “estimate.” If there is a shortcoming in the software, the systems integrator will charge extra to fix it. These extra charges are typically many times higher than the original estimate. The best way to solve this problem is to make the applications software vendor or the systems integrator unconditionally guarantee the price of the software product and the
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hyperbole
Many of Oracle’s 43,000 employees, particularly key developers and those who have been with the company since the mid-1980s, have become multimillionaires thanks to their stock options.
