Ellison on Best-of-Breed Integration

Here's a nice quote by Larry Ellison from the book Softwar (2003), in which he's referring to Oracle's attempts to win market share in the applications market in the mid 1990s by putting together best-of-breed systems. He says the guys at Oracle running this process "had all these wonderful names for the new integration technologies that they were developing: the message backbone, integration glue, and all this other stuff. I tried to get a detailed technical explanation as to how it all worked, but nobody was able to explain it to me. I just couldn't understand what they were saying. One of two possibilities here: I'm too stupid to understand, or they don't understand it either. Even though they couldn't describe how this stuff worked, they just knew it would solve all their product integration problems.... It was like, wouldn't it be nice to have flying cars..."

This reminds me of a lot of situations in life, when you're not sure if you're the one who's too slow to understand, or if the person doing the explaining doesn't know what he's talking about.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Date Dimension Table Definition

Tripoli Falls to Rebels, Earthquake in Virgina

Climate-Gate Scientist Cleared Over and Over Again