HP is buying Autonomy for 10+B. Many analysts feel this is over priced, and on Oracle's earnings call Larry Ellison couldn't help but get a jab in at HP by saying that they (Mark Hurd ironically) told Autonomy they were overpriced at their current 6+B Market Cap when Autonomy went to Oracle looking for a suitor.
Autonomy CEO then said "WTF we never talked to Oracle about being purchased".
Yes. It does give Autonomy an easy out: "Sure Oracle, we did pitch selling ourselves to you - on the morning of April 1st! Didn't you get the joke?!?! Joke aside, the meeting was indeed as we described in our first response."
Either that, or the two companies are actually having a joke at our (tech industry watchers) expense.
If Autonomy's CEO said it was an April Fools joke, then HP and himself would not look very good in front of Wall Street or stock holders. There might actually be SEC complications also.
No, he would lose creditability with everyone. You do not "punk" other companies. All future meetings would be clouded with the thought "is this real, or another punk by this guy".
I forget where, but I once read an article suggesting that one of the big problems Microsoft has faced in the past 10 years is that, after the DoJ suit and the ruling of it as an abusive monopoly by Judge Jackson, they missed out on a lot of good new developers simply because they didn't want to work for that sort of company.
I don't think my opinions of Larry Ellison had been high for some time, but recent actions and publishing this sort of press release hardly raises them. Perhaps this will be the final downfall of Oracle; that their reputation in the tech community so precedes them that they run out of willing labour and / or partners?
While I agree with your general assessment I disagree with your conclusion.
See, Oracle is not (and never was) a technology company. They are a huge marketing and sales organisation that happens to dabble in technology products.
The carnage of Sun top engineers after the takeover should tell us something.
That said, I think it's a dumb, childish and immature move.
2 Minutes of LOL and gufaw! As a believer in kharma (in the metaphorical sense) I think that will come back and bite.Messrs. Hurd and Ellison.
Do you really think Larry cares about what some uppity yankee hipster thinks about his company? These days, a lot (most?) of Oracle software is built in India, Eastern Europe, etc. Developers in those countries don't care about this sort of things, they care about the cold hard cash Oracle have in their coffers, which they get by selling products over geeks' heads (i.e. to their bosses' boss).
Wage inflation in developing countries is much more of a problem for Larry than "boardroom etiquette".
Yes, as a Brit I was quite surprised about that ;-)
As for the other side, there's not just the issue of who builds for them but who builds with them. If the industry perception of Oracle becomes establised that they're awkward, litigious and have an attitude problem, who's going to buy the licenses and build products against their platform?
[ I'm sure in Larry's eyes "uppity yankee hipsters" and "uppity brit hipsters" are equivalent ;) ]
I don't think they have a reputation for being awkward with their own customers/partners/etc; they're unashamedly merciless with competitors, and this is well known. In the enterprise sector the two categories often overlap, but then again in those circles being a shark is actually considered a good thing anyway.
At the moment their target is squarely HP, like SAP before them, and this is what it means. It's actually mildly amusing, if you've followed the whole saga with Apotheker living on a plane etc.
Was it not Oracle who sued an alternative support provider out of existence on very spurious grounds? That's hardly a customer-friendly action; I can't imagine the support organisation's customers were very well disposed to Oracle after this.
I'm sure they are targeting (who they think are) their competitors. I see and hear good things about their technology. I don't doubt the management culture of some organisations would count it as to their credit that they act 'forcefully'.
But still, there surely has to come a tipping point beyond which aggressive nastiness and cockiness works against, not for them. It's not relevant for me on several grounds but this is one more black mark against Oracle's culture for me that would discourage me from working with them and make me wonder what it'd take for them to do something similar to me.
Support is where Oracle makes the real money, so they're very aggressive there, but I think you're referring to the TomorrowNow case. They were bought by SAP to basically snatch Oracle customers, and "it looks like that TomorrowNow was probably cheating like mad. Instead of going to Oracle's support site and downloading only the patches and bug fixes its customers were entitled to, it downloaded all the Oracle software it could get its hands on. Oracle says TomorrowNow had a whole bank of servers skimming its computers automatically for Oracle software." (see http://www.computerworlduk.com/in-depth/it-business/3246680/... )
The "enterprise" world is full of sharks, Oracle is just one of many.
To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.
To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.
To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.
To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.
And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.
Yes, he is known for this kind of thing. Works for him apparently and has been for many years. It's not like he is able to 'fail' in a lot of senses of the word anymore; he is rich beyond believe, he has great business sense, he is a winner on a number of levels. Why would he care about anything, especially anything said in the tech community?
Agreed.
This is a really weird press release for Oracle to serve from their flagship website. Even the Notch v Bethesda back & forth was orders of magnitude more civil…
What about this? (not a joke)
A) ridicule HP into dropping Autonomy bid
B) because of A, the stock price of Autonomy crashes
C) Oracle buys Autonomy
D) Mike Lynch gets fired
If only Mr. Lynch had just come out and said, "yes, we also went to Oracle to see if they might be interested". Then he would have had much less trouble =)
Why does Oracle care so much about this? Autonomy shopped themselves around and Oracle turned them down. Now Oracle wants to hurt Autonomy because a competitor bought them. I guess all is fair in M&A, but this just seems like a stupid spat.
I'm guessing it's mostly Mark Hurd (Oracle president and ex-HP CEO) trying to look good by pointing out that he did refuse to buy Autonomy because the price he was discussing with them was overpriced in his opinion whereas HP bought them for almost twice the price.
It's basically Mark Hurd getting back at HP in the most pathetic way I've ever seen.
I find it ridiculous that companies operating at this level waste their time with things like this when they clearly have bigger issues on their hands. No wonder Oracle is struggling if this is where they are focused.
New software license sales and renewals are both down year-over-year as a percentage of overall sales. It might just be a blip, but I read it as a weakness in their core business. I think the size of the enterprise segment is shrinking - as Andreesen pointed out recently, it was pretty common ten years ago for startups to sink tons of cash into Oracle licenses. Nowadays, it doesn't happen at all. Internet-scale is no longer equivalent to enterprise scale, and less companies are buying Oracle as a result. Elsewhere, government sales are slowing as a result of global fiscal restraint, which basically leaves Fortune 500 to carry the water for Oracle. So yeah, "struggling" might be a bit over-the-top, I certainly wouldn't be betting on Oracle as a breakout story. They are probably a business in decline, and most likely to end up in a similar spot as SGI, DEC and tons of other former enterprise powerhouses that saw their core business diminished by the relentless commoditization that comes with advances in technology.
Andreesen pointed out recently, it was pretty common ten years ago for startups to sink tons of cash into Oracle
And Andreessen should be listened in this field because.... ? Serious corporations go for IBM, Oracle, SAP and the likes. They want stability and someone to show up and fix when things go wrong. Most of the 'startups' Marc is talking about, will be not be here 5 years from now.
What was Marc's last good investment? Ning or Groupon?
Skype, Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Jawbone and Box.net are all in the Andreeson Horowitz portfolio. He seems to be doing fine.
He bought FB way too late than most others. What valuation did he buy in Zynga, Twitter etc than we'll talk? Jut because they're 'hot' now doesn't mean that they'll make him money later.
Google, Apple, Facebook are all using Oracle albeit not for their main consumer-facing product but more for internal systems that performs e-Commerce functionality.
I don't know, but based on your statement, I'd guess that they each probably have a few licenses for enterprise-grade apps. I don't think that changes the analysis that the market is moving on from what Oracle is selling.
HP is buying Autonomy for 10+B. Many analysts feel this is over priced, and on Oracle's earnings call Larry Ellison couldn't help but get a jab in at HP by saying that they (Mark Hurd ironically) told Autonomy they were overpriced at their current 6+B Market Cap when Autonomy went to Oracle looking for a suitor.
Autonomy CEO then said "WTF we never talked to Oracle about being purchased".
Then this.