I was reading a Forbes magazine article (byline Brian Caulfield and Wendy Tanaka 06.13.08) about the failure of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal and Yahoo's subsequent scramble for googlence, and one of the lines that stood out to me was a characterization of Larry Ellison (the wildly eccentric boss of Oracle Corp) as the "Sith Master of Silicon Valley." I liked the idea that this might be on target.
I'm a shareholder in Oracle, and furthermore, I hold an Oracle certification as a Database Administrator – which is ironic since all my actual DBA and development work has been with Microsoft's competing SQL Server product, for which I hold no certification.
Despite this, I am not a fan of their product line, exactly – it is about as baroque as a high technology product line can get and still function. The reason I bought stock in the company was, rather, because I saw first hand, during my years working with the Paradise Corp (a pseudonym) IT department the amazing ease with which Oracle's enterprise sales team took my employers for a multimillion dollar ride. A project which was started in 2003 is still going on, years after the original anticipated "go live" date, and as far as I know, it barely works if at all, and only with a zillion caveats (appropriate to mention, I suppose, for this blog).
I figured if all of Oracle's sales teams were half as effective as the ones working my IT higher ups at Paradise, that company had a locked down revenue stream for decades to come. So, through thick and thin, I remain a loyal Oracle shareholder – and among all my long-term holdings, it's been, overall, one of the most pleasing. Or maybe that's just the luck of jumping on (and off and on again) the bandwagon at the right time?