Gawker: valleywag, oracle openworld

Larry Ellison on cloud computing buzzword: "Complete gibberish"

Jackson West — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:20:00 EDT

"The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion." So says Larry Ellison, who told analysts yesterday that "other than change the wording of some of our ads," the company has no plans to make any actual changes to its business in order to jump on the cloud-computing bandwagon. Really, Ellison needs to get another monkey to do the infomercial thing on stage — he's far more charming when he's being rude but honest. [WSJ] (Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

New Oracle product seamlessly bores the whole enterprise

Paul Boutin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:40:00 EDT

The canned marketing script says, "Oracle Beehive provides a complete range of collaboration services including conferencing, instant messaging, email, calendar, and team workspaces." Translation: It's a competitor for Microsoft Sharepoint. More cynically: Oh boy, an Oracle wiki. Beehive's unveiling was supposed to kick off this week's 45,000-attendee Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco with a bang. But attendees blogging and tweeting the event were just not impressed.

"Not a lot new really," tweeted a conference-goer. "Beehive demo isn't that great — hard to follow the screens" an Oracle employee helpfully typed.

Oracle's bigger-than-Larry-Ellison's-yacht PR machine wants me to blog that "customers and partners are buzzing about Beehive." It's a phony press-release story, for which they've helpfully provided a Google News-friendly headline and a geekbait mention of the European Space Agency. In reality, the online silence about Beehive has been conspicuous. I'm serious: Larry, get your buddy Steve Jobs to help with your next launch. (Photo by AP/Ben Margot)

A strip club brings data nerds to the yard

Tim Faulkner — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:08:12 EDT

The Web 2.0 Summit attracted the Valley's elite to the swanky Palace Hotel, but Oracle's OpenWorld conference, scheduled for November 11-15 at the Moscone Center, draws the far nerdier enterprise IT set. How do database dorks spend an evening in seedy San Francisco after a long day of conference sessions? A Market Street strip club knows. They're not interested in wining and dining networkers in hopes of attracting VC millions. No, they go straight to the city's many strip clubs to blow off steam accumulated from many hours in back office server rooms. The Market Street Cinema posted the above signage upon the conclusion of the Web 2.0 Summit anticipating a stampede of sex-starved database administrators. (Photo by ChannelWeb Network)