[xquery-talk] Aggressivity and the Database Bubble WASRe: Linkedin humor for the weekend (2)

[daniela florescu]

First, the fact that there EXISTS a “Technical level” section in this blog is fundamental.
(and yes, I am a fan of Kellogg’s blogs, too, even if I don’t agree with him always).

First, at that time, technical considerations STILL EXISTED.

E.g. could one of you tell me the technical detail implementations between CouchDB and MongoDB  !?

Huh !? They are both just quickly put together hacks, without any architecture….and no-one, including their own engineers and their
own customers CARES or even KNOWS about the technical details. Tons of my database friends went to work for Mongo and then left in 2-3 months
screaming ….

(I wonder if you ask the average MongoDb “database” developer what a page locking is if you even get an answer…:-)

===========

Second, yes, sure business wars always existed and will always exist. And it’s a good thing.

Trust me, working at Oracle for 8 years, I’ve seen my share of “business wars” and related strategies…...


But when Kellogg cites Geoffrey Moore’s “tornado’.

"The tornado refers to Geoffrey Moore’s <http://www.tcg-advisors.com/who/moore.htm> metaphor for the hypergrowth phase of a high-tech, infrastructure market.”

I agree that during such a “tornado”… the best is to acquire as many customers as possible.

But Moore refers to a REAL customer growth tornado, not an current ARTIFICIAL growth that is 100% due to the pressure from VCs 
— they need to reimburse the money back to the pension funds they took it from in a fixed interval of X years.

I am 100% convinced that this “database bubble” is artificially inflated by VCs billions poured in. More and more articles by Forbes show that —
enterprises play with the new solutions, but few actually deploy those solutions.

This is not only, as it was in the 80 and 90, only a matter of who has the best sales team, and gets the EXISTING projects. (and yes, Oracle did..)

This artificial bubble pushes  vendors to become idiot zombies:  create “customers" out thin air,  bullshiting the few who are open to buy new things into 
believing in aliens, and completely treat them like idiots by ignoring the state of the art.

This is not a case of Moore’s tornado.

One more day passed… one more day closer to the death of this database bubble… :-)

Have a great day,
Dana









> On Jun 16, 2015, at 1:02 PM, Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Remember Ingres. Here is the story of what Oracle did to them. 
> 
> http://kellblog.com/2006/04/08/ingres-can-you-ever-go-back/ <http://kellblog.com/2006/04/08/ingres-can-you-ever-go-back/>
> 
> Undoubtedly you can parse the engineering considerations better than I (see At a product level) but pay attention to what is said in "At the business level" and in particular the reference to failing to understand the tornado.
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 12:26 PM, daniela florescu <dflorescu at me.com <mailto:dflorescu at me.com>> wrote:
> 
> Michael,
> 
> believe it or not, I think it got worse since the days of Larry Ellison (as bas and aggressive as it was… :-)
> 
> The first generation of databases grew organically, with their customer base … they were busy fighting SPLITTING an exiting market
> which was naturally growing. Those databases were DB2(IBM), Oracle, SQL Sever. None of them had a VC behind it….
> 
> The new generation of databases (Cloudera, DataStax, Mongo. CouchDB. MarkLogic…etc) are NOT growing organically.
> 
> They are all financed by Venture Capitalists. They all took between 100M and 200M, sometimes more,  investment money from VCs.
> (And I can tell you, lending money from VCs is worse then lending money from the mafia….. if you don’t give it back… they’ll find you ….)
> 
> A VC naturally wants his investment returned 50X (or whatever X they want) in a fixed amount of time (2-5 years, or whatever).  This is how VC world works.
> 
> So…. this new generation of databases, being financed by VCs,  CANNOT grow naturally and organically with the market…..
> 
> Their growth speed is imposed by the VCs, and not by the market growth.
> 
> They have to pull customers out of their a..s. They have to create artificial customers.
> 
> They have to go to each other’s throat for the meager number of customers.
> 
> Hence the general hysteria.
> 
> ===========
> 
> Hence all the horrible things that happens right now in the “database” industry, marketing screams all over the place, idiotic marketing messages
> (scale to the level of the “universe”..), bogus benchmarks, query languages that don’t NEED a specification, proprietary syntaxes to cover an existing standard
> — because a standard would reduce the value of the company— bullying every single blogger in the industry to say what you want, physically
> abusing people who dare to say something else, bribing of officials of all kinds…..
> 
> Gold rush, here we come again.
> 
> Science ( temporarely I hope ), left this field.
> 
> How good a product is irrelevant right now. You can see that by watching the amount of money spent by this generation of databases in marketing and sales vs. engineering.
> Usually it’s 10X. This was not true for Oracle, even if they did spend a large amount on sales.
> 
> My hope is that when the database bubble will crash, soon, VCs will finally get disappointed, and finally move away to another field, like locusts, so
> we can come back and bring some scientific interest into this field.
> 
> But, yeah, I’ve never seen ANYTHING like what’s going on right now with the database companies in Sillicon Valley…..
> 
> Best
> Dana
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://x-query.com/pipermail/talk/attachments/20150616/3de7687b/attachment.html>