Hacker News Reader

Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

If I ever want to get rich, I'll set up shop convincing small businesses they need to do things the way Google does, if only they want to remain competitive.

Oracle has used exactly this business model to great success, and obscene profit, for over 30 years.

View on HN

Believe it or not, there's a world outside silicon valley where not every company can hire a large team of engineers to create and maintain their data infrastructure to process sales, do crm, keep track of manufacturing, etc. That's why companies like Oracle exist (and are very successful)

Edit: I noticed you meant small businesses. However, Oracle does this mainly for the large companies that don't excel at technology.

I hate the term "Big Data" but if it somehow puts Oracle down it can't be all bad.

They need to do it if the cost is affordable. And the fact the cost of Big Data processing became cheap enough to do it en masse is a driver.

Take a simple example. Every small offline shop will not refuse to count every customers head turn (with direction, angle and frequency), calculate averages, and get sales floor attention heatmap divided by day, hour, age and sex.

If that would cost them $500 one-time fee for 10 cameras and $5/day for the cloud service, and produced by pressing one big green key.

That's the Big Data driver, businesses are opening their eyes to the ability to analyze (cheap!) a huge number of small (and even smaller) factors and make better decisions.

I know that's not what you mean, but I find it quite amusing that you describe Oracle (a 30 year old company)'s business as convincing people they need to do things the same way Google (a 15 year old company) does it.

Well, there is SAP, whose business model is "look at what the big companies are doing. You small time fella, you need the same thing to grow big as well" as well

He said they have the same business model. Business models are abstract.

dewitt said "Oracle has used exactly this business model to great success, and obscene profit, for over 30 years". You claim that business models are abstract. Perhaps, except in the case where the words "exact" are used, and a specific company is named. I, like SeoxyS find the paradox of Oracle being accused of helping businesses to be "me-too" copies of Google - a company half of Oracle's age - amusing.

The model in question is "convince small and medium businesses that they need to buy my software in order to do things the same way as large companies X and Y and have a hope of remaining competitive". For Oracle X and Y were banks, retail and logistics companies, for the new generation of "big data" vendors it is Google and Facebook.

But the poster in question didn't say "X" and "Y" did they...this feels like an exercise in pedantry now, but he really did say "exactly" and "google".

Ok, here's some "conversational language" insight:

He said: "Exactly this business model" -- that is, as it pertains to it's essence.

NOT to be read as:

"Exactly this business model as it pertains to inconsequential details, like which big company they should be imitating".

To be pedantic, he said Oracle follows the same business model, not that Oracle follows Google.

But if google has only existed for 15 years how can the business model of "get money out of people trying to help them do a google me-too" have existed for 30?

You're putting us to sleep with this tiresome over-literal arguing. Be more interesting.

I guess as a software engineer I can be a little pedantic, literal and detail oriented, perhaps to my own detriment.

I would argue Oracle's model has been to suggest to businesses that they need to do things quite differently from the way Google does...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com