Mistaking the Present for the Future

From Ellison’s commentary in Softwar by Matthew Symonds (Simon & Schuster, 2003), Chapter 8. The book pairs Symonds’s narrative with Ellison’s first-person footnotes; this passage is Ellison’s voice.

In early 1998, Ellison was pushing Oracle from client-server to internet architecture. Ray Lane, Oracle’s president, called a meeting of his top 150 sales managers and asked Ellison to come down. The message was coordinated: customers wouldn’t tolerate the shift. Ellison had heard the pattern before. The same organization had told him relational databases would never be commercially viable.

The reps were reporting what customers wanted today and treating it as what customers would want tomorrow. “Client/server was dead,” Ellison writes, “and the people in the room would figure that out at the funeral.” Oracle needed to move before SAP and the rest saw the same opening.