Kipling may need a Warhol overhaul; it seems these days that everybody gets to be the monastery for 15 minutes just to see if they are well-architected.
This headline is not really genuine. The group is definitely fighting big tech, but purely for the benefit of Oracle. They aren't fighting for users, but simply against Google and Amazon, who are Oracle's biggest competitors.
Having worked at Oracle, the hatred for Google is very deep. We worked with G only when we had easy money to make, and they did the same. We would get in trouble for using any G product, and could only use G sheets/docs if a client had created it themselves and sent it to us.
Oracle hates everyone, with very rare exceptions. The intensity simply varies depending on degree of success in the markets Oracle targets. They aggressively drop any Microsoft dependency in software they acquire, for example, ever since MS moved in the enterprise-database space.
What alternatives did you use- Microsoft Office for those?
Now I'm imaging if Oracle had invested in creating as many competitors for Google products as possible, Samsung-style, even in markets that don't make sense.
Back in 2007, Sun had been working on an iPhone/iOS competitor named the jPhone. Imagine if Oracle had ended up continuing their work. Then there'd be two competing smartphone OS's powered by Java.
It's funny imagining Oracle trying to undercut Google by competing with a half-baked iOS clone made (or rather, bought) by Sun, though. Perhaps they would've kept the fight just so they can hurt G, as they are currently doing now via litigation.
That is literally what they do. We used OraDocs which is a comically awful version of G sheets/docs or office 360.
Oracle has “beehive” a god awful outlook extension that ruins most functionality by taking core features from outlook and forcing them through oracle servers.
Rather than sales force for a CRM they have a god awful oracle sales cloud from decades ago with 10% of the functionality.
They moved all acquisitions software from AWS to oracles cloud... but oracles cloud couldn’t handle the load and a few had to be temporarily returned to aws.
To be fair, using gsuite is only for hn hipsters. Anybody reasonable uses MS office. And please don't even tell me Google is open. There is no company on Earth which has more lockdown than Google.
When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2008 summers, they already had fully functional web based office which was a decade ahead of what was at Google at that time. Google is good only at pr and that's what they use their oss and surrounding efforts for
To quote George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Besides, there was a time when the supposedly reasonable thing to do was to use Internet Explorer. I am glad the unreasonable people have consigned it to the waste bin, which is exactly where it belongs.
That quote is very illogical. It tries to create a dichotomy where it doesn't really exist. Pretty much everyone tries to adapt the world to themselves (see the use of fire, clothing, air conditioning, fans, etc to try to adapt climate). Also, pretty much everyone adapts themselves to the world (realizing that gravity means you can't jump off of cliffs with no parachute, that you need to eat, that you need oxygen, etc). Progress depends on finding out the right balance of what can be adapted to you, and what you need to adapt to. Finding that balance requires reason. Thus all progress is dependent on the reasonable person.
That quote is so spot on that I'm going to get it printed on a mug.
Lets call the adaptive people "Alice", like in cryptography, and use one of your examples at random: Air conditioning.
A hundred years ago, if it was too hot Alice just shrugged and didn't do anything about it. She just accepted that "It Is What It Is." Around the turn of the century, one guy, named Willis H. Carrier, decided "enough is enough, I'm going to fix this" and invented modern electric air conditioning machines. These days Alice accepts the new state of things: you can buy air conditioners, and once purchased, you can turn them on.
But lets be honest: If Alice had to use a building without air conditioning, or broken air conditioning, there's a snowball's chance in hell that she'll actually do anything about it, despite the ready availability of such devices and specialised tradespeople to fix them.
I've regularly visit a government office where 200 people have sat sweating for three years because nobody lifted a finger to I dunno... maybe see what's wrong with the aircon.
This observation exactly matches my experience of the world.
I'd love to live in your world where most people go out of their way to improve the status quo in novel ways. It would be... magical.
Hi, I'm Alicia from the Veneto (Venice if you like). I'd like to point out that we have been living in buildings that don't need air conditioning for 800 years, because our venacular architecture is designed to keep us warm in winter, yet cool in summer.
Do you have more info about this architecture? Could it be applied world-wide? Ie. think Japan needs architecture against earthquakes, The Netherlands needs to take floods into account, etc.
Not an expert on the subjet, but what I saw is this: old houses and churches (400+ years) with big stone walls tend to be rather cool in summer (my parents house ground floor always stay under 25°C when properly used, even with temperatures reaching 40°C outside) and have little temperature fluctuation overall (a piano, which is very sensitive to that and need yearly tuning in most places, can stay tuned for 10 years without intervention). I suspect the biggest factor is insulation due to having having a lot of mass that doesn't easily change temperature, but again I'm not an expert.
Incidentally, you cannot have it all: this architecture is not cheap, not fast, and isn't designed to withstand earthquakes or floods. But you'll never need air conditionning.
I don't know, the need to air conditioning is kinda relative anyway, and it creates a lot of Co2 as well, thereby contributing to the global warming problem.
A few years ago I've been in an old monastery, almost daily, in both summer and winter. The summer was good, albeit with a window open. Not as good as airco, but good.
However the gas costs in winter were insane, from what I heard it was in the hundreds of thousands of EUR.
> That quote is so spot on that I'm going to get it printed on a mug.
There are other issues with the quote. Look at where and when George Bernard Shaw lived (1856 - 1950) in the United Kingdom. The elan of the era that Shaw grew up in Britain was all about "taming" nature and "civilizing" the benighted brown people. This was the era where people went to areas that had previously been jungles and tried to have manicured British lawns. This was also the era where Great Britain tried to impose the British way of life over civilizations that were thousands of years older than it. In many ways, our world is still recovering from the effects of the "unreasonable men" that George Bernard Shaw talks about.
The point of the quote is to make people think before dismissing someone as being unreasonable. A person perceived as unreasonable may be the very person who is going against the grain, which is generally what you have to do to make progress.
Concise aphorisms that encapsulate wisdom often trade comprehensive nuance for brevity. It is up to the reader to look beyond the literal words for the value in the aphorism. My favorite example is the golden rule, which invites you to consider other people's experiences and perspectives, to generously value their experience on par with how you value your own, and treat them accordingly. A literal and simplistic application of the golden rule, though, would often be a terrible idea as it ignores critical differences in our wants, values, life circumstances, and abilities.
wrong bubble, mate. Anyway, aside from the generalizations and name-calling, I kind of agree with you, as someone who used both MS Office and GSuite in a business environment. Probably for the large majority of basic usage, there is no difference but for the type (and size) of stuff I was sometimes forced to deal with, GSuite was severely lacking, leading to frequent frustration and having to do meta-work in order to do my actual work.
Google Docs had real time collaborative editing years before Microsoft.
Word online was a piece of crap for years. A decade? This is crazy talk. It's like how people call Microsoft teams good when using it is like loading pages in a Internet Explorer 6 app.
Who cares what you saw as an intern? Did they not release it because it was too good for the public?
Not sure why you got downvoted so much, however I agree with the notion that entire Gsuite is a toy for kids to play. Try doing something similar and immediately start looking around thinking: where's my Excel?
Depends on what you are doing right? Most people use spreadsheets for lists and simple sum() type of things; sheets works fine for that and is convenient. Same for the other gsuite stuff.
Those sweeping statements never work; hordes of young people or ‘new computer users’ (people in poorer countries who can now afford tablets and low end laptops etc) never touched MS Office and won’t be thinking ‘where is my Excel?’ only for that reason and just complete their work in sheets.
These are often people doing production work and not kids who are playing.
Collaborative editing of large, complex documents involving dozens of domain experts.
The collaborative features of GSuite are best in industry, some other features are so - so. I know what expert Excel users can do with it, and it's truly impressive in its domain. But if I need to do that type of stuff I reach for Python typically.
Agreed. As a longterm users of both Excel and Google sheets, for simple tasks G-sheets is enough (and probably better for sharing). But any complex modelling should be done in Excel - it has far superior performance, short-cut keys, and analytical options. Being able to see the calculations easily for non-technical people is also a big advantage over other analytical products like Jupyter notebooks (e.g. Python / r) or SAS. Of course for really big data / stats modelling you need to use SAS/notebooks/stata (not a fan of the last one). Horses for Courses.
No serious engineer I ever met used Google docs for extended calculations. Although there are curious difference in software use depending on your location.
It's funny you say this because I tried using Excel for basic fitness/nutrition tracking and it wouldn't let me because my Windows 10 license was having issues with Office.
I opened up Google Sheets and haven't looked back. I can update any spreadsheet from my phone and it's backed up on my Google Drives account. Would have given Microsoft a chance had they not been so particular about who can use their software.
I've used Excel for over a decade and am baffled by how restrictive the licensing has become.
My opinion is that this type of "dark financing" is more common than many might suspect.
I believe this tactic, used by some tech companies to attack competitors, is fairly effective. I imagine it is mostly employed by those like Oracle that aren't winning in the market.
I am not a fan but I wouldn't call Oracle "not winning". It has been a very profitable company for a very long time. I am not so sure if the current star companies will last that long.
I mean, sure, but looking at the last five years they are getting destroyed by clouds. Amazon, Google, and long-time nemesis Microsoft are all dramatically outperforming Oracle. Nobody wants Oracle's cloud products. The companies that are doing worse than Oracle are other dinosaurs like IBM and Dell. Even VMWare is beating them.
"Oracle donated between $25,000 and $99,999 last year to the internet project..."
The upper bound is barely enough for two modest full time salaries? This is not much money. I wonder how much the project gets altogether, ie what proportion this is of the total income.
49 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadBut we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane."
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.htm...
Kipling may need a Warhol overhaul; it seems these days that everybody gets to be the monastery for 15 minutes just to see if they are well-architected.
Having worked at Oracle, the hatred for Google is very deep. We worked with G only when we had easy money to make, and they did the same. We would get in trouble for using any G product, and could only use G sheets/docs if a client had created it themselves and sent it to us.
Now I'm imaging if Oracle had invested in creating as many competitors for Google products as possible, Samsung-style, even in markets that don't make sense.
Back in 2007, Sun had been working on an iPhone/iOS competitor named the jPhone. Imagine if Oracle had ended up continuing their work. Then there'd be two competing smartphone OS's powered by Java.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/0ADA49EA-93A...
https://www.informationweek.com/call-it-the-jphone-sun-shows...
Probably not, there were iOS/Android competitors until not too long ago but they all died: Windows Phone, webOS, Symbian.
Oracle has “beehive” a god awful outlook extension that ruins most functionality by taking core features from outlook and forcing them through oracle servers.
Rather than sales force for a CRM they have a god awful oracle sales cloud from decades ago with 10% of the functionality.
They moved all acquisitions software from AWS to oracles cloud... but oracles cloud couldn’t handle the load and a few had to be temporarily returned to aws.
The list goes on.
When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2008 summers, they already had fully functional web based office which was a decade ahead of what was at Google at that time. Google is good only at pr and that's what they use their oss and surrounding efforts for
Know many teachers?
Besides, there was a time when the supposedly reasonable thing to do was to use Internet Explorer. I am glad the unreasonable people have consigned it to the waste bin, which is exactly where it belongs.
Lets call the adaptive people "Alice", like in cryptography, and use one of your examples at random: Air conditioning.
A hundred years ago, if it was too hot Alice just shrugged and didn't do anything about it. She just accepted that "It Is What It Is." Around the turn of the century, one guy, named Willis H. Carrier, decided "enough is enough, I'm going to fix this" and invented modern electric air conditioning machines. These days Alice accepts the new state of things: you can buy air conditioners, and once purchased, you can turn them on.
But lets be honest: If Alice had to use a building without air conditioning, or broken air conditioning, there's a snowball's chance in hell that she'll actually do anything about it, despite the ready availability of such devices and specialised tradespeople to fix them.
I've regularly visit a government office where 200 people have sat sweating for three years because nobody lifted a finger to I dunno... maybe see what's wrong with the aircon.
This observation exactly matches my experience of the world.
I'd love to live in your world where most people go out of their way to improve the status quo in novel ways. It would be... magical.
Incidentally, you cannot have it all: this architecture is not cheap, not fast, and isn't designed to withstand earthquakes or floods. But you'll never need air conditionning.
A few years ago I've been in an old monastery, almost daily, in both summer and winter. The summer was good, albeit with a window open. Not as good as airco, but good.
However the gas costs in winter were insane, from what I heard it was in the hundreds of thousands of EUR.
The fact that it emitted cool air was a side bonus in summer.
There are other issues with the quote. Look at where and when George Bernard Shaw lived (1856 - 1950) in the United Kingdom. The elan of the era that Shaw grew up in Britain was all about "taming" nature and "civilizing" the benighted brown people. This was the era where people went to areas that had previously been jungles and tried to have manicured British lawns. This was also the era where Great Britain tried to impose the British way of life over civilizations that were thousands of years older than it. In many ways, our world is still recovering from the effects of the "unreasonable men" that George Bernard Shaw talks about.
Google Docs had real time collaborative editing years before Microsoft.
Word online was a piece of crap for years. A decade? This is crazy talk. It's like how people call Microsoft teams good when using it is like loading pages in a Internet Explorer 6 app.
Who cares what you saw as an intern? Did they not release it because it was too good for the public?
Those sweeping statements never work; hordes of young people or ‘new computer users’ (people in poorer countries who can now afford tablets and low end laptops etc) never touched MS Office and won’t be thinking ‘where is my Excel?’ only for that reason and just complete their work in sheets.
These are often people doing production work and not kids who are playing.
Normally they have zero idea about professional project work the concept of a version controlled document is something they have never heard off
And we are talking Major Brands and Major agencies here
I was talking about having documents in source control vitally important when you may have ,multiple teams in several countries
Disclaimer: I work at Google and hate docs. But acknowledge the thing works ok for its intended user.
The collaborative features of GSuite are best in industry, some other features are so - so. I know what expert Excel users can do with it, and it's truly impressive in its domain. But if I need to do that type of stuff I reach for Python typically.
I opened up Google Sheets and haven't looked back. I can update any spreadsheet from my phone and it's backed up on my Google Drives account. Would have given Microsoft a chance had they not been so particular about who can use their software.
I've used Excel for over a decade and am baffled by how restrictive the licensing has become.
I believe this tactic, used by some tech companies to attack competitors, is fairly effective. I imagine it is mostly employed by those like Oracle that aren't winning in the market.
The upper bound is barely enough for two modest full time salaries? This is not much money. I wonder how much the project gets altogether, ie what proportion this is of the total income.