Customer Reviews

The Oracle Edge: How Oracle Corporation's Take No Prisoners Strategy Has Created a $8 Billion Software Juggernaut

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

One of Oracle's founders and I had a good laugh over this book. The inaccuracies are amazing. About two pages in it says that Oracle was started to build a database on an IBM mainframe for the Air Force. Wrong customer, wrong computer, wrong project. It doesn't get much better later on. The author didn't bother to interview any early Oracle people except the accountant. The book says there are few nerds at Oracle, and everyone is fashionably dressed. This tells me he only met sales and marketing people, not the several thousand technicians who worked in the adjacent buildings and actually built the products. A bit later the author says that he was moved from an inexpensive motel to a fancy hotel because that's how Oracle people lived. He doesn't mention that the manager in charge of that group was fired for wasting money. I could go on, but this review must be limited.

I think the book does suggest the tone of the sales and marketing people when left on their own, but the shareholders should know that most people are modest, hardworking, normal people and that wasting money is not the corporate standard.

The Oracle Edge is too superficial to be of much value to all but those who want a quick excursion into the subject. You'll have to provide your own interpretations. The author doesn't provide much.

The key lessons I took away from the book are that the company succeeded by providing software benefits for large companies ahead of anyone else in the areas of compatibility across computer platforms, upgrading to new releases, adding new applications, and having maximum up-time. It appeared to have helped that its early competitors did little to respond to any challenge Oracle provided.

As to the future, it looks like Oracle's processes for improvement are not yet robust enough to take on the Microsoft hegemony in personal computers.

Fully eighty percent of the book seems to be about recruiting methods, compensation processes, expense accounts, ways of meeting with customers, and handling of new product releases that are completely unremarkable in the context of what best practice companies do. You can skip over those materials.

One thing that makes this book a little suspect is that there is primarily perspective provided about the company from the author and financial people (I couldn't tell if it was one or two in the latter case). That's a pretty thin base for a whole book about a company. Interviews with customers and competitors would have been nice.

I suspect that the next book about Oracle that someone writes will be the standard for all of us to consider. This book reminds me of The McKinsey Way, a thin abstract of the famous consulting firm's processes from someone who didn't operate at a very high level in the company.

If you don't feel you have to know about Oracle, I suggest you take a pass on this book.

An employee of Oracle, I was thrilled to see this book. However, the material is superficial, disappointingly low on hard fact and examples. Few takeways. Particularly disappointing is the info onthe provision of globalized products by Oracle - that this book was written by an American Marketing person is obvious.

I had great hopes when i purchased this book. Having worked at Oracle for 4 years, I know that there is much to learn from that experience. However, Stuart Read does little more than provide puffy paragraphs to surround an outline. The facts are too vague to convey real value and it left me feeling empty. It's a shame as it could have been a great book. The concept is good but the execution is poor.

I picked this book up a couple of years ago and when I read it then, I thought it was too unreal, too fictitious. Everything the author wrote about Oracle was that Oracle is the paradise and there is not a thing wrong about Oracle.

I read it again a month back and thinking it would changed my mind. It didn't. In fact, it made it even worse. I have been with several high profile Silicon Valley tech companies and despite the rosy outlook of these companies (especially during the dot-com days), it was not all heaven. The author failed miserably to inject realism into Oracle machinery. I would definitely give this book a thumbs down.

Published in 2000, this book was in many respects already out of date. By now, more is. Much of what remains current is represented here by truisms and by gee-whiz exclamations, as for instance Read's goggling at Oracle's fitness center and cafeterias. He appears to subscribe to, and he promotes, a very unreflective adherence to Oracle business practices.

However, one must salute Read's marketing abilities, without which his book was unlikely to interest even so obscure a publisher as Adams Media Corporation. On the other hand, the book is astonishingly ill-written--Read is reported to have a degree from Harvard, but I'm waiting to see it--and his publisher evidently never even thought of editing his annoying prose.

Stay away from this book. By contrast, _The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison_ is a gem.

Oracle Edge attempts to give an insight into how Oracle built a huge organization from a tiny project started by Larry Ellison for a client. It describes how Larry focused on aggressive methods to grow the company, and the upsides and downsides of the methods used. Many incidents are described by the author, involving sales and marketing people, technical employees and senior employees of the organization. These give a good idea about the culture of the organization, and how it has evolved over the years. Some interesting aspects of the book were the aggressive sales focus, maintaining a core-group for product development, extraordinary rewards for the best employees, a rather different hiring criteria, and other mechanisms used to communicate in the organization. The book is probably not for technical reading, and may not even give a complete picture of the organization, but it gives some interesting experiences and perspective of the author about the organization, its early days, and its tremendous growth over the years.

This is an interesting, but distorted view of Oracle. Any company that has to deal with Oracle can tell you that Oracle has many more challenges than this book points out. It is not a "how to run a business" book as much as "hey, we successed in spite of our errors". Although they were successful due a lot of hard work, they made many more mistakes than were indicated in this book. The book is worth reading if your company is using Oracle products. In understanding the hands-on control from Larry Ellison, the dominance that Larry plays in the running of the corporation and how his tempermental style effects their business decisions, Oracle's selling style, and the culture of the company, it will help you make better decisions in how to deal with the company.

The book follows a historic description and the developing management policies of the business up to about 97. He doesnt show the thinking, choices and options that lay behind the management's decisions clearly. He relates the policies, their successes/ failures and how they seemed to work with the insight of a guy who was their recipient, not their creator. He wasn't passive but I didn't feel that he really gave executive insight into strategy, leadership, planning, competetive battles and especially in the ways they were thought out and won. We don't experience Ellison first hand. It is an insiders book from a lower middle level. I like the book in that although it struggles with its organisation, the contents are still mainly composed of insights into the policies and it takes a business focus rather than the journalists' history valuing approach. I would buy it again for the ideas, but I haven't read any other Oracle books. It is very easy to pick up and just read.

I'm always interested in what people write about Oracle, being an international Oracle employee for almost 5 years now. The good thing with this book is that the author really tries to give beef to the title - how can others take profit from Oracle's success methods and which are these anyways. It's not easy to analyze and find a structure, but the author solves this quite well. Sometimes though the facts seem to be stretched and inaccurate (see other comments on wrong project, customer etc.) and also my interest wasn't holding up until the end. I was skimming through the last 80 pages. For an Oracle outsider who wants to know what's going on inside surely a good read, except the various little inaccuracies. The minority runs around in suite & tie, we all know how developers usually dress in most companies of Silicon Valley. Other than that: easy & informative