This has been Oracle's (i.e. Larry Ellison's) sales and marketing M.O. since forever. Read up on why Raymond Lane left the company. And sad part is it works.

Only till it doesn't. One day they'll try this tactic and discover that they've burned so many folks early in their career that a majority will see through the tactic. Or alternatively decision makers will consult with staff that advise them directly and THEY will have been burned.

And the third thing that can happen, which happened with a friend of mine, is that a really bad solution is implemented at a very large ongoing cost, the executive who made the decision leaves (which is what often happens with incompetent executives) and their replacement walks in, sees the disaster, doesn't care about saving his predecessors stupidity and decides to remove the bad solution, and makes sure that the vendor who caused the headache goes to the bottom of the pile when it considerating them during tenders for new business.

You know what they say: it costs less to keep existing business (especially in a saturated marketplace where you are the market leader) than it costs to drum up new business.

Believe me, this is a very short to medium term sales solution. When it goes wrong it's not easy to recover from. When competitors start taking market share from Oracle they'll find it very hard to recover their market share without immense upheaval and systemic change throughout their business. Microsoft learned this the hard way. Oracle's time will come! Can't come soon enough.

I was interested in reading up on this, and found this article if others are interested: http://www.peoplesoft-planet.com/anatomy-power-play-ray-lane...

The article is not about whether programmers are doing well for themselves. It's about what happens to the rest of society when only one section (tech\finance) do well for themselves at the expense of everyone else?

I fully agree with this piece.

I am sick of the Larry Ellison type role model of leadership that is encouraged and celebrated.

Mindless ambition is not a bad thing if you want to climb a mountain or walk to the north pole in winter on your own. But if you want to rule the world you will do harm in unimaginable ways.

I'd like to believe there is a secret rag tag bunch of 60-70 year old, retired Engineers out there working on some cool tech.

If we have 60-70 year old's running for president, moving the markets on wall st and robbing diamonds there just have to be a few greybeards dying of cancer working on perpetual motion or something. I mean this is the generation that built the first rockets and computers with fucking slide rules. I am sure a few lurk around here. What are you busybodies upto?

60+ become candidates because of accumulated wealth, accumulated critical mass of professional and political connections, and a bit of end-of-life ego.

As for what old STEM people do, my father started to learn C++ at 66, learned Python at 68, modified and invented variations of heat pipes for energy efficient home cooling, designed and built a home-brew control system (before weenie arduino stuff), mastered the art of the perfect grilled pork burrito, and learned to play jazz clarinet. Really miss that cranky old geezer. RIP, Dad.

Hey, thanks for sharing that. RIP indeed.

P.S. Can you (pretty please) pass on the secret for the burrito?

My favorite kind of cranky old geezer. Inspired.

Interesting. Could explain why the different wiring produces the same computation.

I am just curious to see what, this generation of 20-40 year old's who get lucky, end up doing with their cash. They do seem a bit more worldly wise than the last gen (who I blame for funding all the BS tech we see today).

Most likely, it means they can finally afford to buy a house.

(Seriously, a house a normal person could afford anywhere else would kinda require a windfall to afford out here.)

I'm with this guy.

Agree and also Investors have a bias towards the student crowd as they are much easier to impress and deal with, than an experienced Academic or Engineer.

I agree with you. Let's just give thanks that Larry Page doesn't run Wikipedia. At this point Google is way past the point of no return. They are more bothered about empire defense than information.

Since the crowd around here can't exist without an increase in poverty, the real question is how many poor people do we need to produce one Zuckerberg. If we want more Zuckerbergs we need more poor people, just as if we want more whales in the ocean we need more ocean.

Pretty sure Trump can work out a nice formula to export the poor into the developing world, in return for an expansion of H1B visas or something. Given the clamor I still see in China and India for people coming in, shouldn't be too hard to work out. Also they don't use toilet paper there.

And yes I am that cynical of the crowd around here and the effect the tech industry has had on increasing poverty.

This comment is absolutely baffling to me - I can't even disagree because I don't understand what you are saying.

I believe the op is referring to the debate about wealth creation and distribution, where one could have a view that people in IT-startups like Zuckerberg are not creating wealth, just distributing it. And to distribute, you need to have someone to distribute FROM and someone to distribute TO. Now the comment should be more legible, I believe.

Ok, and yes that makes sense. The wealth creators don't have to be low paid drones though.

There was a recent discussion about startups and an increase in income inequality.

It seems some people think that there is no such thing as too much income inequality.

> Since the crowd around here can't exist without an increase in poverty, [...]

How does that work?

In so many ways. You can find the pattern everywhere once you start looking.

On a recent trip I saw the after effects of a Nokia factory closing. Now one would think given the boom in phones it wouldn't be an issue for the employees to get new jobs. Two years after loosing their jobs the majority were involved in evangelical churches or multilevel marketing schemes.

Disruption does many useful things, but I feel the benefits are accruing to fewer and fewer people at the expense of many.

Everyone has a smart phone these days when they used to have a feature phone (or even earlier, no mobile phone).

That's a big benefit to billions of people. The few people working in phone factories are a drop in the ocean.

Also well worth reading about T.J Watson.

IBM was one of the few American companies that had no layoffs during the depression in the 30's.

Inventories built up. No sales. And he was almost fired.

Once the recovery started every company and govt in the world wanted a computer and the rest is history.

That was only obvious in retrospect, and has very strong survivor-bias: it might as well have sunk the company, and IBM would have been completely unknown today.

Also, things are a bit different today: IBM is largely a services company, which doesn't lend itself well to inventory building. Also, they have struggled on the merit of their offerings, not the economical climate, for a very long time. Doubling down right now is not obvisouly going to end well.

"Computers" were actually clerks in the census office that spent their days manually adding up and multiplying things. They got replaced by IBM's tabulators well before the 30's. But you are right IBM's inventory at the time was mostly tabulators.