Lang Xianping: Why Is Oracle Bone Successful?

Now let me tell you a story about an American high-tech enterprise. This story is about the Oracle Corp boss who recently squeezed IBM out and bought the sun micro system.

In 1977, 32 years old. Larry Ellison (Larry Ellison) started Oracle with two other people. At that time, he was a dropout who had never graduated from three universities.

Don't belittle this dropout youth, their three guys are not very simple at the very least. They can at least understand the forefront of the industry. paper 。 A guy first saw a paper published by Edgar Frank Codd in a professional journal called "the relational model of large shared database data", which is a turning point in the history of database development. "Frank" You know, at that time, the database products of the lower level "hierarchical model" and "netted model" occupy the main position in the market. After reading the other two people, they felt the potential of database software, so they began to plan the construction of a relational database.

The first question is, how does the guy who wrote the paper do not run the company himself? The real problem is that he is an engineer of IBM! So how can IBM not do it herself? This article was actually published in June 1970, but IBM has been tardy in this project. The main reason is that IBM was closed at the time, and the huge and complex bureaucratic system discussed here for a long time concluded that the relational database was too slow to match the backward hierarchical database.

In stark contrast, those three "off the shelf" people released the Oracle products in the summer of 1979. The new database product is not very stable, and lacks some important functions, but there are still customers. At that time, the CIA could not wait to buy such a software to meet their needs. But after consulting IBM, it found that IBM had no commercial products, so contacted oracle. It was not until 1983 that Oracle had released the third edition, and IBM released its tardy product DB2.

Sustainable competitiveness

What do you see behind this story? In the American environment, new technology research results can be released in time. Even if a company fails to get out of its internal problems, the technology will not disappear. Instead, it will be accumulated and passed down, so that people in the rear will not have to waste time on some low level problems. So called scientific research is such accumulation and transmission.

Why can oracle bone inscriptions be launched third times so fast? The real situation is that the so-called second edition of oracle bone inscription is actually the first edition of the revised version, but it is not very thorough. Moreover, the second version of the software is not only unstable, but also lacks some important functions. How did the third edition of Oracle be improved? Several of their founders did not dare to narrate themselves after receiving the first order, because they were too clear that if the product was not upgraded, it would catch up with IBM immediately.

What's more, when the situation was not like today, most computers use Microsoft's operating system. At that time, there were all kinds of computers in the CIA, so how to cross platform operation is a key and very real problem. They know very well that they can not fail, but they have to solve these specific problems in order to ensure future success. In other words, in western philosophy, failure is the failure of control and management.

On the basis of process management, oracle bone can be continuously improved from the first edition to the third edition. market demand Therefore, today's oracle bone inscriptions have been achieved. This continuous improvement from the first edition to the third edition is the embodiment of the so-called continuous competitiveness.