Lang Xian Ping: Why Oracle is successful?

In Western philosophy, failure is the fault of control and management. Wen/lang Ping, professor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, top scholar of corporate governance I'm going to tell you a story about American High-tech companies.　　The story is about the boss of Oracle, who recently squeezed IBM away to buy solar micro-systems.　　In 1977, Ellison, 32, founded Oracle with two other people, who was a dropout who had not graduated from three universities. Don't underestimate the older young people who drop out of school, their three guys level is not simple, at least can see the most cutting-edge paper. One guy first saw an article in a professional journal published by Edgar Edgar Frank Codd, a relational model of large shared database data, a turning point in the history of the database. You know, at that time, the lower level of the "Hierarchical Model" and "Network Model" database products in the market occupies the main position.　　The other two also read, they feel that the database software has the potential, so began to plan to build a commercial "relational" database. The first question is, how did the guy who wrote the paper not do his own company? The real problem is that he is an IBM engineer! So, how come IBM doesn't do it by itself? This article was published in June 1970, but IBM has been slow to engage in this project.　　The main reason is that the IBM blindness, a large and complex bureaucratic system on this side of the discussion half-day conclusion is that they think the "relational" database speed is too slow, compared to the backward hierarchy of the database. In stark contrast, the three "institutional" people, in the summer of 1979, released the commercial Oracle products, the new database product is not very stable, and lack of some important features, but still have customers. At the time, the CIA couldn't wait to buy a set of such software to meet their needs, but after consulting IBM, it found that IBM had no commercially available products, so it contacted Oracle.　　It was not until 1983 that Oracle had released its third edition, before IBM released its belated product DB2. Sustainable competitiveness What do you see behind this story? In an environment like the United States, new technical research results can be released in time, even if a company because of internal problems did not get out, the technology will not disappear, but is accumulated, passed down, so that the people back then do not need to waste time on some low-level issues.　　The so-called scientific research is such accumulation and transfer. Why did Oracle launch the third edition so soon? The real situation is that Oracle launched the so-called second edition is actually the first version of the bug revision, but the change is not very thorough, and this second edition of the software is not only unstable, but also lacks some important functions. How did Oracle's third edition improve? After they had received the first list, their founders did not dare to be narcissistic, because they knew too well that this product, if notUpgrades will soon be overtaken by IBM. There is, then, the situation is not like today, most computers are using the Microsoft operating system, then the CIA has a variety of computers, so how to operate across platforms, this is a very important question.　　They know very well that they cannot fail, but they have to solve these specific problems in order to ensure success in the future, it is said that in the Western philosophy, failure is the fault of control and management. On the basis of process management, Oracle can continuously improve from the first edition to the third edition, satisfy the market demand, and thus make Oracle today. And this continuous improvement from the first to the third version is the so-called sustainable competitiveness of the embodiment.