December 9th, 2004
OracleWorld: Complaint-central for overpriced software?
Apparently, if you’re a tech exec and you’re going to complain about overpriced software, then OracleWorld is the place to do it. First Judy Chavis, director of business development for Dell’s enterprise product group, seized the venue to beat up Red Hat for pricing Red Hat Enterprise Linux out of the SMB (small-to-medium business) market. Then, not to be outdone, Sun CEO Scott McNealy used the OracleWorld stage to do some price-bashing of his own. But rather than pick an easy and universally hated-by-Sun target like Red Hat, McNealy picked on none other than event host Oracle for overpricing its software. McNealy’s chief complaint was Oracle’s continued policy of charging for its software by number of processor cores rather than number of processors. Most of the semiconductor industry, including Sun’s supplier of x86 compatible processors (AMD), has been moving the direction of multiple core processors — processors that pack the strength of two or four of the more typically used single-core processors into one chip. For example, today, Intel starting showing off a 65 nanometer dual core mobile processor code-named Yonah.
