Oracle's Ellison Scoffs At Microsoft Server Technology

Ratcheting up the rhetoric in the geek cold war
over who will dominate the hugely valuable Internet server market,
Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison on Monday night lambasted Microsoft over
the software giant's claim that it now offers the fastest servers on the
market.

"There's a reason they (Microsoft) don't run any large Web sites," Ellison
said in his one-hour keynote address to cap off the first full day of the
Comdex convention here.

In a voice dripping with vitriol, Ellison scoffed at the standards by
which
Microsoft measured the purported speed of its servers and accused
the company of manufacturing a substandard, unreliable product.

Ellison said his ire was sparked by a "crummy mug" Microsoft employees
have been handing out to conventioneers touting the results of a test in
which a Microsoft server cluster ran faster than a similar Oracle device.

Responding to those claims, Ellison showed the audience a multimedia
demonstration in which Microsoft servers failed under adverse
conditions, while Oracle server groups ran despite losing components.

Ellison said that Microsoft lawyers had warned him against showing the
demonstration.

With its confrontational tenor, Ellison's keynote address was in sharp
contrast to that of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates' comments to kickoff
Comdex on Sunday night.

Rather than delve into controversial issues, Gates used his keynote
slot to host a two-hour product demonstration in which a cadre of
Microsoft executives trotted out the software giant's slickest new
toys.

When not ripping Microsoft or singing the praises of the Oracle 9i
Application Server, Ellison waxed philosophical during his keynote
about what he said was a fundamental mistake of the computer
industry.

Specifically, Ellison said that the computer industry's passion for
customization both in servers and in personal computers has made it
virtually impossible for manufacturers to create reliable, standardized
devices.

Instead of building increasingly complex and individualized machines,
Ellison said, companies should try to develop PCs and servers that are
identical to one another and tested against rigorous standards.

"We need to turn (PCs and servers) into true appliances," Ellison said.

PCs particularly need to be homogenized, Ellison said, predicting that
within a few years most PCs would contain little more than Microsoft
Office, an Internet browser and a handful of games. Everything else,
Ellison said, will be handled at the server level.

That message was in sharp contrast to Gates' insistence Sunday night
that computer manufacturers should move devices away from the
increasing "master-slave" relationship between servers and PCs.