Rebirth of the Tech Madman

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This year, Larry Ellison had an accident because of cycling too fast, and then underwent a plastic surgery. He took a short break, so he had time to think about it.

He can't do it if he doesn't think deeply-Oracle almost went bankrupt in 1990 because of a sales strategy error.

However, in the final analysis, the reason is that competition in the industry is too fierce.

To give an embarrassing example, the former troika on the ibm-pc platform-spreadsheets, word processing, database database dbase, its operator Ashton-Tate has collapsed.

The general ins and outs are: dbase’s financial resources have attracted copycat imitators, and they are also very good, such as foxbase, which has eroded the market that should belong to dbase; the extremely large Ashton-Tate company has used all means. , But the warning was invalid and the acquisition failed. In the end, only a lawsuit was filed. What I did not expect was that the court ruled that dbase violated the copyright of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was not protected. Shiden-Tate Company was desperately desperate, and now dbase has been acquired.

Competition in the desktop database market is so fierce, not to mention the large-scale database market with higher technology content and greater profit margins.

Oracle, rewritten in C language, claims to be able to run on all computer platforms. This gimmick is of course a bit exaggerated. Oracle cannot support 100% hardware systems, but it is true that it has wider applicability.

With this, oracle has developed rapidly in the past ten years, but it has made enemies everywhere. Sybase and informix are its very strong opponents.

In addition, on ibm mainframes and minicomputers, oracle has to challenge ibm's child soldiers-db2; on the Fangyuan server, the situation is similar, oracle has to challenge ebase, a philosopher who belongs to the Tang sect.

The so-called soldiers, of course, means that these hardware systems are very friendly to db2 or ebase. From technology, to services, and even the most front-end marketing, they all have innate advantages, throwing away a lot of oracle.

What's more, in terms of technological advancement, oracle is still not a great success, marketing and service are its strengths.

All in all, the more the Oracle road goes up, the narrower it gets. The boss, Larry Ellison, must work hard to stand on the highest point and think about some "philosophical" issues about the company and the entire industry. Looking for new growth space; otherwise, Oracle may face bankruptcy again, and his own luxurious life will lose its roots.

In Larry Ellison's view, what Tang Huan is doing now is to expand his territory from his personal computer to the Internet.

To be honest, Larry Ellison was secretly jealous of Tang Huan's way of throwing a concept to create an industry, but he had to convince him. Therefore, he spent the time healed and studied the World Wide Web well, which was quite insightful.

Listening to Tang Huan’s introduction to the five-generation Fangyuan personal computer, Larry Ellison suddenly had an idea—the future of the Internet is so powerful, does that mean access to the terminal, not just Fangyuan personal computer What about such a form? Or to put it further, out of the maintenance of vested interests, Tang Huan's touting of the five-generation Fangyuan personal computer is itself a wrong direction!

Imagine that when the Internet spreads, all tasks can be submitted to the network center server for centralized processing, and the results will be returned later, and the network terminal hardware configuration only needs cpu, memory and network card, like a hard disk. Such expensive equipment can be completely omitted.

This kind of lightweight computer, let's call it a network computer, should be squeezed to $500.

As for the software system, the network center server must have its own oracle; and the client only needs a browser, and even the operating system can be omitted to the greatest extent. Because the network computer can be started via the network, the browser is downloaded from the central server, and everything is ready.

After this computer application model slowly became clear in his mind, Larry Ellison couldn't help being a little excited-he seemed to have found a good card that overturned the existing industry game rules! I don't know if Tang Huan realizes that the Internet he has been pushing hard may ruin his existing advantages?

Larry Ellison’s temperament is quite similar to that of Jobs, weird and elusive, but this does not affect his conspiracy-he forcibly hold on to this brilliant idea, ready to go back and plan well, and then Also hype a concept, maybe network computers can replace Fangyuan personal computers.

...

Of course, Tang Huan would not have thought that someone would come up with an idea based on his blueprint for the Internet, trying to subvert the current dominance of Fangyuan's personal computer. After all, there are too many covets from all sides, and it is overwhelming.

However, the richest man has noticed the increasingly sharp competition among software companies in the industry.

At the beginning of the birth of electronic computers, the main task was data processing, so the market demand for databases can be said to be prosperous. Up to now, the cross-hardware platform relational database is the most famous with oracle, sybase, and informix, and the conflict is also the most intense-Philip White, the chief executive of informix in Menlo Park, and the chief executive of the adjacent oracle in Redwood City Official Larry Ellison has even reached the point of personal conflict and has occupied a very distinctive place in Silicon Valley gossip news.

The database market is so rich that even Microsoft, which is constantly running for operating systems and office software, has also moved their minds. Unfortunately, the technical threshold in this field is not easy to pass.

To this end, in terms of large databases, Microsoft and Sybase signed a cooperation agreement to jointly develop a project called sql_server; in terms of desktop databases, Microsoft took a generous move and took foxbase, which is a straightforward step.

The irony is here. Ashton-Tate was too stingy to win foxbase, and ended up in a bleak evening scene, and sold dbase instead; Microsoft got foxbase and developed it on this basis An enhanced version of foxpro-in this way, the historical grievances between dbase and foxbase continue to between the already incompatible versions of Microsoft.

The market competition between these two companies is mainly manifested in the programming language tools, especially the c/c++ language, plus the three major development tools of philosopher, ++, microsoft_c/c++, and zeroe_c/c++, it is like a three-nation killer. Situation.

Among them, the position of zeroe_c/c++ has always been relatively detached, and it has achieved rapid development of visualization and componentization; and Microsoft has acquired dbase and foxbase respectively, and after adding the database, the new version of the product will integrate these resources. And catch up with zeroe_c/c++ in function.

At this year's comdex, and Microsoft showed the beta version of the latest programming development tools, and even microsoft_c/c++ has begun to change to microsoft_visual_c++.

Tang Huan, who wandered around in the comdex exhibition hall, saw this scene and asked Anders Heelsberg, who has been in charge of the programming development tools department, "Do you think that in the Internet age, programming languages ​​should be able to What kind of adaptive changes are there?"

Anders Heelsberg replied without hesitation: "The Internet will draw more people to the computer, and the level of users will be clearly differentiated in two directions. Compared with the advanced programming tools like zeroe_c/c++, Novice users who use a friendly development tool like zeroe_delphi will certainly grow rapidly in scale."

"In particular, based on the traditional chapter programming language used by turbo_chapter, Zheru not only developed an object-oriented object_chapter for use by delphi, but also developed a scripted chapter_script for office software macro languages ​​and the dynamics of the World Wide Web. The use of web pages seems to have a tendency to sweep the world."

Having said this, Anders Helsberg laughed proudly, “The financial elites of Wall Street can no longer do without the spreadsheet tool pioneered by the teacher; in order to better analyze the data, they are now chapter_script is inseparable, and it is even praised as the most beautiful programming language in the world."

"I estimate that with the expansion of the World Wide Web, there will be more and more people developing websites, and subsequently, more and more people who master chapter_script."

Tang Huan, who was walking forward with his hand, listened carefully to Anders Heelsberg's words, and asked: "Then have you ever thought about how specific this trend that is sweeping the world will be?"

Hearing this seemingly philosophical question, Anders Heelsberg was a little bit stunned. He scratched his head and murmured: "Specifically... the code developed by our programming tools runs on every server, every workstation, every desktop computer, every laptop, every handheld computer, every A home video game console..."

"Every TV, every refrigerator, every air conditioner, every mobile phone, every car..." Tang Huan took the words with a smile, "Our programming tools will break out of the traditional boundaries of computers and enter home appliances, Transportation and other common products that people cannot live without in their daily lives are endowed with scientific and technological intelligence."

Seeing his disciple opened his mouth in surprise, Tang Huan joked: "Why, do you think it's impossible?"

"Of course not." Anders Heelsberg, who woke up, shook his head quickly, "At the very least, we are already conducting similar research and development on TVs, mobile phones, and cars. It's just that, The teacher's thinking is so broad that I didn't react to it for a while."

Tang Huan nodded slightly, "This cannot be blamed on your limited vision, but the technological gap inside is daunting. The first problem is the limitation of hardware resources."

"The so-called software programming, in the final analysis, is to make full use of the computer's microprocessor and memory resources under the guidance of mathematical algorithms."

"There are borrowings and repayments, and it’s not difficult to use them again, but even in the process of borrowing and repaying, programmers will inevitably be negligent ~www.readwn.com~, causing artificial memory leaks, and it will become more and more complicated with the application. The probability keeps increasing."

"In order to facilitate the use of novice users, chapter_script has deliberately downplayed the abstract concepts of data types such as integers and floating-point numbers, and even introduced an object data type that can represent any data type."

"Under these appearances, the compiler can automatically reclaim memory."

"If the programming tool department can carry forward this point, then our programming language, entering products other than computers, will undoubtedly greatly reduce the difficulty of implementation."

"The teacher simply opened another window for me." Anders Heelsberg suddenly admired: "However, in this way, we need to design a programming language from scratch-after all, c/ The main feature of c++ is that it can flexibly allocate memory resources manually through memory pointers; the mechanisms of chapter and object_chapter are not different. Asal_script is still far away from real automatic memory recovery."

"This is indeed a brand new subject." Tang Huan nodded, "A programming language that meets real cross-hardware requirements, like C language, which has a compiler that supports different hardware systems, is not enough. Instead, it should have a separate system. A different kind of virtual machine, which also has functions such as automatic memory garbage collection, distributed, multi-threaded, code execution safety, and so on."

After pointing to this level, Tang Shoufu glanced at the booth of the Sun Microsystems company just passing by, smiled playfully, and said to his heart-you should sell hardware products like servers and workstations honestly. There is no need to work hard any more. Who will let the advantage of time be on my side?