All in the Family

I miss Accidental Empires - the characters described in it are now in their dotage, but in its day it was the only book on tech that gave the proper human context to Silicon Valley. It's easy to read the news, and see a sterile world of one big company doing business with another. AE blew the cover on that, and showed a world smart, vain people trying to one-up each other.

If you don't know the people you miss the news. Take this story: Oracle claims Yahoo has defected. On the surface, the story looks pretty simple:

• Oracle makes a big move into open source, feeding on RedHat's business - and then
• Oracle snares a big customer win

That's the simple story. Scratch a bit deeper, and you find this: Open Source Business Models - Brent Williams' terrific and influential paper from Eclipse.con. Believe today's press, and Oracle has a big win - believe Brent Williams, and Oracle's entry into Open Source has been a complete failure. Who to believe?

Follow the people, and I think the truth can be found. If you know the people, you might discover that the driver behind the Yahoo! side of the deal was most likely CTO Farzad Nazem. Dig just a bit deeper than that, and you'll know that Farzad and his wife were both (Oracle CEO) Larry Ellison lieutenants in the old days. Know just a bit more, and you'll know that Farzad and his wife were married in Larry's house.

So, Larry was looking at a failure, needed a deal, and called in a favor. Oracle's open source initiative is probably still hurting, but they've got a win in the press, and maybe can build on that.

SO ... what to take out of this? Read Brent Williams' paper because strategy matters...