Rebirth of the Tech Madman

...

This year, Larry Ellison had an accident because he was riding a bicycle too fast, and then had plastic surgery. It was a little rest, so he had time to think about everything.

He can't do it without thinking deeply-Oracle almost went bankrupt in 1990 because of a sales strategy error.

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

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

The general ins and outs are as follows: dbase’s wealth of money has attracted copycat imitators, and they are also very good, such as Foxbase, which has eroded a lot of the market that should belong to dbase; , but the warning was invalid, the acquisition failed, and finally had to file a lawsuit; what I never expected was that the court ruled that dbase infringed the copyright of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was not protected; Shton-Tate company, suddenly cornered, and now dbase has been acquired.

The competition in the desktop database market is so fierce, let alone the large-scale database market with higher technical content and larger profit margins.

Oracle, which has been rewritten in C language, claims to be able to run on all computer platforms. Of course, this gimmick is 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 also made enemies everywhere. Sybase and informix are its very strong opponents.

In addition, on ibm's mainframes and minicomputers, oracle will challenge db2, the subordinate soldier of ibm; on the Fangyuan server, the situation is similar, oracle will challenge ebase, a philosopher who also belongs to Tangmen.

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

What's more, in terms of technological advancement, oracle is still not the best, and marketing and service are its strong points.

All in all, the road of oracle becomes narrower as you go up—the boss, Larry Ellison, must strive to stand on the highest point and think about some philosophical issues about the enterprise, and even the entire industry, so as to Find a new room for growth; otherwise, Oracle may face bankruptcy again, and his own luxurious life will lose its foundation.

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

To be honest, Larry Ellison was secretly envious of Tang Huan's method of creating an industry by throwing out a concept, but he had to accept it. Therefore, he took advantage of the time he was recovering from his injuries to study the World Wide Web carefully, which can be regarded as quite insightful.

Listening to Tang Huan's introduction to the fifth-generation Fangyuan personal computer, Larry Ellison suddenly had an idea—the future of the Internet is so powerful, does it mean that the access terminal is not just the Fangyuan personal computer? What about such a form? Or to put it further, Tang Huan's touting of the Five Generation Fangyuan personal computer was a mistake in one direction in order to safeguard vested interests!

Imagine that when the Internet is popularized, all tasks can be submitted to the network center server for centralized processing, and the results will be returned later, and the hardware configuration of the network terminal only needs CPU, memory and network card. Such expensive equipment can be completely saved.

The lightweight computer, let's call it a network computer, should sell for as little as $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 through the network, the browser is downloaded by the central server, and then everything is ready.

After this computer application model slowly became clear in his mind, Larry Ellison couldn't help feeling a little excited—he seemed to have found a good card that overturned the existing industry rules of the game! I don't know if Tang Huan realizes that the Internet he is promoting might ruin his existing advantages?

Larry Ellison's temperament is quite similar to that of Jobs, eccentric and elusive, but this does not affect his scheming - he forcibly holds down this flash of inspiration, and prepares to go back and make a good plan. They also hyped up a concept, maybe the network computer can replace the Fangyuan personal computer.

...

Of course, Tang Huan would not have imagined that someone would come up with an idea based on the Internet blueprint he had drawn, trying to subvert the existing dominance of Fangyuan PC.

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 described as everlasting. Up to now, Oracle, Sybase, and Informix are the most famous cross-hardware platform relational databases, and the conflicts are also the most intense. Philip White, the CEO of Informix in Menlo Park, and the adjacent CEO of Oracle in Redwood City Officer Larry Ellison, even to the point of personal strife, occupies a rather distinctive place in the Silicon Valley gossip news.

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

For this reason, in terms of large-scale databases, Microsoft and Sybase signed a cooperation agreement, and the two parties jointly developed a project called sql_server; in terms of desktop databases, Microsoft made a generous move to win Foxbase, which can be regarded as a direct step.

The irony is here. Ashton-Tate was too stingy and failed to win Foxbase. In the end, it ended up with a bleak end, and sold dbase to Microsoft; Microsoft got Foxbase and developed on this basis An enhanced version of FoxPro was issued—in this way, the historical grievances between dbase and Foxbase continued to the already incompatible relationship with Microsoft.

The market competition between these two companies is mainly manifested in the programming language tools, especially the c/c++ language, coupled with the three major development tools of Zheru, ++, microsoft_c/c++, and zerone_c/c++, it seems to be a killing of the Three Kingdoms. situation.

Among them, the status of zerone_c/c++ has always been relatively detached, and the rapid development of visualization and componentization has been realized; and Microsoft acquired dbase and foxbase respectively, and after supplementing the layout of the database, the new version of the product will integrate these resources. And catch up to zerone_c/c++ in functionality.

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

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

Anders Helsberg replied without hesitation: The Internet will bring more people to the computer, and the level of users will be clearly differentiated in two directions. Compared with advanced programming tools like zerone_c/c++, Beginner users who use friendly development tools like zerone_delphi will definitely grow rapidly.

In particular, on the basis of the traditional Pasal programming language used by turbo_pasal, Zheru not only developed the object-oriented object_pasal for Delphi, but also developed the scripted pasal_script for the macro language of office software and the dynamics of the World Wide Web. The use of web pages seems to be a trend that is sweeping the world.

Speaking of this, Anders Hellsberg smiled proudly, The financial elites on Wall Street are already inseparable from the spreadsheet tool pioneered by their teachers; in order to better analyze data, they now use Can't do without pasal_script, and even praised it as the most beautiful programming language in the world.

I estimate that with the expansion of the World Wide Web, more and more people will develop websites, and accordingly, more and more people will master pasal_script.

Tang Huan, who was walking forward with his hands behind his back, listened carefully to Anders Hellsberg's words, and asked, Then, have you ever thought about how far this trend sweeping the world will go?

Hearing this seemingly philosophical question, Anders Hellsberg was slightly taken aback. 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 computer, every handheld computer, every A home video game console...

Every TV, every refrigerator, every air conditioner, every mobile phone, every car... Tang Huan took up the conversation with a smile, Our programming tools will break out of the traditional territory of computers and enter home appliances, In those commonplace products that people cannot do without in daily life, such as vehicles, we endow them with technological intelligence.

Seeing his disciple opened his mouth wide in surprise, Tang Huan joked, Why, don't you think it's impossible?

Of course not. Anders Helsberg, who came to his senses, quickly shook his head, At least, we are already conducting similar research and development on products such as televisions, mobile phones, and automobiles. However, The teacher's thinking is so broad that I couldn't react for a while.

Tang Huan nodded slightly, It can't be blamed for your limited vision, but the daunting technical gap. The first problem is the limitation of hardware resources.

The so-called software programming boils down to making full use of the computer's microprocessor and memory resources under the guidance of mathematical algorithms.

“It’s not difficult to borrow and repay, but it’s just in the process of borrowing and repaying that programmers will inevitably be negligent, causing man-made memory leaks, and as the application becomes more and more complicated, the probability will continue to increase.”

Pasal_script has deliberately downplayed the abstract concepts of data types such as integers and floating-point numbers for the convenience of novice users, and even introduced an object data type that can represent any data type.

Under the hood is the compiler's ability to 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 just opened another window for me. Anders Hailsberg exclaimed suddenly: However, in this way, we need to design a programming language from scratch-after all, c/ The main feature of C++ is that memory resources can be flexibly and manually allocated through memory pointers; the mechanisms of pasal and object_pasal are also similar*** asal_script is still far from real automatic memory recovery.”

This is indeed a brand new topic. Tang Huan nodded, A programming language that meets the real cross-hardware requirements, such as the C language with a compiler that supports different hardware systems, is not enough, but should have a language that isolates each hardware system. Different types of virtual machines, and at the same time have functions such as automatic memory garbage collection, distribution, multi-threading, and code execution security.”

After giving pointers to this extent, the richest man in Tang glanced at the booth of Sun Microsystems just passing by, smiled playfully, and said to himself—you should just sell hardware products such as servers and workstations honestly. There is no need to work hard anymore, who let the advantage of time be on my side.