Newsgroups: sci.environment,talk.politics.misc,alt.activism
From: mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman)
Subject: Re: Idiotic Japan Bashing
Organization: Oracle Corporation
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 17:07:40 GMT
X-Disclaimer: This message was written by an unauthenticated user
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In article <1992Dec28.080944.7939@pegasus.com> tleylan@pegasus.com (Tom Leylan) writes:
>mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman) writes:
>  >jgacker@news.gsfc.nasa.gov (James G. Acker) writes:
>  >>but Japan supposedly has a 100-year enviro-industry plan

>>I keep hearing this kind of bullshit.  Does anyone out there really
>>believe it?  After all, can you imagine the hundred year plan that a
>>business or company would have come up with in 1893?  

>Michael, May I suggest that your difficulty in believing any particular
>thing is due to more to your upbringing and environment than anything
>else.

You can suggest it, but youy will find it hard to convince me.

>You take a trip to Germany and you sit yourself down in a brewery that
>has been brewing beer for 600 years and you get yourself a sense of
>continuity.

So?  That does not mean that they can plan 100 years in advance.

>You're trying to wedge your own definition of "100 year plan" into the
>works and if you mean "show me where they say how many units they will
>sell in 2092" then by all means there is no plan by your definition.

>In short they plan to exist 100 years from now, and they plan to serve
>their customers and to have employees and your stock certificates will
>still be worth something.

Well, if you call that a plan, then most companies and countries have
thousand year plans, not hundred year plans.  Of course, a plan that
simple and with that little detail is so useless that you might as
well not have it.

A decent plan would identify key markets and technologies that the
company should get into.  For example, I have a 20 year plan for my
part of Oracle and another for my career.  

The one for my department identifies one key technology and 3 key
markets that we should become leaders in.  I have target dates for
beginning development of our flagship products for each and target
dates for beginning sales in the US/Canada, the rest of the First
World, the NICs, and the Third World.  I have also identified the
market segments which we can expect to sell into most easily and the
companies which I think are most likely to compete with us.  Despite
its vagueness it is the most confidential document I have produced
while at Oracle.

The one for my career identifies three strategic products that I can
position myself to build while at Oracle.  Each succeeding one is
larger than the last.  Each will leverage sales of other Oracle
products.  Two of them will allow Oracle to enter new markets that we
are not currently a player in using our existing products as a base,
both to build the technology and to provide a receptive audience.

Those are effective long term plans.  I think your own description of
a 100 year plan shows just how ludicrous a 100 year plan would have to
be.


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I am not an official Oracle spokesman.  I speak for myself and no one else.