And now for an encore he has stepped up to the plate at Great Bridge. It was time to take on Oracle's lucrative database market. Along with operating systems and server software, databases are an essential and ubiquitous element in today's commercial-computing environment. That means open-source development efforts could prove effective for databases, as the pool of potential code contributors would likely be very large. And until now, serious database operators at big corporations had little control over the source code.
Control is half of the open-source attraction.
The other is money. And Batten is betting that CFOs have grown tired of forking over cash to Ellison, who holds dominant leverage over customers in much the same way Microsoft strong-armed the PC market in the company's heyday. It wasn't the Sultan of Brunei. And you begin to wonder what's wrong with that industry that all of the value goes to one guy. I think what Frank sees so clearly is the same dysfunctional element in the database market as he does in the OS market.