In the Q&A session following the launch of Oracle 8i, chairman and chief executive Larry Ellison says that the product is competing more with Windows NT that with Microsoft’s SQL Server which he describes as a tiny product that almost no one uses. And he had other harsh words for NT. It was, he claims, responsible in part for the current labor shortage in the IT industry, because the irrational distribution of complexity, by which he means the tens of thousands of NT servers round the world that are being used in LANs, are taking up the time of technical support people who could be put to better use elsewhere in the industry. The internet computing message at the heart of yesterday’s presentation was, he says the last generation of computing, as once it gets a foothold, client-server is dead.
