If you buy a coffee maker, or a toaster, or a lawn mower, pretty much anything, the manufacturer is liable for any injuries that product may have caused. As far as I can see, this is always focused on “bodily injury”… why? If someone loses the house, car, or job, because the “bank product” just imploded, isn’t that another injury caused by negligence?

“This plastic bag is not a toy.” or “Do not place animals into the microwave.” Duh. Everybody understands that. (At least I hope so). Where is the disclaimer on those “banking products” that hardly anybody (including the bankers themselves) understands. Where does it say “this derivative has a risk score of 89 (out of 100)” on a scale that says “you could lose that money”? Would people be more careful if they knew what they were getting into? I think so. But they just took the banker’s word for it. No data was made available to back up those claims.

Where was the bank’s risk management? Oh right, it was focused on the customer. If there was a product liability for banks, I’m sure the bankers would have been a little more hesitant with those loans. The data was all there, but nobody wanted to look. I’m hoping that the lawmakers in those governments in the US, the EU, Japan, Korea, and others, that are bailing out the financial institutions at the moment, are considering to extend the current liability law into the financial world.

If I’m reading this description from Wikipedia with banking products in mind, that would make a good start.

“The most fundamental rationale for strict liability is to force producers to internalize the external costs they impose on society. By placing liability for all injuries caused by a product on its manufacturer, the manufacturer is forced to take into account, when deciding whether and how much to produce the product, the harm caused by it. If this internalized harm is so great that the manufacturer cannot profit from producing the product, it will discontinue the product, or sell it only at a higher price to consumers who value it especially highly (in economic terms, modify its activity level). In this way, strict liability provides a mechanism for ensuring that the societal good of products in the marketplace outweighs their societal harm.”

Disclaimer: I’m no financial specialist, just an observer.

Exadata… cute. Because Terabytes on Teradata are already out there. Petabytes on Petadata (“Pet a data?”) isn’t visionary enough, so we need another factor 1000, with Exabytes on Exadata. Now this is far out enough. Can you “axe a data”? OK, never mind.

Why all this? I’m assuming that Oracle executives visited many data centers in their careers and never ever saw an Oracle logo on those server racks running their very own DBMS. IBM servers, yes, HP, Dell, Teradata, EMC, all there. No Oracle. That must have been a big sting.

Oracle was already very successful getting the Oracle logo out into the world. No major airport that I go through without an onslaught of banners with Oracle is #1, Oracle serves 19 of the top 20 companies in whatever industry, Oracle, Oracle. Paris Charles de Gaulle airport has turned red because of Oracle advertising.

Next step: data center. Well, Oracle was hardly going to start manufacturing any motherboards, chipsets, or disk drives themselves, since the world wasn’t really waiting for another hardware newbie behemoth, when the whole market is consolidating at the same time. Of course, watching even Microsoft starting to acquire hardware assets (I mean, beyond the Microsoft Mouse) with the Datallegro takeover must have accelerated the decision making process to provide an Oracle-branded box with suitable capabilities, and the 11g DBMS comes to mind. So I imagine a phone call from Redwood Shores to Cupertino, kinda like “Hey, Mark, we’ve been friends for a long time, certainly after you had left Teradata <chuckle>, could we get some of your blades and storage racks and wrap them into a nice bundle with our database, so we both can take over the data warehouse market?” Something to that effect and I am obviously exaggerating somewhat.

Hewlett Packard (the hardware unit, mind you!) smells a big opportunity, as most data warehouses these days run on Oracle, so why not have them run on an HP box? Quickly, a few other components are assembled to make it a nice appliance and as painless to manage for the potential user, a name is found (rumor has it, that Larry Ellison himself is heavily involved in all branding activities), welcome, Exadata, the new enemy of Teradata (and IBM).

Wait… wasn’t HP trying to sell its own NeoView box? What was that again? Oh yes, another highly scalable data warehouse “machine”. (They don’t want us to call NeoView an “appliance”). And wasn’t that targeted as direct competition to Teradata as well? By the looks of it, Oracle just stepped on HP toes, and HP let it happen. Funny, how market dynamics sometimes work. I’m sure, the clever marketiers in both companies have all arguments ready, why this new competition is no problem on either side: “It’s good for the customer, more choices, strategic relationship, yada, yada, yada.” However, when it comes to “our revenue” or “no revenue”, I can guarantee that both Oracle and HP favor the first option, which turns the friendship into plain competition. As we say in German: “Beim Geld hört die Freundschaft auf”. Means something like „Friendship ends where money begins“.

We’ll be watching and reporting on developments. Until then, welcome to hardware land, Oracle.