Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

I routinely get asked which blogs I frequently read. I list some of them in my blogroll. It just dawned on me that even though I have Tim Hall’s ORACLE-BASE blog listed in my blogroll I should make a special note that Tim’s blog is a really, really helpful resource.

There are a lot of blogs I read that I don’t mention. For obvious reasons I don’t currently want to link to Oracle’s competitors’ blogs. I wouldn’t want them to get a any boost in readership for free now, would I?

One tricky thing to figure out is how to treat Oracle’s “coopetitors” if you will. Now that Oracle owns a hardware company the lines are really fuzzy. I think it use to be that only Microsoft fell squarely into both the competitor and (quasi) partner space since both Microsoft and Oracle were software companies and both brought RDBMS products to market but neither were hardware companies (forgetting for the moment the Xbox). I refer to Microsoft as (quasi) partner of Oracle because Oracle offers products on Windows and unless I’m particularly naïve Microsoft takes no position directly against customers running Oracle on Windows. Indeed, others in the same scenario have played the “if you load product XYZ we won’t support your OS” trick. Now that Oracle is a hardware and software company I have to get direction from corporate on what acronyms (e.g., IBM, HP, etc), when spoken, will find me getting my mouth washed out with soap.