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Ellison on “Size Matters”

Spotted via Google News: Ellison: Open source needs big vendors to thrive

That’s ok, Larry! That’s why we eat healthy, partner with for instance HP and Dell, and grow pretty darn fast ourselves, too. With no intention of stopping.
Since I joined the company in 2001, we’ve doubled our employee count and revenue pretty much every year. For a “normal” company, that would be a very scary growth rate. For MySQL AB it is “interesting” too, but it’s working.

Larry also says:

“Are we interested? It’s a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between US$30 million and US$40 million. Oracle’s revenue next year is US$15 billion.”

Our business model yields happy customers, while your bottom line makes customers squirm and try to escape at every opportunity – particularly when the billing method (per CPU, per seat, per snazzberry) changes yet again. How’s it working for you?

Revenue is not the only relevant asset, and by no means the most important one either. Of course a company needs healthy revenue to survive and grow, but a modern company does not need to charge lots per customer.

Keep it reasonable, provide good service so customers actually continue being a customer next year and can comfortably increase their service level as their business scales. You want customers to stay with you not because moving away would be a costly hassle, but because they’re happy.

And of course you get a whole lot more customers. There’s safety in numbers. And with the database market expanding like it is, there’s plenty of numbers. MySQL is attracting a fair chunk of these. Rock on.

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2 thoughts on “Ellison on “Size Matters”

  1. “Are we interested? It’s a tiny company. I think the revenues from MySQL are between US$30 million and US$40 million. Oracle’s revenue next year is US$15 billion.”

    Funny thing to say considering they JUST bought Innobase AND Sleepycat… both tinier companies than MySQL AB. Especially Innobase…

  2. When big corporate enterprises talk like that, you know that you have threatened their main income streams. A few years back, all the college students I knew were trying to get into Oracle DB classes. Now, they are mostly working with MySQL and PostgreSQL. A few are going with MS SQL Server, but the licensing costs of getting a full-featured (“enterprise”) version to practice on at home wind up turning them away after their 90 day trial period.
    Congratulations on the new staff members. I have often thought that MySQL should find a way to utilize Firebird (and Postgres and MaxDB) engines in the database server. Now it looks like MySQL will gain its own engine built with the experience of Firebird/Interbase.

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