Kurian’s departure comes just weeks after Oracle announced he was taking a break from his position overseeing Oracle’s cloud efforts, and after Bloomberg reported that a conflict with Oracle co-founder, executive chairman, chief technology officer, and person whose opinion seems to matter most Larry Ellison over the direction of Oracle’s platform software strategy. Kurian reportedly wanted to let more of Oracle’s software run on public infrastructure clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which Ellison apparently resisted given Oracle’s feeble attempts to compete in that market.
It’s fair to say Oracle’s cloud strategy is now at a crossroads. The company acknowledged during its most recent earnings call that it expects to spend roughly the same amount of money on capital expenditures this fiscal year, at a time when rivals like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google are dramatically expanding their outlays on the hardware and buildings needed to run a modern cloud computing service.
ROBERT STEELE: The idiot media is assuming that major capital expenditures are a sign of commitment to growth and will result in effectiveness. What they do not realize is that the data center approach to cloud services is doomed. Amazon is ten years ahead of every one else on data center based services, and will prosper mightily in the next decade aided by government complacency about Amazon's gross violation of all data owner rights (cross-correlation with abandon and impunity). What is not clear is whether Larry Ellison is ready to make the leap toward the post-Google and post-Western Internet in which the focus of effort is on helping each source own and store their own data (with contrived encrypted back-ups); connecting all multilingual and multimedia sources across all boundaries; providing sense-making tools for the INDIVIDUALS, not only at the meta-level, and finally, embedding holistic analytics and true cost economics while also crafting the entire global to local system with Open Source Everything Engineering (OSEE) while utilizing Thin Thread to index everything, not the 4% or so that is common now.
