"This sweeping agenda has rattled the nerves of customers, who fear that Oracle has its own best interests, not theirs, at heart." Oracle has 370,000 customers. The reporter spoke to two or three, and from that he's claiming that some or most or all of those 370,000 are living in fear of Oracle. No research, no survey, no quantitative evidence. Zero.

"The worry is that instead of saving money, customers will end up paying more over the long term, and that Oracle, already known for its aggressive tactics, will use its strong position in software to gain even more leverage over a larger array of products." Heaven save us from aggressive salespeople! Meanwhile, are we to believe that IBM and SAP and HP and Cisco only hire passive salespeople? "This year, [Oracle] bought Sun Microsystems, a hardware maker, signaling its intention to dominate the data centers of businesses by controlling more of their technology purchases. It is a prospect that its traditional partners and, more important, its customers, find unnerving." Could we hear from even one of those customers? And that supposedly malevolent strategy of becoming more influential in the data center is mirrored precisely by the strategies of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu and other traditional player as well as cloud providers Amazon, Microsoft, and Verizon as well as services firms such as Wipro, Infosys, and others. Why is Oracle the bad guy for wanting the exact same thing that many others also want? "With Sun, Oracle has found a way to sell customers hardware bundled with all that software in a fashion similar to that of its main database rival, IBM." So isn't IBM also guilty by association in this world-domination thing? Funny—no mention of that in the article. And Microsoft, another major database player along with IBM and Microsoft, is also getting into the integrated-systems business—why no mention of its nefarious plans? Then there's SAP, which now owns Sybase, and Sybase makes databases, and SAP is getting into integrated systems—so why isn't SAP also terrifying the countryside like the FrankenOracle monster supposedly is? "Oracle built its business by dominating the database market, providing the central repositories of crucial information that businesses must maintain and use to complete transactions." Again, it's no good for Oracle to do this, but no problem for IBM and Microsoft and Sybase to do so? "Later this year, Oracle also plans to give select customers access to a product suite called Fusion. This arrives after five years of work and will unite many of the products Oracle has acquired into a single software platform—one that will combine functions found in rival products from companies like SAP, IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce.com." What in the world would this reporter have Oracle do: strive to make its new products less capable, less competitively viable, and less valuable to customers? So, like I said at the top, this whole thing isn't exactly a matter of life and death, but it's frustrating to see one of the leading companies in this great and productive and valuable industry misrepresented so blatantly by someone with a broad platform who is clearly more interested in expressing a set of baseless opinions than in rigorously proving even one of the audacious claims made throughout the article. Oracle's not without its faults—no company is, and no industry is. And if someone undertakes a comprehensive study showing widespread fear and loathing of Oracle among its customers, I promise to be the first to deliver all the gory details. But Oracle deserves better than this swill from the New York Times and to reinforce that opinion, consider the final condescending and graceless line from the article itself: "At least Oracle has the courtesy to assuage customer's nerves for one week through its Open World largess." That conclusion makes one thing very clear: although some fear of Oracle may reside within Oracle's customers, a great deal of fear of Oracle surely resides within the reporter who deliberately presented such an unfair portrayal of the company. RECOMMENDED READING: Global CIO: Larry Ellison And The New Oracle Rock The Tech World Global CIO: Oracle's New Fusion Apps: An Inside Look Larry Ellison Rips Red Hat Linux, But Stays Committed Global CIO: Will Larry Ellison Launch Bidding War With IBM For Netezza? Global CIO: Oracle Product Chief Offers Glimpse At New Fusion Apps Global CIO: Oracle Launches 'Cloud In A Box' And New Cloud Business Global CIO: At Oracle Open World, Oracle Commits To Cloud Computing Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Top 10 Priorities At Oracle Open World Global CIO: Larry Ellison Embraces Cloud Computing's 'Idiocy' Global CIO: Oracle CEO Larry Ellison On The Future Of IT Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit.

To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his page.

For more Global CIO perspectives, check out Global CIO,
or write to Bob at [email protected].