I must admit that my favorite movie slogan ever belongs to (yet another) bad sci-fi movie that I've featured in this blog -- Robocop: "Half Man, Half Machine, All Cop." I like it for a few reasons: * It's a clear, powerful piece of positioning
(Revised 4/18) Most marketers know the old saw from John Wanamaker, considered the father of both the modern department store and modern advertising, that goes: "I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted ... I just don't know which half." The quote speaks to
In an eerie turn of events, my ex-, ex-, ex-employer Ingres Corporation has been resurrected by, of all people, Terry Garnett, one of Oracle's early marketing vice presidents, now of Garnett & Helfrich Capital. They have bought Ingres back from Computer Associates, open sourced it, and are building
Yes, web 2.0 is a big buzzword. That's not the question. The question is: is it more than that? I think yes. As someone who's generally marketing and buzzword averse, it took me a while to arrive at this viewpoint, but I do believe there
At Mark Logic Corporation, we make an XML server. The product's name is (ever so subtly) MarkLogic Server, or just MarkLogic for short. This post provides some Q&A that helps you understand how we think about (or in marketing speak, "position") our product. What
I met a few months back with one of our customers in aviation to discuss how MarkLogic could help his airline with flight documentation. During the meeting, I learned that flight documentation is (yet another) example of a custom publishing system -- but one that's about as mission-critical
Oracle had some PR coverage this week for their launch of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, their new enterprise search solution. Oracle can now compete not only with traditional enterprise search vendors such as Vautonomy and FAST, but also with fellow database vendors who already have enterprise search solutions, such
Here's a mind-expanding idea: what if the reason you couldn't find something was because it didn't exist? This occurred to me the other day when speaking with a friend who works in a big company's market intelligence department. He faces the same
Databases
Early in my career, I interviewed at Gartner for a job as an analyst. During the meetings, I met with Mike Braude, then head of research. Mike had made himself famous by declaring the death of IBM’s SAA about two days after it was launched. I remember when we
One near-universal pattern I've noticed with content software is that the process for using it usually looks like this: * Step 1: prepare your content to be loaded in the system * Step 2: load the content into the system * Step 3: get the benefits of the system The simple
My friends joke that someday I should write a business book based on 1960's bumper stickers because I often re-use 1960's maxims (e.g., "question authority") as basic rules for business. Today's posting is based on the idea of "the establishment&
I first used a relational DBMS in 1984 while working at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. At the time Oracle (then called Relational Software, Inc.) was a $15M company. It was about 2 minutes after sun-up on the dawn of the relational era. I liked Ingres, the RDBMS I used at the
