INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Last year here in Paris you challenged Bill Gates by declaring the end of the personal
computer and of complicated software like Windows’95. What is the current status of
the network computer that Oracle is starting to launch on the market?
Answer
We said the network computer would begin to ship in September, and the early production
models are now finished. I will be demonstrating them at the conference, and we will start
shipping at the end of this month.
Question 2
How much license business will the company have?
Answer
I think the first six months will be slow as people begin to try it out, as companies try
it. There are two markets: the corporate market and the home market will begin trying them
for the first six months. Within six months to a year we’ll see very rapid growth of
the network computer till I believe in the year 2000 when 100 million network computers
will be sold, far more than PCs.
Question 3
You will have competition from the Japanese, like Sony, which will put the browser for
navigating on Internet inside game consoles. How do you see the problem of the market?
Answer
I think the problem has been with the low end of the market. Game machines are all
non-standard: the Sony game machine is not compatible with the Sega game machine, the Sega
machine is not compatible with the Nintendo game machine, and so I think all of that makes
no difference. All of those computers are going to go away. What you’ll have at the
very low end is a standard network computer, and they will all run all the same software.
Then a little higher will be the PC standard that will run all the same software. All
non-standard specialised products will disappear. Sony and Nintendo will have to go to a
standard architecture, just like personal computing is going to standard architecture, and
the network computer is the right architecture to standardise on. Jim Clarke’s Naveo
is the same. They are not building a standard architecture computer. They are taking the
Netscape Navigator and putting it on several different types of computers. We think that
is a fundamental mistake. We think what the world wants is a standard architecture for low
cost digital appliances. Right now we have a standardised architecture for personal
computers. We need a standard architecture for low cost digital appliances. The reason
game machines have not changed our culture like the PC has is that they are all different.
Question 4
At the moment all the attention is on the browser war, but there may be competition on
Intranet between Microsoft and Oracle. What’s your opinion?
Answer
I think the browser war will disappear in 18 months because there will be no more
browsers. The next generation Microsoft operating system will not have a browser. The
Internet will be the whole environment in which you live. So the browser war will be over
in 18 months. I don’t know if Netscape will compete. If there is no browser, the war
is over. So there will be a PC and there will be a network computer - a lower cost,
simpler to use, digital appliance - and we believe our software will become the dominant
software for the network computer and Microsoft will remain dominant in the PC. Our new
environment for the network computer has no browser. You don’t see a browser: you
live in the world of the Internet. That is the whole environment.
Question 5
But, in effect, Bill Gates has switched the Microsoft focus to the Internet application in
the last six months, so Microsoft is abandoning the old concept of PC, don’t you
think?
Answer
No, I don’t think so. I think they are saying that the Internet is a very important
to the PC - Netscape sold 40 million browsers on Bill Gates’ PC - and they wanted to
get Netscape off the PC. I think Microsoft will do this very well. I think the Microsoft
browser is as good as the Netscape browser, it is free and included with every copy of
Microsoft Windows’95, so I think that Microsoft will win that war. They will
certainly win it with the next version of Windows because there is no browser. What we are
proposing is very different. We are saying that the PC as a whole is too complex and too
expensive and we need much lower cost, simpler to use digital appliances. They cost ten
percent the price. Right now in the wealthiest country in the world, the United States, 30
percent of American households have PCs. Let me put that another way: 70 percent of
American households don’t have PCs. Ninety percent of European households don’t
have PCs. The devices are too complex, too expensive. We will never have an information
age if we have to rely on the PC. A computer has to be in everyone’s house like a
telephone or a television. We call this the age of television because everyone gets their
news like this on TV, everyone learns about the world. We all have TVs, we don’t all
have computers. To move from the age of television to the information age we all have to
have computers and that can never be the PC.
Question 6
And what about interactive TV? Do you believe in video-on-demand or do you think that
interactive TV will come only through Internet?
Answer
Interactive TV will come on the Internet. The Internet standards will extend to include
interactive TV and one of the interesting things about the network computer that will
shock a great many people is that early next year we will be showing our video-on-demand
component of the network computer. You will be able to sit at the Internet and get
video-on-demand. It won’t be television quality video-on-demand but it will be true
video-on-demand, good enough for the news, good enough for things like movie previews. It
will be true video-on-demand, not downloading a video onto your PC, but actually playing
video over the network on the network computer. The Oracle Video Server, a part of the
universal server, is video. And we can serve hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users
with video. We think this will revolutionise the Internet because video is the most
powerful means of communication yet devised by mankind.
Question 7
What kind of need does the Oracle Universal Server satisfy for corporation? When you say
enable the information age, what does this mean inside the corporation?
Answer
It means taking all of your information, all of your data and putting it on-line and
making it available to all of your people throughout your company. Training and education
is not something from kindergarten through college; education is a lifetime thing and
corporations spend a fortune on education. You can now take all of your educational
videos, all of your training classes and put them on-line, put them on the network, and
take advantage of video, because the universal server manages video and audio in addition
to image data and textual data as well as relational data. The Oracle data base really can
manage all of your data. It can take your marketing brochures, all of your textual
information, your image data, your audio and your video and combine that with your
structural-relational information and give you the one unified repository for all that
information so it’s securely stored; it could be reliably and economically delivered
across the network to all your users throughout the company. Now with a network computer,
you really can put all of your users inside your company on-line. Everyone can afford to
have this appliance and everyone can easily learn to use this appliance, so everyone gets
access to the corporate repository, everyone gets the training that they need, the access
to the information that they need.
Question 8
But with many companies using the Web and millions of people coming on the Web through the
network computers, what will happen with Internet? Will there be a need for more
bandwidth, for example?
Answer
We think the national telephone companies will invest heavily in the Internet, that the
network computer will work very much like your cellular telephone. Originally, you had to
pay a lot of money for a cellular telephone and eventually the telephone companies gave it
away. They gave the cellular telephone away because they charge for the monthly service.
So the phone companies will invest in expanding the Internet, providing more bandwidth,
and as we have millions of people coming on-line, they’ll charge a monthly service
charge, US$10.00 a month or US$20.00 a month for access. They will make money and people
will get the services at a very low cost. Again, the whole world will come on-line.
Electronic mail is an application that everyone will want to use. It is interesting right
now that PCs have a strong gender bias, being mainly used by men and wealthy families.
That is not true of television or the telephone. With the network computer I think we will
see a truly universal computer.
Question 9
What do you expect the next wave of the Web to be?
Answer
Multimedia electronic mail. When you log on, your mail messages will look like Web pages,
with images buried in them, audio buried in them and animation and video in the mail
message. We think the killer application of the future, the application that will put
everybody on-line is multimedia electronic mail. Killer application is, I think, a
California expression. It is the application that will create the market. I think the
killer application for the PC was the spreadsheet; the first application that really
caused people to justify the purchase of the PC. We think the application that will cause
everybody to come on-line will be multimedia electronic mail.
Question 10
Your company is based in Silicon Valley. Do you think that Silicon Valley will lead
Internet technology is the same way that it has led the chip, the microprocessor
technology and then the PC?
Answer
I think the European telephone companies will play a very interesting role in bringing
everybody on-line. France is a good example. Minitel was years ahead of its time, a
wonderful idea and now technology has caught up with the idea itself. We are actually
seeing more interest in bringing everybody on-line in Europe than in the United States and
expect the European phone companies to be very aggressive in testing first the network
computer and then deploying the network computers throughout the country. One European
country talked about giving a network computer to every one of their citizens, and it is a
very wealthy European country and they could certainly afford to do it. Some of the basic
technology will come from Silicon Valley but the social change, the investment, we think
Europe might actually lead North America.
Question 11
What will be your next challenge to Bill Gates?
Answer
Our industry reinvents itself every 15 years, so in my career this is pretty much it. A
new generation of computers is going to start now. The PC is 15 years old. 15 years before
that we had minicomputers, 15 years before that we had mainframes, now is the time of the
network computer. Oracle is in the business of managing huge amounts of data on server
computers and delivering that to a large number of users across the network and doing that
reliably securely and economically. We have to build this low cost standard appliance, so
we can bring everybody on-line, and then we truly will see the full light of day of the
information age. That is a big enough challenge for me.
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