According to Xinhua News Agency, TikTok had previously issued a statement saying that the company had submitted a plan to the US government. U.S.A Oracle The company said on the same day that it had reached an agreement with TikTok's parent company to become its "trusted technology provider".
On September 20, TikTok indicated that the bytes jumped Oracle 、 Wal-Mart A principled consensus was reached on the "California on the Cloud" scheme. According to the proposal, TikTok's headquarters will remain in the United States, Oracle It will become TikTok's partner in data security compliance. This scheme does not involve technology and algorithm transfer.
Before that, Microsoft It seems to have been in the leading position in this transaction. On the other hand, Oracle has experts who say that it is not only inexperienced in consumer services, but also has no products in social media. However, it is just such a company that not only won the support of President Trump, but also eventually became a "trusted technology provider".
What is the existence of Oracle, which has been founded for nearly half a century, in the scientific and technological circles?
Larry Ellison Larry Ellison: the man supporting Trump
Larry Ellison, 76, was born in New York City. When he was nine months old, Allison was unfortunately infected with pneumonia. So his mother gave Ellison to her relatives to raise him. In the next 48 years, Ellison never saw his biological mother again.
During the 1970s, Ellison joined the electronics company Ampex. At that time, one of his projects was to help the CIA develop databases. The name of this database is Oracle.
At that time IBM Edgar Cod, who worked on the project, first put forward the theory of relational model and published a paper on "relational database system". Influenced by Cod's paper, Ellison and two colleagues founded the "Software Development Lab" company (the predecessor of Oracle) in 1977.
Today, Oracle has nearly 140000 employees. Ellison stepped down as CEO of the company in 2014. But by the end of 2019, he still held 36.2% of Oracle's shares. According to Forbes data, as of June 2020, Ellison has personal wealth of 66.8 billion US dollars, making him the seventh richest person in the world. In addition, he is also Tesla A director of the board of directors.
But Ellison's most distinctive feature is that he is one of the few technology giants who openly support President Trump. He said: "We can only have one president for a period of time. I don't think he (Trump) is evil. I support him and hope he can do better." He also added that he would support anyone who enters the White House.
Although the words do not admit it, the actions have explained everything.
It is reported that on February 19, 2020, Ellison hosted a fund-raising event at his home for Trump's re-election. Those who donate 100000 dollars can play golf with the President; Those who donate 250000 dollars can sit down with the President and have a chat.
In February this year, Ellison hosted a fund-raising event for Trump's re-election at his residence in Southern California Less than two months later, the epidemic broke out in the United States. At this time, Ellison is said to be the first one to talk to Trump and suggest that the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine should be used to treat COVID-19.
If you still have an impression, you will remember that at the press conference, the president rashly publicized the efficacy of this drug on COVID-19 without scientific support. It is said that this is the direct result of the exchange between Ellison and Trump.
Although many medical experts at that time believed that this drug might have potential side effects, and the efficacy of treating COVID-19 was not verified, and many technology companies were unwilling to go into this troubled water, Ellison's Oracle Company actively participated in the planned drug research. Ellison convened a team composed of Oracle engineers and officials from the FDA and the National Institutes of Health to develop a database of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and help doctors record treatment plans and efficacy, including hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine.
For this reason, Oracle also won the praise of Health Minister Alex Azar. He said: "Oracle and the Ministry of Health cooperated with the Trump government to provide data-driven solutions, which is another tangible result of the President led nationwide anti epidemic campaign."
In mid August, when it was reported that Oracle intended to participate in the bidding for TikTok's business in the United States, President Trump expressed his support for Oracle without stint, saying that Oracle "is a great company", and "I believe Oracle can handle this matter well".
Walk through the trough and shake off competitors
In 2019, Oracle became the second largest software company in the world in terms of revenue and market capitalization, second only to Microsoft.
It is not easy for Oracle, which has been established for nearly half a century, to develop into a multinational technology company of today's scale. During these 43 years, Oracle has had its peaks, valleys, and endless disputes.
The first ten years were the golden age of Oracle's development. The company releases five versions of Oracle database almost every two years. The revenue increased rapidly from 55 million dollars when it was listed in March 1986 to 584 million dollars in 1989. The good development momentum also led the company to move its headquarters from the original Menlo Park to the current Redwood Beach area.
But soon, the first crisis came. At that time, Oracle adopted a "prepaid model" marketing strategy. Under this strategy, the company's sales personnel encourage potential customers to buy a large amount of software at once. In order to increase their sales commission, the sales staff recorded the future licensing revenue in the current quarter.
When looking at the early stage, the company's sales data is really impressive. But after a long time, the problem was exposed. In the quarter of early 1990, Oracle's revenue soared by 54%, while its net profit grew by only 1%. For this reason, Oracle had to readjust its financial report twice, and then faced a class action lawsuit of "exaggerating the financial report data". Its brand reputation was hit, and even the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Later, Ellison himself said that Oracle "made a terrible business mistake".
Oracle Headquarters While Oracle fell from the altar, other competitors rose along the trend. In 1994, Informix became Oracle's biggest competitor. In the next three years, Informix CEO Phil White seemed to have a fight with Ellison, and the disputes between the two people often appeared on the front page of the media.
Informix claims that Oracle has hired its engineers to disclose important trade secrets about its upcoming products. However, Informix finally abandoned its lawsuit against Oracle in 1997. Then, White bought a billboard near Oracle's headquarters and wrote on the billboard: Oracle's software was "faulty", and Ellison was "the escaped warrior"
Perhaps he was too eager to defeat Ellison. Instead of defeating Oracle, White, who was almost obsessed, made the same mistake as Oracle made a few years ago. But unlike Ellison, White is in prison. The billboard was still there, but Informix had already faded out of the market and was later acquired by IBM.
In the next few years, Oracle was the leader in the database market. In 2004, the company's sales increased by 14.2% to 6.2 billion US dollars, and the company's share in the relational database market was unmatched.
Open the overbearing acquisition mode
Although Oracle has a leading edge in the relational database market. But in the enterprise application market, Germany still ranks first SAP The second is the acquisition of J D. Edwards' Peoplesoft. PeopleSoft acquired J D. Edwards was also trying to compete better with Oracle and IBM. Unexpectedly, Renke's front foot completed the acquisition, and its rear foot was faced with a hostile acquisition from Oracle.
Why is it a hostile takeover? According to the former employees of PeopleSoft who experienced the takeover crisis at that time, Oracle did not directly make a takeover offer to the management and the board of directors of PeopleSoft, but made a bid to the shareholders of PeopleSoft. In essence, this has constituted a hostile takeover. Not to mention, the initial offer was about the same as the share price of PeopleSoft at that time (maybe even lower).
Later, in February 2004, Oracle raised its offer to $9.4 billion, but the board of PeopleSoft still rejected it. Then, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to try to stop Oracle on the grounds that the acquisition might violate the antitrust law; In order to protect itself, PeopleSoft also launched the "poison pill plan" - that is, to issue more shares to prevent hostile acquisitions; It also provides customers with a refund guarantee plan to increase Oracle's acquisition costs
After 18 months of tug of war, Oracle finally announced in December 2004 that it had signed a definitive M&A agreement to acquire Renke at a price of $26.5 per share (about $10.3 billion). One month later, Oracle laid off 6000 Renke employees.
The acquisition of PeopleSoft expanded Oracle's territory in the fields of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and human resource management (HCM) software, and replaced PeopleSoft as the second largest enterprise application software.
The successful acquisition of PeopleSoft has also promoted the confidence and ambition of Ellison and Oracle. Through the experience of this successful acquisition - malicious acquisition, to be precise - Oracle has since started an overbearing acquisition mode and marched forward with the "corpse" of its rivals.
For example, in order to expand the customer relationship management (CRM) software market, Oracle spent $5.8 billion to acquire Siebel, and won a large part of the CRM software market; In order to improve and consolidate the competitiveness of cloud computing services, Oracle has successively acquired the cloud computing company NetSuite ($9.3 billion) and the data science project cloud platform DataScience.com.
The acquisition of Sun Microsystems is another transaction of great significance to Oracle, marking Oracle's transformation from a pure software company to a software and hardware manufacturer.
However, the deal is also controversial. Sun Microsystem owns software assets such as Java and Solaris. Java is a general software platform, and the operating system Solaris uses open source code, which is called the OpenSolaris project. These software assets are also important to some companies in the open source community, so they worry that Oracle will end the traditional support of Sun Microsystems for open source projects. Moreover, Oracle, which acquired Java patents through acquisition, turned to Google Take the case to court.
Attract the White House, attack Google Amazon
It seems true that Larry Ellison has a close relationship with President Trump. But he never admitted that he had donated money to Trump's campaign. And the federal election report also confirmed that he did not provide funds for any candidate between 2016 and 2020.
But his company is different.
Federal records show that Oracle CEO Safra Katz has donated more than 130000 dollars to support Trump's re-election; Another company executive, Jeffrey Henry, donated more than 55000 dollars. Last year, Oracle also provided $500000 to $999000 to an organization set up by Republicans to promote the President's North American trade agreement.
In addition, Safra Katz is also the only senior manager of a large technology company who has joined the Executive Committee of the Trump Administration's Transition Team.
By wooing the White House, Oracle has become more and more unscrupulous and relentless in attacking its competitors.
Ten years ago, Oracle obtained a patent for Java technology by acquiring Sun Microsystem. Later, Oracle and Google tried to reach an agreement that Oracle would license Java to Google so that Google could develop programs for mobile devices using the Android operating system. However, the agreement was not reached, and Google finally developed its own platform based on Java. The new platform is still mixed with some Java files.
In 2010, Oracle filed a lawsuit against these Java files used by Google, accusing the latter of infringement. Although the lawsuit can be divided into several stages, so far it seems that there is still no conclusive conclusion.
During this decade, the two companies took turns to appeal. The most recent result was that in March 2018, the Court of Appeal again ruled Google's infringement. Google continues to appeal. Subsequently, the Supreme Court decided to accept Google's appeal and review the previous ruling. Originally, the review was scheduled for March 2020, but due to the impact of the epidemic, it was postponed to early October this year.
Katz is in Trump Building However, in February this year, shortly after Ellison held a fund-raising event for Trump at home (although Ellison claimed that he was not at home that day), the Trump government submitted a non party opinion statement, expressing support for Oracle's insistence in the past decade.
After the failure to win the US $10 billion cloud service contract of the US Department of Defense, Oracle accused the relationship between Amazon Network Services and three officials of the Department of Defense of "destroying" the fairness of the bidding process.
But the different relationship between Oracle and Trump, as well as the White House, was not opposed by employees? Of course. But Larry Ellison, who always goes his own way, is not. More importantly, Oracle's business model is mainly oriented towards enterprises and the government. Which party is close to will not affect the brand reputation in any way. What Oracle should do is to choose the right team and develop its own business. According to insiders, four years ago, when Trump was about to take office, while other technology companies were still shocked, Oracle had already begun to discuss business cooperation with the new government.
Drive Microsoft out of the world
Oracle and Microsoft, or Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, are not only rivals, but also deadly rivals.
At the end of the 1990s, Microsoft rampaged in the market, which had already attracted many competitors' attention. In 1997, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4.0, winning half of the browser market. Just as Microsoft enjoyed its victory, the U.S. federal government launched an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, accusing it of abusing its monopoly position and forcing it to bundle browser software Internet Explorer in its personal computer operating system Windows, thereby suppressing other browsers in the market (Netspace Navigator and Opera ）Competitiveness.
There was nothing wrong with Ellison and Oracle. However, when the judge showed Microsoft many detailed evidences that even Bill Gates, the CEO at that time, did not know very well, Microsoft realized that there might be "insiders" in the company. After investigation and according to later media reports, people finally know that Ellison hired private detectives to find evidence against Microsoft from Microsoft's garbage. It's really a bit inappropriate for a big company to use such a dirty trick to spy on the enemy and not let go of garbage. This is the "garbage gate incident" that made a lot of noise twenty years ago.
Gates, who learned the truth, scolded Ellison for "hooliganism" and "rogue", but Ellison proudly defended that this was "public service", "I stand on the side of all mankind... fight against Gates on behalf of all mankind". Also, when asked what he would feel if his company was investigated like this, Ellison said bluntly: "We will send the garbage to Microsoft headquarters, and they can investigate as they want. We have no hidden secrets."
Ellison and Gates are in the same frame No matter how angry Gates is, Allison always aims to drive Microsoft out of the world. When Microsoft dominated the personal computer market, Ellison launched a browser based "network computer" and announced that "PC is dead". As a result, the PC was not dead, but the Windows 98 operating system was a great success, while Ellison's "network computer" gradually withdrew from the market.
If the PC market fails, start from the advantageous database field. In 2001, Oracle released the Oracle 9i database. Ellison boasted that websites using Oracle 9i are three times faster than those using Microsoft SQL. Then, the media god found that Microsoft's own website server also uses Oracle 9i. Although Microsoft clarified the rumor at the first time, Oracle took advantage of this wave of publicity.
Today, Oracle, which is almost blank in the field of consumer services and social media, has once again defeated Microsoft. This time, Microsoft probably lost to that point of contacts. Even though this is "a business decision, not a political decision", Larry Ellison's personal relationship and Oracle's relationship with the White House are still difficult to ignore.
As Eric Schiff, the chairman of Patriarch Organization, a private equity firm, said, Microsoft's human relations cannot be compared with that of Allison.
"In order to win this deal, Microsoft has done everything they can, so they just have to wear the MAGA hat and appear at the rally to cheer," he said. "There is no doubt that compared with most other companies, Microsoft has done well enough, and its relations with the White House and Trump are also good. But it is still a little worse than Allison."
