From Business Week, quoting Oracle’s marketing chief Mark Jarvis:
The way we develop products has changed dramatically. As I said, a few years ago we had 150 products. [CEO] Larry Ellison’s whole push on development has been that he doesn’t want 150, he wants one product. And that has forced development to change the way they come up with products.
It’s very interesting to see the meetings. The teams come up with what they think is a killer feature. And they want to charge for it separately. And they want to [create separate products] because they believe that’s their measure of success. What Larry has forced them to do is realize that their measure of success is how well integrated their product is with all the others — because that’s what customers want. He doesn’t measure developers on the revenue they bring in anymore. Now we look at how well integrated they are.
Our advertising is very simple. One or two or three words. Less is more with the ad. Larry and I call it “Japanese gardening.” The principle of a Japanese garden is that it’s not complete until you’ve taken out as much as you can.
