I don’t disagree. But – I do recall watching a “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” back in the late 80’s or early 90’s that had a very interesting interview with Larry Ellison. If you were to see that interview now, you might think, “My God – he planned all this!” And by “all this” I mean everything right down to the “cloud”. The “Cloud” – which he hates now, as a buzz word, but ranted then about how silly it was that I was getting into my car to drive down to a store, to buy a box with bits in it, to drive it back to my computer, to put the bits in my computer. He claimed, even back then, that the network was the computer. It should be noted that the key acquisition in the Sun Microsystems deal for Oracle probably wasn’t MySQL, but rather Java. If they had no intention on competing in this arena, they wouldn’t be in court with Google now over the use of Java.

Mr. Ellison’s “Rich and Famous Lifestyle” included an amazing house that was inspired by a samurai’s palace. The best ninja, in my experience, tend to look a lot like the best samurai. All I’m saying is keep on eye on Oracle – I think they may be the sleeping ninja in the room.

It’s interesting how we forget about previous lock in attempts – Microsoft’s NetBEUI is a good case in point.

This is one of the lessons from the web, that lock in eventually fails. Hopefully that’s going to happen again as the market rejects being locked into the various services.

Good point about Oracle, the thing is I’m not sure if they are going to be one of bigger “empires” in the way Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google are trying to control the web.

Maybe I need to refine my post to reflect those comparatively smaller players – in their web dominance – like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM will sit in the scheme of things.

That’s not to say they aren’t big players and possibly bigger companies overall than some of the net’s “big four”, but it seems to me they aren’t trying to control content and information in the same way.