Tuesday, May 13, 2008

ApEx: Oracle Marketing WTF?

At the time of writing, the score is 68 have not used ApEx leaving only 8 who have. Obviously this poll isn't scientific, but it does have to represent a small bit of the community. Perhaps Oracle Mix would be a better place to ask the question?

I guess my followup poll would be why? Why haven't you used it?

Did you not know about it?

If that's the case, then it's definitely an Oracle Marketing WTF.

Did you know about it but just never got around to trying it?

I'm completely dumb(quit snickering)-founded.

I believe the very first time I heard anything about the product was when it was referred to as Marvel (Project Marvel?) on AskTom. Am I the only one who read the site for enjoyment (probably, but it was the only thing I could read at work). That must have been 4 or 5 years ago. I started using it in May of 2005, now three years back.

Yes, Oracle has boatloads of products. I still don't know what the whole Fusion thing is (please don't say middleware, I don't know what that is either).

As someone pointed out in the comment section, it's one of the busiest forums on OTN.

I wonder if John and Dmitri run into this? Probably makes cold calling difficult.

As a [ApEx] community, what can we do to help promote it?

4 comments:

Dimitri Gielis said...

About the poll, maybe a lot of Apex users didn't find the post. I can try to blog about it, so your Apex votes get higher ;-)

It's logic Oracle sales/marketing doesn't promote APEX that much as they don't get any direct license revenue from it, that's why it's important that we do...

APEX will get there, don't be afraid. Otherwise it would mean we have to close Apex Evangelists, which we don't want to do ;-)

Dimitri

oraclenerd said...

Good point Dmitri.

Why market something that you don't directly make money off of?

I'm not afraid, just befuddled.

Perhaps my enthusiasm blinds me from reality!

SydOracle said...

"Why market something that you don't directly make money off of?"
Because you make revenue off the back end. You may promote Linux, but you make money of Linux SUPPORT. Ditto MySQL. You market Apex, 'cos you make money off the database the application is running on and it is locked in 'cos only Oracle runs Apex.
Maybe the problem is that they make more money from selling OAS...

PS. Some places with Oracle DB will have it as the back-end of a third party application (eg Apps), so won't do any front-end development.

oraclenerd said...

And there's another problem, Oracle has so many technologies that do compete against each other.