So, hypothetical situation: You're sitting with Safra, talking about tomorrow's conference call with Oracle investors. What company names are you going to drop? Who are you going to make sound like shit? Who are you going to buy out in the next few months? And you come up with a couple names. Red Hat. MySQL. Salesforce.com. SAP. Microsoft. Sun Microsystems. Okay, maybe not Sun. And then you realize, whoa. Holy smokes. BEA Systems isn't on your list. And why is that?
They were doing so well, and they still kind of are, but they've lost something. Yes. They've lost their virginity and the light has gone out of their eyes and they're just not fun anymore. They've burned out and washed up. And you just don't care about them. You really don't. You don't want to buy them or talk about them or even hear about them anymore. And you also know that you can't make any forward-looking statements, so you just talk about all of this hypothetically and keep it to yourself.
Safra says that companies are like flowers: they bloom only once. She says there are a lot of one-hit wonders out there who do one thing and then never do anything else. And she says BEA Systems is one of those companies.
Food for thought, bros.
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