Opinion ? Out of focus

Oracle is a mid-range database company. It is worth holding onto that rather obvious fact if you are one of its customers. Oracle, and especially chief executive Larry Ellison, seems to have forgotten.

On last week's barnstorming trip across Europe, Ellison went hell for leather for his main competition. He lambasted the Bill Gates way of designing PCs - Oracle could and would do better, he said. Ellison also announced his company's new operating system strategy, which will take on Windows 95 on the desktop and NT on the server.

He hosted the company's developers' conference which, in most respects, was conducted as any desktop development conference should be.

It just wasn't the kind of thing you expect from a sober-suited database company. About Oracle's core business, relational databases, Ellison had not one word to say - until Computing reminded him of its existence.

Oracle's guiding spirit is a driven man. His management team seem to be desperately hanging onto his coat tails - somewhere, anywhere - as he zig-zags between niches in the IT business. But appearances on the Oprah Winfrey Show, interviews with the national press and the regurgitation of his personal life serve a serious purpose - to make Ellison and his company household names.

Yet Oracle's core business remains selling databases and business software on mid-range systems. In the past, this has meant first VMS and then Unix, but in the future, it is going to mean Windows NT - whatever the success of NC Server.

In terms of products that can be bought today, Microsoft and Oracle do not compete. Now Larry Ellison wants to compete everywhere. Yet to keep its core products at the forefront of technology, Oracle will need the cooperation of Microsoft. Oracle users beware.