Essay --

Keanu Jefferson Mrs. Smith English 10-Period 4th 10 February 2014 â€Å"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment† And The Affects It Has Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July fourth, eighteen o four in Salem, Massachusetts, to a family that had been prominent in the area for a long period of time. â€Å"Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment† was written in 1837 by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne was not always interested in education, but he went to Bowdoin College in 1821. He would be the only person in his family to ever to go to college. He was prepared by Dr. Benjamin Lynde Oliver for college and the college experience. He really did not care about school or interested in any type of particular type of profession, but still went to collage anyway. He studied most of the classics some including mathematics, philosophy, composition, and natural science. During his college years he met many people, including future president Franklin Pierce. Hawthorne's use of obsession, desire, and experience was established in the theme in the short story â€Å"Dr. Heidegger's Experiment†. In the early and mid ei ghteen thirty's everybody was taking about the fountain of youth and the affects to make you younger it has. The theme to this story was based on this fact. When Hawthorne was writing â€Å"Dr.. Heidegger's Experiment† he must have been thinking about the fountain of youth, desire, experience, and the obsession of life so it influenced this story to be the way he wrote it.. People often say â€Å"If I had my life to live over again. I would not be where I am at right now. I would use my experience that I have gotten to really better my life.† this story can make people think about having another shot and if they did have another shot at life how they would do everything d... ...esire something so bad that you will put effort into papers and try to pass test so you can get these things. If you desire these things then you would not mind putting a little effort into it. Nathaniel Hawthorne died on May nineteen,eighteen sixty four,. Hawthorne was a very active man and was very healthy. Hawthorne health started to fail him. He would not go see in doctors or anything to find out what was wrong with him. There is no details on the way he died . His death up to this day is still a mystery and no records to this day exist to find out the way he died. Some people say he died of cardiac arrest ,but there is no proof to this day about what happened to him. He went to New Hampshire hills a place that he loved to go to hoping to regain his health. He went there went his old friend Franklin Pierce. Nathaniel Hawthorne died on the second day of the trip.

Is Oracle Dying

Oracle Corporation was founded in Jun 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, Ed Oates. Over the years, it has risen to become almost indisputable leader of the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) market with 44% (Source: IDC 2009) – at least, for now, though, no one is sure how long that numero uno position will last. There were heady days of 1996-2008 or so when Oracle ruled the world of RDBMS. It was unchallenged crown king that could do no wrong. Hundreds of thousands of Database engineers, architects, administrators spoke of Oracle as if it was actually the famed â€Å"Oracle of Delphi†.Conference passes to Oracle Open World were so coveted that it was distributed to star employees in any company using Oracle Products. However, after 2008, the downward spiral has been very perceptible to the database communities. The hush-hush talks could now be heard very loud and clear. Only that Oracle was perhaps hearing but valiantly choosing not to listen. It continued to maintain the arrogance of a star past its prime – denying that it was aging, claiming that the talent would always trump the age.I think the Oracle Goliath had forgotten that for every arrogant Goliath, there is a David that is bound to introduce it to its nemesis. But my guess this downward spiral perhaps set into motion long before 2008 or so when world started noticing it. Time machine Let us trace Oracle Journey through its very meager beginnings and how it lost its course along the way. The chronological sequence of this journey could be roughly as I have shown below:- 1977   SDL (Oracle's predecessor) founded 1978    Oracle Version 1 developed 1979    First commercial SQL RDBMS 983  Ã‚   Oracle Version 3, first RDBMS developed to run on mainframes, PC, minicomputers, VMS 1984  Ã‚   first RDBMS to offer read-consistency 1985    Released of Oracle Version 5, first RDBMS in client/server environments 1986  Ã‚   Oracle IPO (NASDAQ) 1987  Ã‚   Rises to numbe r one in the world for RDBMS, Oracle gets into building enterprise applications 1988  Ã‚   Oracle Version 6 with several new features: PL/SQL, Row-level locking 1989  Ã‚   Oracle provides DB support for OLTP and moves its HQ to Redwood Shores, California 1990  Ã‚   Launches Oracle Applications Release 8 992  Ã‚   Launched Oracle 7, offers full applications implementation methodology 1993  Ã‚   Client/server environments enhancements 1994  Ã‚   Oracle receives the industry’s first security clearance 1995    Debuts first 64-bit RDBMS 1996  Ã‚   Releases feature rich 7. 3, with different types of data types – text, maps, audio, video, or images, develops an open standards-based, web-enabled architecture 1998  Ã‚   Oracle8 Database ; Oracle Applications 10. 7 – first enterprise computing company to use Java 1999  Ã‚   Offers its first DBMS with XML support 2000  Ã‚   Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i 001  Ã‚   Oracle9i Database with Oracle RAC,   first RDBMS to complete 3 terabyte TPC-H record 2002   Oracle RDBMS passes 15 industry standard security evaluations – first RDBMS to achieve this 2003   Oracle debuts Oracle Database 10g, more robust clustering software 2004   Declares Oracle â€Å"the Information Company† and spreads into many other areas 2005   Acquires rival PeopleSoft, releases first free database, Oracle 10g XE 2006  Ã‚   Declares a 30-year commitment for open standards computing, giving customers â€Å"Unbreakable Linux† 2008   HP Oracle Database Machine/Exadata storage 009  Ã‚  Gets into too many things – including BEA products, launch of Oracle Fusion Middleware, 11g advance Oracle 2010  Ã‚   Oracle acquires Sun Microsystems, announces Sun based Exadata/Exalogic machines 2011  Ã‚   Keeps adding bells and whistles to same Exadata/Exalogic machines 2012  Ã‚   Announces initiative focused on Cloud Rise of Oracle Most of the engineers in software industry were not even born when in late seventies, it struck young Larry Ellison, after reading paper written by Dr Edgar F.Codd (1970) on relational database management systems titled â€Å"A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks†, that a software could be designed that could follow the principles of relational databases. His belief was reinforced when he read another article, published in the IBM Research Journal, and authored by Ed Oates (IBM) about the IBM System R database. System R itself was based on Codd's theories. In 1977, Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL) and in 1979, SDL was rechristened as Relational Software, Inc. nly to change its name again in 1982 to Oracle Systems Corporation. In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation. From 1979 through 1992, Oracle primarily focused its attention on making its flagship product, Oracle RDBMS, strong . Oracle was getting complacent after version 5 and then it came out with version 6 – this was huge fiasco product and it was nightmare for customer support and Oracle support. Corporate customers were threatening to pull off Oracle.Version 6 was quickly followed up by version 7 which saved the day for Oracle. 7. 34 turned out to be very stable product. Version 8i, 9i and 10g added to Oracle RDBMS core competence. These versions by themselves attracted customers to Oracle. If everything was so good, continues to be good then why do I particularly feel that Oracle could be dying as a company? Lack of Level 5 leadership Oracle has been led by Larry Ellison all these years. Larry is a level 4 leader – wish he was level 5.Under his leadership, Oracle has always focused on â€Å"what† should be done and â€Å"how† will it be done. Level 5 CEOs first focus on â€Å"who† and then on â€Å"what† and â€Å"how†. People part of the equation rem ains very flaky, to say the least, with Oracle. It has been notoriously uncaring about exodus of top talent. Many ex-Oracle top performers have gone on to form companies, rise to be C staff, unleash innovations but Oracle didn’t really do anything specific to stop the fleeing top talent.Also, like many other celebrity CEOs, Ellison is getting two distracted by things that his company should not be focusing on – example, Oracle’s American Cup sponsorship, Ellison’s many prime properties, Ellison’s unflinching support for former ousted HP CEO and great friend Mark Hurd, Ellison’s purchasing Lanai Island. All these have direct impact on Oracle’s future – why? Because all these are issues that distract the CEO. Same thing happened with Lee Iacocca – once he turned around Chrysler, he focused more on politics, image building, helping White House ith many initiatives which distracted him from his duties as CEO. And Chrysler sl id back into the mess that it had recovered from. Mark’s hiring into Oracle forced Ellison to send Charles Phillips off. Charles was a great executive and leader recognized for his talent in and outside Oracle. Letting a great leader go in favor of a friend whose moral ethics are somewhat doubtful never went well with the employees. Also, Oracle doesn’t have conversations like â€Å"what can we do to stop you from leaving† with most of their top talent attritions. 5 Phases of a perilous corporationAny company going through the general growth, if not managed in a disciplined manner, can hurtle itself into peril. Jim Collins brings this out very succinctly in his book â€Å"How the Mighty Fall – any why some companies never give in†. The 5 stages of this journey from greatness to perish are very perceptible when they happen. The Path to Destruction I suspect Oracle’s downward spiral started after 2001-2002 (or at least sometime during that per iod). It could not come to terms with the ever high stock price of more than $45 and started becoming greedy.Perhaps under some implicit or explicit mandate from Uncle Larry, the sales people were sent marching to see how much more they could milk out of their unsuspecting and totally Oracle dependent customers. And perhaps the sales people came back with the message that customers would not mind paying more for the crown jewel product – core RDBMS as well as Oracle ERP Suite – 11i. Oracle (read, Larry Ellison) could not stand competition – especially those then started looking at how to kill rivals – hostile and non-hostile acquisitions of rival JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel.Every growing company reaches a point where growth starts flattening – happened with Apple, happened with Google and will happen with next big shinning company as well – Oracle was not particularly immune to it so in an attempt to resuscitate its flattening growth, largely due to its flagship core RDBMS product, Oracle started developing another front that it could open – this was business of application servers – an exploding market back in the day.An application server is packaged software that developers use to write and deploy web specific applications. The market had exploded past decade or so since many application server vendors were trying to build dynamic applications for the web and mobile devices. For Oracle the lure was that the market had the potential to perhaps become as lucrative as their core database market.Oracle was very late entrant into this market but it quickly acquired BEA Software (leader in the space at that point) and started competing neck to neck with IBM WebSphere. Within Oracle, Application Server business is viewed as â€Å"third business† besides core RDBMS and ERP. Oracle built its business around data bases and from the very beginning it has dominated the database market, providing the d ata stores and central repositories to store critical business information that businesses must maintain, use and safeguard to complete transactions.This has given it almost a monopoly and a very superior position when negotiating with customers. Oracle’s sales team that is always scavenging to find new sources of revenues, capitalizes on such an edge and leverages it to squeeze every dollar out of the customers – rightfully earning a fearsome reputation of being â€Å"hard-line negotiators† – and they are squeezing where it hurts the customers most – at their licensing and support costs.However, like it had opened a third front by getting into Application Servers market, it has since then opened many more such fronts via its acquisition spree – Oracle has expanded well beyond just the databases and application servers and entered the business software domain as well, acquiring leader companies in domains related to technology infrastructure , sales, employees, inventory and customers. People typically use products from these acquired companies to track information related to these important entities. Undisciplined growth In their pursuit to keep up with their YoY growth, Oracle has descended into a very undisciplined growth.There was also very unreasonable desire to grow into every domain. While growing via acquisitions, Oracle Executive Management has forgotten that it is not simply enough to acquire good companies, it takes good and dedicated diligence to grow them into great companies. Some of the companies Oracle acquired are as under (source – http://www. oracle. com):- 2013 Feb-13Acme PacketNetworking hardware for telecommunications service providers 2012 Dec-12Eloqua Marketing Automation platform for managing sales and marketing leads across an enterprise.Dec-12DataRakerCloud based Analytic platform to transform meter, customer, network and asset Big Data into actionable business intelligence. Nov-12Insta ntisCloud and premises-based PPM – Project Portfolio Management applications. Sep-12SelectMindsCloud-based social talent sourcing and corporate alumni management application Jul-12Xsigo SystemsProvider of network virtualization technology that simplifies cloud infrastructure and operations Jul-12SkireSolutions provider for managing capital projects, facilities and real estate Jul-12InvolverSocial media development platformJun-12Collective IntellectCloud-based social intelligence solutions May-12VitrueSocial Marketing Platform provider Mar-12ClearTrialCloud-based Clinical Trial Operations and Analytics products Feb-12TaleoTalent Management Software 2011 Oct-11RightNow TechnologiesCloud-based CRM Oct-11EndecaE-commerce & Business Intelligence Sep-11GoAHead Service Availability and Management Software Jul-11InQuiraService Knowledge Management Software Jul-11KspliceRebootless Linux kernel updates Jun-11 FatWire Software Web Content and Web Experience Management (WCM and WEM) Soft ware Jun-11Pillar Data Systems Storage systemsApr-11Datanomic Data Quality Software Feb-11Ndevr – Select IP only Environmental Reporting and Business Intelligence 2010 Nov-10 Art Technology GroupEcommerce software vendor May-10 Pre-Paid Software Payment Solutions May-10 Market2LeadApplications May-10 Secerno Data protection hardware and software Apr-10Phase Forward Applications for life sciences companies and healthcare providers Feb-10AmberPoint Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) management Feb-10Convergin Telecom Service BrokerJan-10Sun Microsystems Computer servers, storage, networks, Java, MySQL, software, and services Jan-10Silver Creek SystemsProduct Data Quality Solutions for connecting Enterprise Systems, Customers, Suppliers and Partners. 2009 Oct-09SOPHOI Intellectual property management for Media & Entertainment Industry Sep-09HyperRoll Financials, software and IT services Jun-09Conformia Product Lifecycle Management May-09Virtual Iron Software Server Virtualizati on Management Software Mar-09Relsys International Drug Safety and Risk Management 2008Oct-08Haley (RuleBurst Holdings) Natural Language Business Rules / Policy Automation Oct-08Advanced Visual Technology Retail Space Planning Oct-08Primavera Project Portfolio Management Jun-08Skywire Software Document Management May-08AdminServer Insurance Policy Administration Jan-08BEA Systems Enterprise Software 2007 Dec-07MoniforceReal User Experience Monitoring Sep-07BridgestreamEnterprise Role Management software Jul-07Bharosa, IncOnline Identity Theft and Fraud Detection May-07Agile Software CorporationProduct Lifecycle Management Apr-07Lodestar CorporationUtilities Application SoftwareMar-07Hyperion CorporationEnterprise Performance Management Mar-07Tangosol IncDatagrid Software 2006 Nov-06Stellent Inc. Universal Content Management, Digital Rights Management Nov-06SPL WorldGroupUtility Billing and Customer Service Systems Oct-06SunopsisETL, Data Integration Oct-06MetaSolvOSS service activati on Jun-06DemantraDemand-Driven Planning Solution [email  protected] IP-based Contact Center Solution Apr-06Portal Software Billing and Revenue Management solutions for communications and media industry Feb-06HotSipCommunications infrastructure solutionsFeb-06Sleepycat Software Open-source database software for embedded applications Jan-06360CommerceRetail Industry Solutions Jan-06Siebel SystemsCustomer relationship management 2005 Dec-05Temposoft Workforce Management Applications sam organization Nov-05OctetString Virtual Directory Solutions Nov-05Thor Technologies Enterprise-wide User Provisioning Solutions. Oct-05Innobase Discrete Transactional Open Source Database Technology Sep-05G-LogTransportation Management Solutions Aug-05i-flexBanking Industry Solutions Jul-05Context MediaEnterprise Content IntegrationJul-05ProfitLogicRetail Industry Solutions Jun-05TimesTenReal-time Enterprise Solutions Jun-05TripleHopContext-sensitive Enterprise Search Apr-05RetekRetail Industry Solutio ns Mar-05OblixIdentity Management Solutions Jan-05PeopleSoftEnterprise Software 2004 Jun-04CollaxaBusiness process management May-04 PhaosIdentity management Jan-04SiteWorks Solutions Clinical trials management 2003 Jun-03ReliatyEnterprise data protection Jun-03FileFishEnterprise content management 2002 Jun-02SteltorEnterprise calendaring system Jan-02NetForce Adverse event reporting systemJan-02Indicast Voice portals Jan-02TopLink Object-relation mapping technology 1999 Jun-99Thinking Machines Corporation datamining technology 1995 Aug-95IRI Software OLAP products 1994 Oct-94Rdb (A division of DEC) Relational database The early acquisitions show Oracle focus on growing its databases market but acquisitions of past few years including very surprising $5 Billion acquisition of Sun MicroSystems do not give us good sense of where Oracle’s focus is. The strategic theme in Oracle’s acquisition spree is missing and seems more like reactions of leadership focusing only on â⠂¬Å"growth†.Take a look at spread of Oracle into sectors and even a layman would agree that it is stretching itself far too thin. If people outside of Oracle can’t understand why Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, the confusion is equally evident inside Oracle as well. No one can put a figure on if Oracle acquired Sun for hardware market entry point or MySQL or Sun Solaris OS or was it a combination of all these and then some. Oracle has come out with an integrated ERP product suite – Fusion. The sales teams do not fully comprehend how to package Fusion compared to Oracle 12 version.As such Fusion itself is at least four years too late. In its attempt to create a unified platform for ERP software, it has managed to successfully scare customer who want just a small focused set of modules – like AR and GL or Manufacturing. There was Steve Jobs who made the famous statement that â€Å"†¦we tell customers what they want†¦Ã¢â‚¬ . Larry Ellison can ma ke the same claim – but to be successful at doing that, you have to be a visionary and not be distracted so hopelessly as Ellison currently is. And, customers seem to be last thing that Oracle considers while deciding these moves.For example, many of Sun’s largest former customers were large Wall Street financial institutions, and they were really miffed last year when Oracle wanted to restrict their server and operating system choices to only Sun technologies. They relentlessly pushed back and Oracle had to ultimately give in to their defiance, reaffirming deals that would let companies like HP and Dell offer Sun software on their respective hardware. â€Å"Customers will always gripe about giving too much control to any one company,† said Israel Hernandez, director of software research at Barclays Capital.Larry Ellison runs Oracle likes his personal fiefdom. The Oracle Board of Directors is merely a formality that is maintained to satisfy the Wall Street and S EC. Most decisions are taken unilaterally by Ellison and his leadership team. For example the 2010 hiring of ex-HP CEO, Mark Hurd, as a co-president after Hurd was fired by HP board due to sexual harassment allegations. Analysts viewed the hiring as a positive outcome for Oracle as it looked to expand. However, Mr. Hurd’s arrival was quickly followed by departure of one ofOracle long-timer, Charles Phillips. At one time, Charles was touted as Ellison’s protege and likely successor. Oracle customers are worried about putting all their eggs in one basket. Almost every company that they tend to do business is being bought by Oracle – much to customers’ dislike. And for hosts of Oracle’s Annual Open World program, San Francisco city officials are running into dilemma of saying â€Å"No† to Oracle at some point for hosting the event, simply because it is unlikely that city could survive the demands of an Oracle four times its current size.A look at its portfolio will tell you more about scary reach and disappointing and unfocused spread that Oracle has now – 110 product lines spread across 14 different domains. (source – http://www. oracle. com):- DATABASE DataScaler (October 2010) e-Test (acquired from Empirix) (March 2008) Innobase (October 2005) Moniforce (December 2007) mValent (February 2009) Secerno (May 2010) Sleepycat (February 2006) TimesTen (June 2005) TripleHop (June 2005) MIDDLEWARE AmberPoint (February 2010) BEA (January 2008) Bharosa (July 2007) Bridgestream (September 2007) Captovation (January 2008)ClearApp (September 2008) Context Media (July 2005) Datanomic (April 2011) FatWire (June 2011) HyperRoll (September 2009) GoldenGate (July 2009) Java (April 2009) Oblix (March 2005) OctetString (November 2005) Passlogix (October 2010) Sigma Dynamics (August 2006) Silver Creek Systems (January 2010) Stellent (November 2006) Sunopsis (October 2006) Tacit Software (November 2008) Tangosol (March 2007) T hor Technologies (November 2005) APPLICATIONS AppForge (April 2007) Collective Intellect (June 2012) Eloqua (December 2012) Haley (October 2008) InQuira (July 2011) Interlace Systems (October 2007)Involver (July 2012) LogicalApps (October 2007) Market2Lead (May 2010) Ndevr (February 2011) RightNow (October 2011) SelectMinds (September 2012) Taleo (February 2012) TempoSoft (December 2005) Vitrue (May 2012) PRODUCT LINES Agile (May 2007) ATG (November 2010) Endeca (October 2011) Hyperion (March 2007) PeopleSoft (January 2005) Primavera (October 2008) Siebel (January 2006) [email  protected] (June 2006) IMPLEMENTATION AND INTEGRATION TOOLS Global Knowledge Software (GKS) (July 2008) SERVERS, STORAGE, AND NETWORKING Ksplice (July 2011) Pillar Data Systems (June 2011Sun (April 2009) Xsigo Systems (July 2012) Virtual Iron (May 2009) INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA Acme Packet (February 2013) (pending) Convergin (February 2010) eServGlobal's Universal Service Platform (USP) ( May 2010) GoAhead (September 2011) HotSip (February 2006) MetaSolv Software (October 2006) Net4Call (April 2006) Netsure Telecom Limited (September 2007) Portal Software (April 2006) Sophoi (October 2009) ENGINEERING AND CONSTRUCTION Instantis (November 2012) Primavera (October 2008) Skire (July 2012) FINANCIAL SERVICES i-flex (August 2005)HEALTH SCIENCES ClearTrial (March 2012) Phase Forward (April 2010) Relsys (March 2009) INDUSTRIAL MANUFACTURING Agile (May 2007) Conformia Software (June 2009) Demantra (June 2006) G-Log (September 2005) INSURANCE AdminServer (May 2008) Skywire Software (June 2008) RETAIL 360Commerce (January 2006) Advanced Visual Technology (AVT) (October 2008) ProfitLogic (July 2005) Retek (April 2005) UTILITIES DataRaker (December 2012) SPL WorldGroup (November 2006) LODESTAR (April 2007) Failure to Admit Reality It is also felt that Oracle executive management is out of touch with reality.The typical strategy is to first make fun of competitors, then ridicule them and finally scare the wits out of the customers who were even thinking of adopting competitors’ products. If the competition still survives all this and continues to grow then Oracle does one of the two things – either it buys the competition or simply buys the number two in that space. They did this for Sun, HP, NetApp, EMC, VMWare, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Salesforce, Microsoft (for MS SQL Server). Most of the times, customers can see through this and continue their adaptation of new products from customers.Most recent examples are Oracle’s taking potshots for two consecutive years in Oracle Open World 2010 and 2011 at Salesforce. com and then when it couldn’t wean away customers from Salesforce. com or slow down the ramp up, it launched its own versions of cloud offerings in 2012 Open World. Sun MicroSystems â€Å"Millstone† Around the Neck Whatever be the underlying rationale for purchase of Sun MicroSystems, Oracle is now challenged to make th e whole acquisition viable. It now finds itself in the territory of hardware market that its sales team is so ill-equipped to sell.The only option it had was to turn the Sun hardware into Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytic Servers and try to hoodwink the customers into buying this â€Å"supreme† computing machines. Much to its chagrin, not many customers are biting this new set of baits. Dark â€Å"Cloud† Space For a long time – almost three years – Oracle made fun of Salesforce. com, Amazon and Microsoft – specifically for their cloud services. It positioned the Exadata and Exalogic servers as new cloud servers that could provide as much computing power as tens of commodity hosts from these vendors cloud offerings.However, around late 2011-2012, it became very clear to Oracle that Cloud hosting and cloud based multi-tenancy software are the future and it scrambled to buy as many Cloud services based companies as it could – examples are RightNow , Taleo, Virtue – all acquired within months of each other in 2011-12. Oracle needs to realize that just acquisition of a company by and in itself doesn’t position Oracle as a leader in that space – acquisition is just the start – Oracle thereafter needs to retain the talent in that company, invest and grow the company, integrate it seamlessly within Oracle’s other relevant product lines.Unfortunately for Oracle, these are also the areas where it has failed most of the times in the past. Grasping for straws Good news first, Oracle has not yet reached this stage yet – in this stage, very perceptible symptoms are – changing CEOs and executive staff in quick rotation and changing the product directions every so often. However, there is bound to be a moment, not in very distant future, when we will find that eople will become so weary of Oracle products that Ellison will be either dislodged by a hostile board or will leave on his own. He has essentially no succession plan in place except bunch of execs like Thomas Kurian or Mark Hurd who can stake their claim to the crown. Thomas is well respected within the company but lacks charisma and chutzpah of Ellison. Mark may not be as respected but has good experience of cutting costs – like he did at HP. Death KnellIn this stage, a company either slowly vanishes into irrelevance or is acquired or merged into another competitor or goes belly up. For the sake of hundreds of thousands of professionals using, preaching and earning their bread from Oracle Technologies, I just hope Oracle never reaches that stage. Out of hundreds of companies that passed through this stage and vanished into oblivion, only two companies have thus far ever recovered from this stage – Xerox and Apple. Once again, I am sincerely hoping that Oracle never reaches this stage.Will it be able to recover from this downward spiral? Oracle can arrest this dance towards its vanishing into obli vion – question that really begs for an answer is – will it have the honesty to first admit and then stop this march? First of all, Oracle should focus and determine its core strength and then focus on building up on those. There is no prudence demonstrated in draining money on acquisitions and then selling those companies at markdown, or worst, writing off the charge as a loss.It is about time Oracle give up its greed on squeezing more money out of its customer and first create products and value that customers will willingly play obscene amount of money for. References: http://finance. yahoo. com http://www. oracle. com http://www. nytimes. com/2010/09/22/technology/22oracle. html? _r=0 http://www. forbes. com/2001/10/29/1029orcl. html http://www. zdnet. com/oracles-customers-a-bit-baffled-by-fusion-strategy-says-report-7000011143/ http://www. networkworld. com/news/2013/011713-oracle-cloud-265922. html How the Mighty Fall: And why some companies never give in â€⠀œ by Jim Collins, Is Oracle Dying Oracle Corporation was founded in Jun 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, Ed Oates. Over the years, it has risen to become almost indisputable leader of the Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) market with 44% (Source: IDC 2009) – at least, for now, though, no one is sure how long that numero uno position will last. There were heady days of 1996-2008 or so when Oracle ruled the world of RDBMS. It was unchallenged crown king that could do no wrong. Hundreds of thousands of Database engineers, architects, administrators spoke of Oracle as if it was actually the famed â€Å"Oracle of Delphi†.Conference passes to Oracle Open World were so coveted that it was distributed to star employees in any company using Oracle Products. However, after 2008, the downward spiral has been very perceptible to the database communities. The hush-hush talks could now be heard very loud and clear. Only that Oracle was perhaps hearing but valiantly choosing not to listen. It continued to maintain the arrogance of a star past its prime – denying that it was aging, claiming that the talent would always trump the age.I think the Oracle Goliath had forgotten that for every arrogant Goliath, there is a David that is bound to introduce it to its nemesis. But my guess this downward spiral perhaps set into motion long before 2008 or so when world started noticing it. Time machine Let us trace Oracle Journey through its very meager beginnings and how it lost its course along the way. The chronological sequence of this journey could be roughly as I have shown below:- 1977   SDL (Oracle's predecessor) founded 1978    Oracle Version 1 developed 1979    First commercial SQL RDBMS 983  Ã‚   Oracle Version 3, first RDBMS developed to run on mainframes, PC, minicomputers, VMS 1984  Ã‚   first RDBMS to offer read-consistency 1985    Released of Oracle Version 5, first RDBMS in client/server environments 1986  Ã‚   Oracle IPO (NASDAQ) 1987  Ã‚   Rises to numbe r one in the world for RDBMS, Oracle gets into building enterprise applications 1988  Ã‚   Oracle Version 6 with several new features: PL/SQL, Row-level locking 1989  Ã‚   Oracle provides DB support for OLTP and moves its HQ to Redwood Shores, California 1990  Ã‚   Launches Oracle Applications Release 8 992  Ã‚   Launched Oracle 7, offers full applications implementation methodology 1993  Ã‚   Client/server environments enhancements 1994  Ã‚   Oracle receives the industry’s first security clearance 1995    Debuts first 64-bit RDBMS 1996  Ã‚   Releases feature rich 7. 3, with different types of data types – text, maps, audio, video, or images, develops an open standards-based, web-enabled architecture 1998  Ã‚   Oracle8 Database ; Oracle Applications 10. 7 – first enterprise computing company to use Java 1999  Ã‚   Offers its first DBMS with XML support 2000  Ã‚   Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i 001  Ã‚   Oracle9i Database with Oracle RAC,   first RDBMS to complete 3 terabyte TPC-H record 2002   Oracle RDBMS passes 15 industry standard security evaluations – first RDBMS to achieve this 2003   Oracle debuts Oracle Database 10g, more robust clustering software 2004   Declares Oracle â€Å"the Information Company† and spreads into many other areas 2005   Acquires rival PeopleSoft, releases first free database, Oracle 10g XE 2006  Ã‚   Declares a 30-year commitment for open standards computing, giving customers â€Å"Unbreakable Linux† 2008   HP Oracle Database Machine/Exadata storage 009  Ã‚  Gets into too many things – including BEA products, launch of Oracle Fusion Middleware, 11g advance Oracle 2010  Ã‚   Oracle acquires Sun Microsystems, announces Sun based Exadata/Exalogic machines 2011  Ã‚   Keeps adding bells and whistles to same Exadata/Exalogic machines 2012  Ã‚   Announces initiative focused on Cloud Rise of Oracle Most of the engineers in software industry were not even born when in late seventies, it struck young Larry Ellison, after reading paper written by Dr Edgar F.Codd (1970) on relational database management systems titled â€Å"A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks†, that a software could be designed that could follow the principles of relational databases. His belief was reinforced when he read another article, published in the IBM Research Journal, and authored by Ed Oates (IBM) about the IBM System R database. System R itself was based on Codd's theories. In 1977, Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL) and in 1979, SDL was rechristened as Relational Software, Inc. nly to change its name again in 1982 to Oracle Systems Corporation. In 1995, Oracle Systems Corporation changed its name to Oracle Corporation. From 1979 through 1992, Oracle primarily focused its attention on making its flagship product, Oracle RDBMS, strong . Oracle was getting complacent after version 5 and then it came out with version 6 – this was huge fiasco product and it was nightmare for customer support and Oracle support. Corporate customers were threatening to pull off Oracle.Version 6 was quickly followed up by version 7 which saved the day for Oracle. 7. 34 turned out to be very stable product. Version 8i, 9i and 10g added to Oracle RDBMS core competence. These versions by themselves attracted customers to Oracle. If everything was so good, continues to be good then why do I particularly feel that Oracle could be dying as a company? Lack of Level 5 leadership Oracle has been led by Larry Ellison all these years. Larry is a level 4 leader – wish he was level 5.Under his leadership, Oracle has always focused on â€Å"what† should be done and â€Å"how† will it be done. Level 5 CEOs first focus on â€Å"who† and then on â€Å"what† and â€Å"how†. People part of the equation rem ains very flaky, to say the least, with Oracle. It has been notoriously uncaring about exodus of top talent. Many ex-Oracle top performers have gone on to form companies, rise to be C staff, unleash innovations but Oracle didn’t really do anything specific to stop the fleeing top talent.Also, like many other celebrity CEOs, Ellison is getting two distracted by things that his company should not be focusing on – example, Oracle’s American Cup sponsorship, Ellison’s many prime properties, Ellison’s unflinching support for former ousted HP CEO and great friend Mark Hurd, Ellison’s purchasing Lanai Island. All these have direct impact on Oracle’s future – why? Because all these are issues that distract the CEO. Same thing happened with Lee Iacocca – once he turned around Chrysler, he focused more on politics, image building, helping White House ith many initiatives which distracted him from his duties as CEO. And Chrysler sl id back into the mess that it had recovered from. Mark’s hiring into Oracle forced Ellison to send Charles Phillips off. Charles was a great executive and leader recognized for his talent in and outside Oracle. Letting a great leader go in favor of a friend whose moral ethics are somewhat doubtful never went well with the employees. Also, Oracle doesn’t have conversations like â€Å"what can we do to stop you from leaving† with most of their top talent attritions. 5 Phases of a perilous corporationAny company going through the general growth, if not managed in a disciplined manner, can hurtle itself into peril. Jim Collins brings this out very succinctly in his book â€Å"How the Mighty Fall – any why some companies never give in†. The 5 stages of this journey from greatness to perish are very perceptible when they happen. The Path to Destruction I suspect Oracle’s downward spiral started after 2001-2002 (or at least sometime during that per iod). It could not come to terms with the ever high stock price of more than $45 and started becoming greedy.Perhaps under some implicit or explicit mandate from Uncle Larry, the sales people were sent marching to see how much more they could milk out of their unsuspecting and totally Oracle dependent customers. And perhaps the sales people came back with the message that customers would not mind paying more for the crown jewel product – core RDBMS as well as Oracle ERP Suite – 11i. Oracle (read, Larry Ellison) could not stand competition – especially those then started looking at how to kill rivals – hostile and non-hostile acquisitions of rival JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel.Every growing company reaches a point where growth starts flattening – happened with Apple, happened with Google and will happen with next big shinning company as well – Oracle was not particularly immune to it so in an attempt to resuscitate its flattening growth, largely due to its flagship core RDBMS product, Oracle started developing another front that it could open – this was business of application servers – an exploding market back in the day.An application server is packaged software that developers use to write and deploy web specific applications. The market had exploded past decade or so since many application server vendors were trying to build dynamic applications for the web and mobile devices. For Oracle the lure was that the market had the potential to perhaps become as lucrative as their core database market.Oracle was very late entrant into this market but it quickly acquired BEA Software (leader in the space at that point) and started competing neck to neck with IBM WebSphere. Within Oracle, Application Server business is viewed as â€Å"third business† besides core RDBMS and ERP. Oracle built its business around data bases and from the very beginning it has dominated the database market, providing the d ata stores and central repositories to store critical business information that businesses must maintain, use and safeguard to complete transactions.This has given it almost a monopoly and a very superior position when negotiating with customers. Oracle’s sales team that is always scavenging to find new sources of revenues, capitalizes on such an edge and leverages it to squeeze every dollar out of the customers – rightfully earning a fearsome reputation of being â€Å"hard-line negotiators† – and they are squeezing where it hurts the customers most – at their licensing and support costs.However, like it had opened a third front by getting into Application Servers market, it has since then opened many more such fronts via its acquisition spree – Oracle has expanded well beyond just the databases and application servers and entered the business software domain as well, acquiring leader companies in domains related to technology infrastructure , sales, employees, inventory and customers. People typically use products from these acquired companies to track information related to these important entities. Undisciplined growth In their pursuit to keep up with their YoY growth, Oracle has descended into a very undisciplined growth.There was also very unreasonable desire to grow into every domain. While growing via acquisitions, Oracle Executive Management has forgotten that it is not simply enough to acquire good companies, it takes good and dedicated diligence to grow them into great companies. Some of the companies Oracle acquired are as under (source – http://www. oracle. com):- 2013 Feb-13Acme PacketNetworking hardware for telecommunications service providers 2012 Dec-12Eloqua Marketing Automation platform for managing sales and marketing leads across an enterprise.Dec-12DataRakerCloud based Analytic platform to transform meter, customer, network and asset Big Data into actionable business intelligence. Nov-12Insta ntisCloud and premises-based PPM – Project Portfolio Management applications. Sep-12SelectMindsCloud-based social talent sourcing and corporate alumni management application Jul-12Xsigo SystemsProvider of network virtualization technology that simplifies cloud infrastructure and operations Jul-12SkireSolutions provider for managing capital projects, facilities and real estate Jul-12InvolverSocial media development platformJun-12Collective IntellectCloud-based social intelligence solutions May-12VitrueSocial Marketing Platform provider Mar-12ClearTrialCloud-based Clinical Trial Operations and Analytics products Feb-12TaleoTalent Management Software 2011 Oct-11RightNow TechnologiesCloud-based CRM Oct-11EndecaE-commerce & Business Intelligence Sep-11GoAHead Service Availability and Management Software Jul-11InQuiraService Knowledge Management Software Jul-11KspliceRebootless Linux kernel updates Jun-11 FatWire Software Web Content and Web Experience Management (WCM and WEM) Soft ware Jun-11Pillar Data Systems Storage systemsApr-11Datanomic Data Quality Software Feb-11Ndevr – Select IP only Environmental Reporting and Business Intelligence 2010 Nov-10 Art Technology GroupEcommerce software vendor May-10 Pre-Paid Software Payment Solutions May-10 Market2LeadApplications May-10 Secerno Data protection hardware and software Apr-10Phase Forward Applications for life sciences companies and healthcare providers Feb-10AmberPoint Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) management Feb-10Convergin Telecom Service BrokerJan-10Sun Microsystems Computer servers, storage, networks, Java, MySQL, software, and services Jan-10Silver Creek SystemsProduct Data Quality Solutions for connecting Enterprise Systems, Customers, Suppliers and Partners. 2009 Oct-09SOPHOI Intellectual property management for Media & Entertainment Industry Sep-09HyperRoll Financials, software and IT services Jun-09Conformia Product Lifecycle Management May-09Virtual Iron Software Server Virtualizati on Management Software Mar-09Relsys International Drug Safety and Risk Management 2008Oct-08Haley (RuleBurst Holdings) Natural Language Business Rules / Policy Automation Oct-08Advanced Visual Technology Retail Space Planning Oct-08Primavera Project Portfolio Management Jun-08Skywire Software Document Management May-08AdminServer Insurance Policy Administration Jan-08BEA Systems Enterprise Software 2007 Dec-07MoniforceReal User Experience Monitoring Sep-07BridgestreamEnterprise Role Management software Jul-07Bharosa, IncOnline Identity Theft and Fraud Detection May-07Agile Software CorporationProduct Lifecycle Management Apr-07Lodestar CorporationUtilities Application SoftwareMar-07Hyperion CorporationEnterprise Performance Management Mar-07Tangosol IncDatagrid Software 2006 Nov-06Stellent Inc. Universal Content Management, Digital Rights Management Nov-06SPL WorldGroupUtility Billing and Customer Service Systems Oct-06SunopsisETL, Data Integration Oct-06MetaSolvOSS service activati on Jun-06DemantraDemand-Driven Planning Solution [email  protected] IP-based Contact Center Solution Apr-06Portal Software Billing and Revenue Management solutions for communications and media industry Feb-06HotSipCommunications infrastructure solutionsFeb-06Sleepycat Software Open-source database software for embedded applications Jan-06360CommerceRetail Industry Solutions Jan-06Siebel SystemsCustomer relationship management 2005 Dec-05Temposoft Workforce Management Applications sam organization Nov-05OctetString Virtual Directory Solutions Nov-05Thor Technologies Enterprise-wide User Provisioning Solutions. Oct-05Innobase Discrete Transactional Open Source Database Technology Sep-05G-LogTransportation Management Solutions Aug-05i-flexBanking Industry Solutions Jul-05Context MediaEnterprise Content IntegrationJul-05ProfitLogicRetail Industry Solutions Jun-05TimesTenReal-time Enterprise Solutions Jun-05TripleHopContext-sensitive Enterprise Search Apr-05RetekRetail Industry Solutio ns Mar-05OblixIdentity Management Solutions Jan-05PeopleSoftEnterprise Software 2004 Jun-04CollaxaBusiness process management May-04 PhaosIdentity management Jan-04SiteWorks Solutions Clinical trials management 2003 Jun-03ReliatyEnterprise data protection Jun-03FileFishEnterprise content management 2002 Jun-02SteltorEnterprise calendaring system Jan-02NetForce Adverse event reporting systemJan-02Indicast Voice portals Jan-02TopLink Object-relation mapping technology 1999 Jun-99Thinking Machines Corporation datamining technology 1995 Aug-95IRI Software OLAP products 1994 Oct-94Rdb (A division of DEC) Relational database The early acquisitions show Oracle focus on growing its databases market but acquisitions of past few years including very surprising $5 Billion acquisition of Sun MicroSystems do not give us good sense of where Oracle’s focus is. The strategic theme in Oracle’s acquisition spree is missing and seems more like reactions of leadership focusing only on â⠂¬Å"growth†.Take a look at spread of Oracle into sectors and even a layman would agree that it is stretching itself far too thin. If people outside of Oracle can’t understand why Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, the confusion is equally evident inside Oracle as well. No one can put a figure on if Oracle acquired Sun for hardware market entry point or MySQL or Sun Solaris OS or was it a combination of all these and then some. Oracle has come out with an integrated ERP product suite – Fusion. The sales teams do not fully comprehend how to package Fusion compared to Oracle 12 version.As such Fusion itself is at least four years too late. In its attempt to create a unified platform for ERP software, it has managed to successfully scare customer who want just a small focused set of modules – like AR and GL or Manufacturing. There was Steve Jobs who made the famous statement that â€Å"†¦we tell customers what they want†¦Ã¢â‚¬ . Larry Ellison can ma ke the same claim – but to be successful at doing that, you have to be a visionary and not be distracted so hopelessly as Ellison currently is. And, customers seem to be last thing that Oracle considers while deciding these moves.For example, many of Sun’s largest former customers were large Wall Street financial institutions, and they were really miffed last year when Oracle wanted to restrict their server and operating system choices to only Sun technologies. They relentlessly pushed back and Oracle had to ultimately give in to their defiance, reaffirming deals that would let companies like HP and Dell offer Sun software on their respective hardware. â€Å"Customers will always gripe about giving too much control to any one company,† said Israel Hernandez, director of software research at Barclays Capital.Larry Ellison runs Oracle likes his personal fiefdom. The Oracle Board of Directors is merely a formality that is maintained to satisfy the Wall Street and S EC. Most decisions are taken unilaterally by Ellison and his leadership team. For example the 2010 hiring of ex-HP CEO, Mark Hurd, as a co-president after Hurd was fired by HP board due to sexual harassment allegations. Analysts viewed the hiring as a positive outcome for Oracle as it looked to expand. However, Mr. Hurd’s arrival was quickly followed by departure of one ofOracle long-timer, Charles Phillips. At one time, Charles was touted as Ellison’s protege and likely successor. Oracle customers are worried about putting all their eggs in one basket. Almost every company that they tend to do business is being bought by Oracle – much to customers’ dislike. And for hosts of Oracle’s Annual Open World program, San Francisco city officials are running into dilemma of saying â€Å"No† to Oracle at some point for hosting the event, simply because it is unlikely that city could survive the demands of an Oracle four times its current size.A look at its portfolio will tell you more about scary reach and disappointing and unfocused spread that Oracle has now – 110 product lines spread across 14 different domains. (source – http://www. oracle. com):- DATABASE DataScaler (October 2010) e-Test (acquired from Empirix) (March 2008) Innobase (October 2005) Moniforce (December 2007) mValent (February 2009) Secerno (May 2010) Sleepycat (February 2006) TimesTen (June 2005) TripleHop (June 2005) MIDDLEWARE AmberPoint (February 2010) BEA (January 2008) Bharosa (July 2007) Bridgestream (September 2007) Captovation (January 2008)ClearApp (September 2008) Context Media (July 2005) Datanomic (April 2011) FatWire (June 2011) HyperRoll (September 2009) GoldenGate (July 2009) Java (April 2009) Oblix (March 2005) OctetString (November 2005) Passlogix (October 2010) Sigma Dynamics (August 2006) Silver Creek Systems (January 2010) Stellent (November 2006) Sunopsis (October 2006) Tacit Software (November 2008) Tangosol (March 2007) T hor Technologies (November 2005) APPLICATIONS AppForge (April 2007) Collective Intellect (June 2012) Eloqua (December 2012) Haley (October 2008) InQuira (July 2011) Interlace Systems (October 2007)Involver (July 2012) LogicalApps (October 2007) Market2Lead (May 2010) Ndevr (February 2011) RightNow (October 2011) SelectMinds (September 2012) Taleo (February 2012) TempoSoft (December 2005) Vitrue (May 2012) PRODUCT LINES Agile (May 2007) ATG (November 2010) Endeca (October 2011) Hyperion (March 2007) PeopleSoft (January 2005) Primavera (October 2008) Siebel (January 2006) [email  protected] (June 2006) IMPLEMENTATION AND INTEGRATION TOOLS Global Knowledge Software (GKS) (July 2008) SERVERS, STORAGE, AND NETWORKING Ksplice (July 2011) Pillar Data Systems (June 2011Sun (April 2009) Xsigo Systems (July 2012) Virtual Iron (May 2009) INDUSTRY SOLUTIONS COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA Acme Packet (February 2013) (pending) Convergin (February 2010) eServGlobal's Universal Service Platform (USP) ( May 2010) GoAhead (September 2011) HotSip (February 2006) MetaSolv Software (October 2006) Net4Call (April 2006) Netsure Telecom Limited (September 2007) Portal Software (April 2006) Sophoi (October 2009) ENGINEERING AND CONSTRUCTION Instantis (November 2012) Primavera (October 2008) Skire (July 2012) FINANCIAL SERVICES i-flex (August 2005)HEALTH SCIENCES ClearTrial (March 2012) Phase Forward (April 2010) Relsys (March 2009) INDUSTRIAL MANUFACTURING Agile (May 2007) Conformia Software (June 2009) Demantra (June 2006) G-Log (September 2005) INSURANCE AdminServer (May 2008) Skywire Software (June 2008) RETAIL 360Commerce (January 2006) Advanced Visual Technology (AVT) (October 2008) ProfitLogic (July 2005) Retek (April 2005) UTILITIES DataRaker (December 2012) SPL WorldGroup (November 2006) LODESTAR (April 2007) Failure to Admit Reality It is also felt that Oracle executive management is out of touch with reality.The typical strategy is to first make fun of competitors, then ridicule them and finally scare the wits out of the customers who were even thinking of adopting competitors’ products. If the competition still survives all this and continues to grow then Oracle does one of the two things – either it buys the competition or simply buys the number two in that space. They did this for Sun, HP, NetApp, EMC, VMWare, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Salesforce, Microsoft (for MS SQL Server). Most of the times, customers can see through this and continue their adaptation of new products from customers.Most recent examples are Oracle’s taking potshots for two consecutive years in Oracle Open World 2010 and 2011 at Salesforce. com and then when it couldn’t wean away customers from Salesforce. com or slow down the ramp up, it launched its own versions of cloud offerings in 2012 Open World. Sun MicroSystems â€Å"Millstone† Around the Neck Whatever be the underlying rationale for purchase of Sun MicroSystems, Oracle is now challenged to make th e whole acquisition viable. It now finds itself in the territory of hardware market that its sales team is so ill-equipped to sell.The only option it had was to turn the Sun hardware into Exadata, Exalogic and Exalytic Servers and try to hoodwink the customers into buying this â€Å"supreme† computing machines. Much to its chagrin, not many customers are biting this new set of baits. Dark â€Å"Cloud† Space For a long time – almost three years – Oracle made fun of Salesforce. com, Amazon and Microsoft – specifically for their cloud services. It positioned the Exadata and Exalogic servers as new cloud servers that could provide as much computing power as tens of commodity hosts from these vendors cloud offerings.However, around late 2011-2012, it became very clear to Oracle that Cloud hosting and cloud based multi-tenancy software are the future and it scrambled to buy as many Cloud services based companies as it could – examples are RightNow , Taleo, Virtue – all acquired within months of each other in 2011-12. Oracle needs to realize that just acquisition of a company by and in itself doesn’t position Oracle as a leader in that space – acquisition is just the start – Oracle thereafter needs to retain the talent in that company, invest and grow the company, integrate it seamlessly within Oracle’s other relevant product lines.Unfortunately for Oracle, these are also the areas where it has failed most of the times in the past. Grasping for straws Good news first, Oracle has not yet reached this stage yet – in this stage, very perceptible symptoms are – changing CEOs and executive staff in quick rotation and changing the product directions every so often. However, there is bound to be a moment, not in very distant future, when we will find that eople will become so weary of Oracle products that Ellison will be either dislodged by a hostile board or will leave on his own. He has essentially no succession plan in place except bunch of execs like Thomas Kurian or Mark Hurd who can stake their claim to the crown. Thomas is well respected within the company but lacks charisma and chutzpah of Ellison. Mark may not be as respected but has good experience of cutting costs – like he did at HP. Death KnellIn this stage, a company either slowly vanishes into irrelevance or is acquired or merged into another competitor or goes belly up. For the sake of hundreds of thousands of professionals using, preaching and earning their bread from Oracle Technologies, I just hope Oracle never reaches that stage. Out of hundreds of companies that passed through this stage and vanished into oblivion, only two companies have thus far ever recovered from this stage – Xerox and Apple. Once again, I am sincerely hoping that Oracle never reaches this stage.Will it be able to recover from this downward spiral? Oracle can arrest this dance towards its vanishing into obli vion – question that really begs for an answer is – will it have the honesty to first admit and then stop this march? First of all, Oracle should focus and determine its core strength and then focus on building up on those. There is no prudence demonstrated in draining money on acquisitions and then selling those companies at markdown, or worst, writing off the charge as a loss.It is about time Oracle give up its greed on squeezing more money out of its customer and first create products and value that customers will willingly play obscene amount of money for. References: http://finance. yahoo. com http://www. oracle. com http://www. nytimes. com/2010/09/22/technology/22oracle. html? _r=0 http://www. forbes. com/2001/10/29/1029orcl. html http://www. zdnet. com/oracles-customers-a-bit-baffled-by-fusion-strategy-says-report-7000011143/ http://www. networkworld. com/news/2013/011713-oracle-cloud-265922. html How the Mighty Fall: And why some companies never give in â€⠀œ by Jim Collins,

Music Styles Of Music And Music - 1220 Words

As week 7 approaches, I had the chance to look back over the last few weeks and take the opportunity to see how I have grown in regards to music, styles of music, meaning behind the music, and so on. While I am pretty open to many genres of music, this course allowed me to sit and actually take in the different genres. I was able to explore the different sounds and beats of each style of music as well. Week one started off with the early sounds of the blues. I explored and listened to sings like, Robert Johnson, â€Å"Cross Roads Blues† and Catherine Russell, Crazy Blues. I enjoyed Robert Johnson’s â€Å"Cross Roads Blues†, but my reaction was that Robert Johnson did not come off as the star of the song. He sang his verses over the guitar, however in my opinion, it seems like the guitar is the â€Å"star† of the song versus the artist singing. I also found it a bit difficult to find the chorus in the song and therefore it really didn’t draw me in. 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Review of Related Literature - 1454 Words

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE This investigatory project aims to make use of rambutan peeling extracts that is high in phenolic compounds such as tannin and saponin that exhibits antioxidant activity and antibacterial activity against pathogenic bacteria. Although the seeds contain such compounds the peeling exhibit greater amount of the said compounds. Rambutan is a very popular fruit cultivated in the Philippines and it is eaten in large amounts. The rambutans rind is quickly discarded and thrown out after it is cut open and peeled off. The researchers will be maximizing the use of rambutan peelings through this project before they are disposed of. Not only will the researchers maximize the use of the peelings, they would be finding†¦show more content†¦It is the most common bacteria that causes staph infections such as pimples, boils, impetigo, cellulitis folliculitis, carbuncles, scalded skin syndrome and abscesses. Examples of the more serious sicknesses are pneumonia,me ningitis, osteomyelitis, endocarditis, toxic shock syndrome (TSS), bacteremia and septicemia. Like the other listed pathogenic bacteria, Staphylococcus epidermidis is also nosocomial and facultatively anaerobic. It affects the skin and is non hemolytic, hemolytic meaning relating to the rupture or destruction of red blood cells. It infects on people with weak immune systems. The infections often start out as skin wounds caused by flexible tubes called catheters. According to Bukhari, â€Å"Catheter infections along with catheter-induced UTIs lead to serious inflammation and pus secretion. In these instances, urination is extremely painful.† Other diseases of Staphylococcus epidermidis are septicaemia and endocarditis. The study of Qarah, Cunha and Dua in 2009 stated that pseudomonal pathogens evidently inhabit nature like soil, water and surfaces of plants and animals, including us humans. 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Military Pension Reform Military Reform - 1583 Words

Military Pension Reform Military pension reform is a subject that strikes fear in the hearts of many of those serving in the United States military and something which would make me cringe when I heard rumors of it. The current military pension system gives those service members retiring with at least 20 years of service, a monthly entitlement of 50% of their base pay for the rest of their lives. This means that someone who enlists in the military at 18 years of age can begin collecting their retirement at age 38. This percentage can also go up if the member gains enough rank to stay in the military past the 20 year mark. This is an incredible benefit, considering the full social security retirement age is now 65, and soon rising to 67. Reservists collect their retirement at age 60. For the Active Duty member, this equates to 27 years of additional income for the military retiree. 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The Secret of Ella and Micha Chapter 4 Free Essays

Micha â€Å"She’s already got you all hot and bothered.† Ethan sips on his soda. â€Å"Look at you. We will write a custom essay sample on The Secret of Ella and Micha Chapter 4 or any similar topic only for you Order Now Drunk after eight months of sobriety and I don’t believe it’s a coincidence it happened on the same night she showed up.† I slam another shot back and wipe my lips with the back of my hand. â€Å"I’m fine man. And I can’t blame what I do on anyone else but myself. This isn’t Ella’s fault. â€Å" Ethan laughs, tipping his head back, bumping it on the edge of the cupboard. â€Å"Who the hell are you trying to convince? You know just as well as every single person in the room knows that you two are each other’s problem and it’s never going to be fixed until you fuck and get it over with.† I punch him in the arm, harder than I planned. â€Å"Watch it. You’re walking on thin ice tonight.† He holds up his hands, surrendering. â€Å"Sorry, I forgot how you get when you’re like this.† I grab a fist full of his shirt and jerk him toward me. â€Å"Like what?† Again, he forfeits up his hands. â€Å"Micha man, calm down and go drink some coffee or something. You’re trashed out of your mind.† I release him and rake my fingers through my hair, frustrated with something I can’t grasp. â€Å"Coffee’s a myth†¦ And I need something else.† My eyes travel to the back door window, and suddenly I understand what I need. I pat Ethan’s shoulder. â€Å"Clear everyone out before my mom gets home, okay?† â€Å"Alright, man will do,† he replies confoundedly. â€Å"But where are you going?† â€Å"On a walk.† I knock people out of my way, and stumble out the back door. Regaining my balance, I trip across the grass and climb over the fence. Ella’s dad’s Firebird is parked in the driveway, so he must be home from the bar. Doesn’t matter, though. He won’t notice or care if I sneak in. I’ve been doing it since we were kids. Although, my intentions did get a bit dirtier the older we got. I stare up at her bedroom window until I reach the tree. After a drunken struggle, I make it to the top and I inch along the branch to the window. Cupping me hands around my eyes, I peek inside. The lights are off, but the glow of the moon lights a trail to her bed. She’s fast asleep. I inch open the window, slicing my finger on a rusty nail. â€Å"Mother†¦Ã¢â‚¬  I suck on my finger tip, the taste of blood and vodka bitter against my tongue as I head dive through the window and hit the floor with a soft thud. Her friend shoots upright from the bed on the floor, her eyes wide. â€Å"Oh my God.† I put my finger to my lips as I get to my feet. â€Å"Shh†¦Ã¢â‚¬  She still looks worried so I dazzle her with my most charming smile. That seems to win her over and she settles back in her bed. As carefully as I can, I step over her bed and crawl in with Ella. She’s always been a heavy sleeper and doesn’t stir. I press my chest against her back, drape my arm over her waist, and feel the rhythm of her breathing. God, I’ve missed this way too much. It’s not healthy. I burrow my face in her neck, smelling the scent of her hair, vanilla mixed with something that’s only her. I shut my eyes and for the first time in eight months, I fall into a peaceful sleep. Ella I sleep horribly for half the night, tossing and turning, like the princess sleeping on a pea. Only I am far from a princess and the pea is my guilty conscience. I don’t know why I feel guilty about blowing off Micha. I’ve done it breezily for the past eight months. Although, he wasn’t living right next door with his sad puppy dog eyes and charming sexiness. My sleep deprivation only got worse when my dad stumbled into the house in the middle of the night, bumping over cups and bottles, drunk off his ass. Later, I heard him crying in the bathroom my mom died in. It still hurts to hear because his tears are my fault. Once I fall asleep, I am out and it ends up being the best night’s rest I’ve had in ages. When I wake up in the late afternoon, I feel refreshed and calm. Until I realize why. Micha is in my bed and has me in his long, lean arms. His body is curved into mine, so every single part of him is touching me. I know it’s him by the smell of his cologne mixed with mint and something else that only belongs to Micha. I pretend to be asleep, engulfed in a wonderful dream, refusing to wake up until he leaves. â€Å"I know you’re awake,† he whispers in my ear. His voice is hoarse and his breath is stale with booze. â€Å"So open your eyes and quit avoiding me.† â€Å"You know it’s illegal to walk into someone’s house without permission,† I say with my eyes shut. â€Å"And sneaking into someone’s bed – that’s the move of a pervert.† â€Å"I didn’t walk in. I fell in,† he says, amused. I pinch his firm chest and he laughs. â€Å"Now there’s my feisty girl.† He brushes his soft lips across my forehead. â€Å"I’ve missed you, Ella May.† Opening my eyes, I wiggle in his arms. â€Å"Please don’t start. It’s too early.† His eyes are guarded and his hair is a mess. He chuckles lowly, a sound that ripples deep inside my core. â€Å"Pretend all you want, pretty girl. You and I know that deep down you’re secretly glad to be pressed up to my body.† He urges our chests together as he snakes his legs around mine. My eyelids flutter against his warmth. God, I’ve missed this so much. Way too much and so has my body, evidently. â€Å"So where did you go?† he asks, crushing my moment of bliss. â€Å"To school in Vegas? Because it kind of surprises me. You never really liked school.† My mind snaps back to reality. â€Å"I don’t want to get into this right now. I just want to have a relaxing summer and then I’m headed back to campus.† He blinks, his eyelashes fluttering against my forehead. The feel of him sends a warm tingle up my thighs and I seal my lips to keep from moaning. His eyebrows knit. â€Å"It’s like you’ve been kidnapped by a bunch of nuns or something.† â€Å"Maybe I was,† I say submissively. â€Å"It wouldn’t hurt anyone if I was.† He considers this and an artful smirk curves at his lip. â€Å"That’s not true. Nuns can’t have sex and I still haven’t fulfilled my lifelong dream of having sex with you.† I open my mouth, my tongue locked and loaded with an equally perverted comeback, but I bite down, remembering I’m not that kind of a girl anymore. â€Å"I need to wake Lila up. She’s got a long drive ahead of her.† With one swift roll, he has me pinned down beneath his body and my arms trapped above my head. His aqua eyes search mine and it’s like staring at the endless ocean. He sucks on his lip ring, lost in thought. â€Å"You’re going to tell me, pretty girl,† he asserts, tilting his head so his lips are next to my cheek. â€Å"You always tell me everything.† â€Å"Micha, please†¦.† I despise how breathless I sound. â€Å"You know why I left. You were there that night†¦ you saw me†¦ I can’t do it again.† Anxiety claws up my throat and my muscles tense beneath the weight of his body. â€Å"Please let me up. I can’t breathe.† He props up on his arms. â€Å"You could have talked to me, instead of running away. You know that.† I shake my head. â€Å"No, I couldn’t. Not that time. That time it was different. You were part of the reason I had to leave.† â€Å"Because you kissed me?† he asks, dipping his voice to a husky growl. â€Å"Or because I found you that way†¦ that night.† I swallow the giant lump in my throat. The kiss was part of it. It was an earthshattering kiss, one that stole breaths, stopped hearts, and scared the shit out of me because it surfaced feelings I’d never felt before, ones that rendered me helpless. â€Å"I don’t want to talk about it. Now get off of me.† I wiggle my arms between us and push on his chest. He sighs and rolls off me. â€Å"Fine, don’t talk about it, but it doesn’t mean you can run away from me again. I’ll chase you down this time,† he threatens with a wink as he climbs off the bed, and the chain hooked to his studded belt jingles. â€Å"Get dressed and meet me out in the driveway. You have to go visit Grady today.† â€Å"No, thanks,† I decline and tug the blanket over my head. â€Å"And I told you last night I have stuff to do today. Besides aren’t you hung over from last night? You were pretty wasted.† â€Å"Don’t do that,† he says, aggravated. â€Å"Don’t pretend like you have some deep insight into me anymore. You’ve been gone for eight months and a lot has changed.† I’m speechless. â€Å"Micha, I†¦ â€Å" â€Å"Come on, get out of bed. You’re going to see Grady, whether you like it or not.† He yanks the blanket off me and tosses it on the floor, so I’m lying there in my plaid shorts and skin-tight tank top with no bra on underneath. He gives me a prolonged once over, with a dark, lustful glint in his eyes and goosebumps sprout all over my skin. I cover myself with my arms. â€Å"I’m not going to Grady’s. I just got home and I have things to do.† â€Å"He’s got cancer, Ella.† He backs for the door, tucking his hands into the pockets of his faded jeans. â€Å"So get your bratty, split-personality ass out of bed and go see him before you can’t.† My arms fall to my sides as I sit up. â€Å"Why didn’t anyone tell me?† â€Å"If you would have told someone where you were, we would have,† he says. â€Å"Although, I’m pretty sure your father knew where you were, he just wouldn’t tell anyone.† I don’t deny it. â€Å"Besides, I told you in the voicemail I left yesterday,† he says, glancing at my phone on the desk. â€Å"But I’m guessing you haven’t listened to that?† I shake my head. â€Å"No, I was too surprised to see your number on the screen.† He bites on his lip ring, something he does when he’s nervous. â€Å"Yeah, you should probably just delete that. I don’t think you’re ready for it yet.† My gaze moves to my phone. What the hell is on it? I climb out of bed, arching my back and stretching like a cat. â€Å"How bad is Grady?† He swallows hard. â€Å"He’s dying, so you need to get dressed and let me take you to see him.† I begin to object, but rethink my initial stupidity. Grady is the one part of my past that I could never run from. At one point, he was like a father to Micha and me. I even called him from Vegas once, although I didn’t tell him where I was. I nod. â€Å"Let me get dressed and I’ll be out in a second.† â€Å"See you in a few.† He winks at me and vanishes into the hall, leaving the door wide open behind him. Lila quickly springs up from the trundle bed, clutching the sheet. â€Å"Oh. My. Hell. What was that about? I mean, he crawled in here through the window in the middle of the night, and just climbed into bed with you.† â€Å"That’s what he does.† I open the window letting in the gentle breeze. Loose pieces of my hair dance around the frame of my face. â€Å"Oh, no.† Lila stretches her arms above her head. â€Å"What’s wrong?† I reluctantly look at her. â€Å"I think someone might have confused your car for a canvas.† She jumps out of bed and elbows me out of the way to get a look at the damage done to her beautiful, nearly brand new Mercedes. â€Å"My poor baby!† I pull a skirt and a pink tank top out of my duffel bag. â€Å"Get dressed and we’ll go check out the damage.† She pouts, looking like she might cry. â€Å"I can’t drive it home like that. My parents will kill me.† â€Å"I know plenty of people who can fix it for you,† I say, opening the door. â€Å"Or I use to, but I’m sure it’s all the same.† She nods and I go to the downstairs bathroom to change, avoiding the upstairs one. I turn on the shower so the mirror will fog up and hide my reflection. I comb my hair until it flips up at the ends naturally. Then I apply a light shade of lip gloss and head out the door, but run into my dad on the stairway. â€Å"When did you get here?† His breath smells like gin and his eyes are red. His cheeks have sunken in over the last eight months and his skin is wrinkled like leather with sores. He’s in his late forties, but looks like he’s pushing sixty. â€Å"Last night,† I tell him, taking his arm and helping him up the stairs. â€Å"I was in bed before you got home.† He offers me a pat on the back. â€Å"Well, I’m glad to have you home.† â€Å"I’m glad to be home,† I lie with a smile as we reach the top of the stairs. He moves his arm away from my hand and rubs the back of his neck. â€Å"Do you need anything? Like help carrying in your boxes?† â€Å"I think I can handle it on my own, but thanks.† I decline, sticking my arm out as he teeters toward the stairs. He nods and his eyes drift to the bathroom down the hall. He’s probably thinking about how much I look like her. It hurts his eyes, at least that’s what he told me the night I went to the bridge. â€Å"I guess I’ll talk to you later then. Maybe we could go to dinner or something?† He doesn’t leave me time to answer as he zigzags down the hall to his room, slamming the door shut behind him. My dad started drinking when I was about six, a few months after my mom got diagnosed with a bipolar disorder. His drinking habit wasn’t that bad back then. He would spend a few nights at the bar and sometimes on the weekends, but after my mom died, beer and vodka took over both our lives. When I return to my room, Lila is dressed in a yellow sundress, with her blonde hair curled up and there is a pair of overly large sunglasses concealing her eyes. â€Å"I feel like crap,† she declares, putting her hands on her hips. â€Å"This place has that effect on most people.† I grab my phone, noting the flashing voicemail as I slip on my flip flops. We go outside, leaving the smoky air behind and step into the bright sunlight, surrounded by the scenery of rundown homes and apartments. The neighborhood is filled with motorcycle engines revving and far in the distance are the sounds of a lovers’ quarrel and Micha is nowhere to be seen. A long time ago, it felt like home, back when street racing and running wild felt natural, but now I just feel lost. Lila starts biting at her fingernails as she gapes confoundedly at her car. â€Å"It looks worse up close.† I circle her car with my arms folded, assessing the damage. It looks like a fruit basket, only instead of being filled with fruit it’s crammed with innuendos and colorful words. I’m on the verge of laughing for some reason. â€Å"They got you good.† She shakes her head. â€Å"This isn’t funny. Do you know how much it’s going to cost to fix this?† Lila’s dad is a big shot lawyer over in California. Her parents are always sending her things like clothes, money, cars. She has never worked a day in her life and gave me a hard time for my waitressing job at Applebee’s, begging me to take time off to go to parties. â€Å"So what do we do?† She chips at some green paint on the headlight with her fingernail. I point up the street. â€Å"There’s an auto body shop not too far from here.† She glances down the road, which is covered in potholes and lined with filthy gutters. â€Å"But this is a Mercedes.† â€Å"I’m sure painting a car, no matter who the maker is, is all the same.† â€Å"But what if they do something to it?† â€Å"Like spray paint it again after they paint it?† I say sarcastically and she scowls. â€Å"Sorry. We’ll find someone, okay? We can take it to someplace in Alpine. It’s a little nicer over there.† â€Å"I can’t drive it when it looks like this,† she complains, motioning at the car. â€Å"It’s hideous.† â€Å"I’ll drive it, then,† I offer my hand out for her to give me the keys. â€Å"Are you joking?† She pats the hood of her car. â€Å"This is my baby. No one drives it but me. You know that.† â€Å"I think your baby is in serious need of some plastic surgery.† Micha strides off the porch of his house and onto the driveway. He’s changed into black jeans, a fitted grey t-shirt, and his blonde hair hangs in his eyes. Using his long legs, he jumps over the chain-linked fence between our yards. â€Å"I know the perfect place to get it fixed and it’s here in town, so you won’t have to drive it so far.† He gives Lila a wink. â€Å"I’m Micha, by the way.† â€Å"Hi, I’m Ella’s roommate or old roommate anyway,† she says with a warm smile and slides her sunglasses down the brim of her nose. â€Å"We’re not sure if we’re sharing a dorm room next semester.† He presents her with his player grin. â€Å"Sharing a room with Ella? That had to be tough.† He shoots me a mischievous look, trying to get a rise out of me. She laughs and returns her glasses over her eyes. â€Å"No, she’s a pretty great roommate, actually. She cleans and cooks and everything. It’s like having my own house maid.† â€Å"Ella was always good at that stuff,† he agrees, knowing the real reason why. Even before my mom died, she was never good at taking care of the house. I had to learn how to take care of myself at a very young age, otherwise I’d have starved and rotted away in a rat-infested house. â€Å"So do you want me to take your car to that shop I was talking about? Like I said, it’s really close.† â€Å"Yeah, that sounds great.† She shuffles her sandals against the concrete. â€Å"I’d rather go someplace close.† I mentally roll my eyes. Leave it to Micha. He can get any woman to contradict herself if he wants to. He swings his arm around my shoulder and kisses me on the forehead. â€Å"But I have to take pretty girl over here to see an old friend first.† â€Å"Please stop calling me that,† I beg. â€Å"I’ve never liked the nickname and you know that. I never even got why you called me it.† â€Å"And that’s the appeal of it, pretty girl.† He tempts me closer to him and caresses my cheek with his lips, giving me a kiss that brings warmth to my skin. â€Å"Now are you ready to go see Grady? You can come, too, if you want†¦ is it Lila?† â€Å"Yeah, it’s Lila. Lila Summers.† She offers her hand and Micha shakes it. â€Å"And sure I’ll go. This place makes me a little nervous.† â€Å"Isn’t your family expecting you to be home tonight?† I escape from underneath Micha’s arm. â€Å"I’ll text them and tell them I’m not leaving until tomorrow.† She retrieves her cell phone and scrolls through her contacts. â€Å"The car will be done by tomorrow, right?† â€Å"It’s hard to say,† Micha says. â€Å"Ethan is the best, but a little slow.† Her head snaps up and there’s delight in her eyes. â€Å"Ethan as in Ethan from the party last night? The one with the sexy hair and the really big hands?† Micha bites down on his lip, stifling a laugh, and flicks me a sideways glance. I can’t help but smile. â€Å"Yep, that’s the one,† he says. â€Å"Do you feel better about taking your car to him now?† â€Å"Well, yeah, if you think it’s okay?† she checks. â€Å"I’m very picky about who works on my car or at least my dad is very picky about who works on it.† â€Å"It’ll be fine,† he assures her with a wink. â€Å"I’ve never disappointed a girl yet.† â€Å"Oh yeah?† Lila laughs, glancing at me uneasily, like she’s worried she’s stepping on my territory. â€Å"So are we going to go or what?† A ping of jealousy pinches inside my chest. â€Å"Yep, let’s go, beautiful.† Micha leads the way around the fence and up his driveway to the garage. When I step inside, my mouth falls open. Parked in the middle, between the walls lined with shelves and tools, is a shiny 1969 Chevy Chevelle SS. It’s painted in a smoky black with a cherry red racing stripe down the center. â€Å"You finally fixed it up?† He pats the shiny flawless hood, his eyes sparkling with excitement. â€Å"I finally got around to it, after talking about it for four years.† His eyes find mine, seeking my approval. â€Å"So what do you think?† â€Å"It’s kind of old.† Lila pulls a face at the car. â€Å"And really big.† â€Å"I thought you liked things big?† Micha teases. I punch him in the arm and he laughs. â€Å"Ow, I meant hands. Jeez get your mind out of the gutter.† I roll my eyes. â€Å"You did not, you pervert.† He shrugs, his eyes lustrous in the sunlight filtering through the gritty windows. â€Å"So what. It got you to lighten up, didn’t it?† â€Å"Are we driving it to Grady’s?† I opt for a neutral voice. He slips his keys out of his pocket and tosses them to me. â€Å"Yeah, go ahead. It’s all yours.† I swiftly shake my head and throw the keys back at him, like they’re scorching hot. â€Å"No thanks. I don’t want to.† He cocks an eyebrow, looking sexy. â€Å"What do you mean you don’t want to?† â€Å"I mean I don’t want to drive it.† It nearly kills me to say it. I walk around the front of the car, open the door, and gesture for Lila to get in. â€Å"But it has a blown 572 Big Block in it,† he says astounded with the keys hanging loosely from his fingers. â€Å"How can you not want to drive it?† My insides twitch to drive it, but I won’t buckle. â€Å"It’s fine, Micha. I’d rather be the passenger.† â€Å"What does that mean? A blown big block or whatever you said?† Lila wonders as she walks to the side of the car. â€Å"Wait, are you guys talking cars? El doesn’t like cars. In fact, she made us take the bus most of the time when we left campus.† â€Å"Oh really?† His tone implies otherwise. â€Å"That’s news to me.† â€Å"It’s a waste of gas,† I lie, attempting to mask the truth; that I miss it. The rush, the speed, the adrenaline high. Lila ducks inside the car and into the backseat. I climb into the passenger side and Micha opens the garage door. He revs up the engine, letting it rumble, teasing me, before backing down the driveway. â€Å"I’m starting to think that the Ella you knew isn’t the same one as I know.† Lila buckles her seatbelt up. He spins the tires down the road. â€Å"I think you might be on to something Lila, because the one I knew loved cars. In fact she used to hang out in the garage all day with the guys while the other girls played with their hair and makeup.† He flashes me a dangerous grin. â€Å"She used to get all excited when we’d go racing.† No matter how hard I try to hinder myself from getting energized, I can’t. Those hot summer nights, flying down the highway, neck and neck with another car, the rush soaring through my body. Micha trails his finger along my neck and rests it on my pulse. â€Å"You’re getting excited just thinking about it.† His touch spreads a longing through my body. I swat his hand away, cross my arms, and focus on the window, watching the neighborhood blur by as he cruises over the speed limit. Micha shifts the gears and the engine thunders louder, begging to burn rubber. â€Å"Is it legal to be driving this fast?† Lila asks nervously. We glance back at her and she grips the edge of the leather seat. â€Å"It just seems like we’re going really fast, especially in a neighborhood.† Micha holds my gaze resolutely as he downshifts and pumps up the rpms. â€Å"What do you think? Speed up? Or slow down?† I want to tell him to slow down, pull on my seatbelt, and look away, but a passion that was dead raves. He throttles the gas pedal, keeping his eyes on mine, venturing me to look away first. â€Å"Um†¦ I don’t think this is a good idea.† Lila’s voice is far away. The car surges faster down the narrow road and his eyes dare me to tell him to slow down and part of me wants to. Desperately. But as he shoves the shifter into the next gear, going faster and faster, my body pleads to let go. Suddenly, Lila screams, â€Å"Stop sign!† Micha’s eyes sparkle like sunlight reflecting into the ocean. He slams on the brakes, squealing the car to a halt, and throwing us all forward. My hand shoots out and I brace myself from hitting the dashboard. â€Å"Are you crazy?† Lila’s voice cracks as she situates back into the seat and realigns her dress over her legs. â€Å"What is wrong with you two?† Micha and I look at each other and my body is burning with a hidden desire that I won’t admit exists. My heart beats in my chest, rock steady and alive again. For a second, I’m back in the place I lost. Then Micha ruins it. â€Å"See, the same old Ella still lives.† He grins arrogantly as he drives through the intersection. â€Å"She just needed a little push out.† I click the seatbelt locked, proving a point. â€Å"No, she doesn’t. She’s gone forever.† â€Å"Try all you want, but I’m bringing her back.† He bites his lip, refocusing on the street as he mutters, â€Å"I won’t let that night ruin you forever.† But it did. It broke me into a million pieces and blew them away in the wind, like crumbled leaves. That night was one of the most incredible nights I’ve ever had. Then I quickly plummeted toward rock bottom. How to cite The Secret of Ella and Micha Chapter 4, Essay examples