Why I was wrong about Oracle and mobile #oow

I love to look at predictions that turn out to be incorrect. Not because I want to laugh at the person who made the incorrect prediction, but because I want to examine the reasons why the person made the incorrect prediction.

So that's what I will do today. And the person who made the bad prediction was - me.

Back in November 2007, when I was attending that year's Oracle OpenWorld, I wrote a post that began as follows:

This really isn't an Oracle OpenWorld 2007 post, so I won't label it as such.

Well, perhaps it's an Oracle OpenWorld 2010 post. (Might as well get started early.)

The NEXT generation of the Oracle Database product will probably be called Oracle Database 12m, where the "m" stands for "mobile."

Mobile is/will be that big. It's already big in my vertical market, it's obviously big in all this Tweeter/Flickr/etc. stuff I talked about earlier, so I suspect it may eventually affect the plumbing.

In this case, I'm not talking about my prediction that the 12th version of the Oracle Database product would have come out two years ago. Instead, I'm talking about what the version would be called.

During my time attending Oracle OpenWorld, the letters "i" (for Internet) and "g" (for grid) were appended to the Oracle releases. I figured that as people accessed the data from everywhere, the mobile element would become more and more important to Oracle's marketing.

As you will see below, I can claim that I was half right.

Before Oracle OpenWorld begins, Oracle provides a special briefing to its Oracle ACE Directors. These are people who are not employed by Oracle, but who have made significant contributions to the Oracle community. Eddie Awad is an Oracle ACE Director, and was in attendance at these meetings. Although the attendees are under non-disclosure, they do end up sharing certain obvious information publicly. Awad collected these public statements from the ACE Directors and shared them in two posts, including this one.

If you look at this collection, you will see a tweet from Dimitri Gielis that read as follows:

some nice features in Oracle DB 12c that will speed up development #orclapex

When I saw that tweet, I said to myself, "Of course!" After all of the talk that Larry has talked over the last few years, the use of the "c" designation makes sense. I claim that I am half correct because the "c" designation implies access from everywhere, including mobile devices. Of course, this designation concentrates on how the data itself is managed - and from a database perspective, that's what you really care about.

In case you don't know what "c" stands for, Computerworld UK spelled it out several months ago, when Ellison stated that version 12 was coming soon.

The next edition may be called 12c, with the c referring to "cloud." Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c, which was released in October, used that naming convention.

Oracle has placed a strong emphasis on its cloud computing strategy of late.

More official news about the new Oracle Database release may be shared at Oracle OpenWorld - perhaps tomorrow (Sunday) evening.