Just picked this up from Brent’s blog. Niel Robertson has a very humorous take on Oracle’s previous update regarding Fusion: I Pity The Fool.

… strangely enough, every single timeframe slide that the Oracle team put up that night, still has 2008 as the delivery date. I’m guessing they are still working out the kinks in Fusion’s calendaring application.

The article is lengthy yet definitely worth a read. From a technical perspective, this article has articulated very well the challenges faced by the ambitious goal and what makes it highly improbable. Oracle’s push on discouraging customizations is a major area that is sadly misguided:

John Wookey: “We recommend you retire customizations.”

This is sort of like saying “We recommend you get rid of all fonts, bullet points, and coloring in every Word, Excel and PPT document you own. Just use our standard templates for everything”. I could expand on this topic for a long time but the net-net is that this is an unrealistic strategy. There is a reason why customers customize – it’s because everyone’s business is a little bit different. Oracle, it’s the whole reason they bought your software in the first place. Unless everyone gets together and agrees on how to run their businesses similarly, this will never, ever happen.