Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the jury this afternoon after a unanimous decision that ruled in favor of Google’s mobile OS — declaring that Android did not in fact infringe on the Oracle patents in question.

The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle’s Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.)

The jury’s decision was obviously a laborious one, following two years of a legal back-and-forth between the two tech giants. Oracle had initially filed the lawsuit back in August 2010, in which the company asserted that Android infringed on Java patents that Oracle acquired as a result of its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Google responded by saying that, at the time of development, it was not aware of Sun’s patents and that Android was in fact free to use.

Of course, that decision was only the first act in the three-part deliberations, in which the copyright infringement issues were to be followed by consideration of Oracle’s patent infringement claims (the focus of today’s hearing) and, finally, the damages Google might be liable for were it found found to infringe.

However, much of that speculation was rendered moot today, as a week of deliberation came to a close today at the U.S. District Court of Northern California, with the jury unanimously declaring that Google did not in fact infringe on the six claims set forth by Oracle in regard to U.S. Patent RE 38,104 as well as the two claims regarding U.S. Patent 6,061,520.

Of course, this does not mean that the whole case has been decided; instead, the decision marks the end of the trial’s second phase, which, again, focused solely on Oracle’s claims of patent infringement.

While the jury had previously found that Google was in violation of Oracle’s copyrights, as stated above, it could not come to a unanimous decision on the issue of fair use. Meaning that, although Oracle ostensibly “won” its copyright case, it effectively has a hold on its ability to collect on any of the $1 billion in copyright damages it is seeking from Google — a conclusion that was supported by the tweets of legal reporter Ginny LaRoe, who attended today’s hearing.

And #Googacle The Trial is over. Judge Alsup dismissing jury. Since Oracle won virtually nothing, no damages phase at this point.

— Ginny LaRoe (@GinnyLaRoe) May 23, 2012

On top of that, there are a number of other legal questions surrounding the copyright case on which Judge Aslup has yet to issue a final ruling, although he is expected to come to a decision next week.

Updating

TechCrunch has discovered and confirmed that software giant Oracle has bought social marketing platform Vitrue for $300 million. [Update: A press release has confirmed the buy at an undisclosed price, though we know it to be $300 million.] As if Oracle didn’t offer enough products and services already, the acquisition will give it a strong Facebook marketing platform to offer its enterprise clients.

Vitrue had taken $33 million in funding over the years and grown to become one of the most popular solutions for big companies trying to win Facebook fans and push out marketing messages to the news feed. Vitrue, according to a source, was on course for revenues of just under $100 million this year, although we have other sources disputing it may have been that high. TC understands there were a lot of potential acquirers interested. Several bidders approached the company but Oracle was the most aggressive.

Oracle is no stranger to massive acquisitions. It bought talent management solution Taleo in February for $1.9 billion.

Beyond Facebook, Vitrue helps marketers manage their presences on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and other platforms. One of the hallmarks of Vitrue has been it’s ability to rapidly integrate with new partners like Klout to give it talking points for dissuading clients from going to competitors.  Vitrue is “nearly profitable” and was projected to reach profitability in this fiscal year, said our source. TechCrunch understands that Reggie Bradford, the CEO, will “very much remain part of the equation” when Vitrue becomes part of Oracle. His exact title is to come.

The purchase continues the trend of large, old-world Internet marketing companies buying their way into social after being slow to adopt. Adobe bought social advertising provider Efficient Frontier for $400 million in November 2011, just a few months after Efficient Frontier had bought Facebook marketer and application developer Context Optional for a reported $50 million.

With time, social has proven too important to ignore. Rather than scrambling to build something and trying to pull brands away from established social marketers, Oracle will instantly gain a massive list of notable clients along with Vitrue. Oracle will also inherit Vitrue’s ongoing battle with competitors like Buddy Media, Wildfire, Involver, ThisMoment, and more for social marketing supremacy.

Update 2: I talked with Abhay Parasnis, Oracle’s SVP of Cloud Development, and Reggie Bradford, the CEO of Vitrue, to get the low-down on the deal in their own words. Parasnis said that it helps Oracle fulfil its “broad vision” in end-to-end cloud services, which includes not only marketing, but CRM and commerce services.

And although Vitrue is bringing in a respectable amount of social media enterprise business to Oracle that Oracle can upsell to other products (like CRM and social commerce) Bradford points out how it will potentially give Vitrue access to a much bigger customer base, since Oracle has 400,000 businesses already using its products.

Google has always been pretty cagey about the financials behind its Android mobile OS — and data that has emerged over the last week could give us an indication why: it’s been losing money from Day One.

In the lawsuit between Oracle and Google — in which Oracle claims Google, in its Android platform, infringes on copyrights and patents related to Java — a judge and jury are trying to work out what kind of damages might be awarded to Oracle. That case took a turn for the specific yesterday, when Judge William Alsup (as reported by Reuters) read out excerpts of Google documents that determined that the platform produced a net loss for every quarter of 2010 — and “a big loss for the whole year”.

He also noted that Android generated around $97.7 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2010.

The jury began their deliberations on Monday, and if they cannot come to a unanimous decision, then the trial will proceed to its second phase, concerning patents, with the first phase on copyright subsequently facing a retrial.

How much money Google has or hasn’t made is an important part of the case because it can be used to decide how much Oracle can potentially receive in damages if it wins the case — although Oracle contends that even if Android is making a loss, this should not have any bearing on the case.

Ironically, if Google can show it’s not making much money out of Android, then that may mean it has less liability. On the other hand, that difficult performance might also become a lever by which critics might begin to ask why Google is pursuing a business that is going nowhere financially.

Figures from Google documents from 2010 revealed earlier in the trial showed that Google expected a loss of $113 million in 2010 from Android and that it expected to have profits of $64 million in 2011; $248 million in 2012; and $548 in 2013. The vast majority of that revenue will be coming from advertising, with small but growing percentages also coming from app sales.

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

A group of women is re-entering the workforce today and reshaping how products are made across key tech sectors like health & wellness, commerce and social products. Not only do they have the experience of raising families, but they’ve been business and technology leaders earlier in life. They’re becoming founders and leaders at startups and in the very companies they’ve been buying products and services from.

Not only do women make most of a family’s health decisions but 48% of graduating physicians are women and women compose 73% of medical and health services managers. As a healthtech startup, we think heavily about the importance of what I call the Family Chief Health & Wellness Officer (aka “Mom”). Avado is not unlike many startups in that we have two male co-founders.  We’d be fools to not figure out ways to bring the female perspective into our business.

A bootstrapped startup such as Avado has many challenges, but it also possesses some key advantages. I want to share one key advantage related to this topic. I think it may be one of the biggest untapped reservoirs of talent. The beauty of startups is results matter much more than rigid hiring practices. Big, dumb companies often have rules that preclude a huge category of the potential workforce from being tapped. It’s a category that I’m familiar with as my wife was previously a marketer at Apple and Microsoft, yet it’s likely neither would hire her right now as her time commitment with our kids during the day doesn’t allow her to show up during a normal work hours. However, we get the benefit because she is able to help us with our marketing in the windows of time she has.

Another thing dumb employers do is look at gaps in “normal” employment as a big drawback. Let me give you an example of a new member of our team that we are absolutely thrilled to have on board. Julie Braman is our new Managing Director of Innovation for Pharmaceutics and Biotech. She and I worked together when I was running Microsoft’s health business and she was the founder of another industry business – pharmaceutics. Julie chose to stay at home while her kids were growing up. As I know with my wife, that hardly means one’s brain shuts down. Rather, it brings an entirely new perspective the business can benefit from. In fact, perhaps the most important trend in healthcare and the focus of the recently rolled out Stage 2 of Meaningful Use is “Patient Engagement.” As a member of the “sandwich generation,” many former professionals turned stay-at-home moms not only have had responsibility for their children but many are also increasingly responsible for their parents’ health. This gives them a particularly unique perspective. Since patient engagement is our central focus, the perspective of a boomer female head of household is invaluable.

Having Julie join the team is a real win-win. She is able to jump back into a very meaty job without skipping a beat. For Avado, it’s a no-brainer. Julie was one of the pioneers in bringing pharmacists into active engagement in primary care practices while she was a practicing pharmacist at Group Health — this is a rapidly growing trend with the shortage of primary care physicians. Julie was also in Sales with pharma giant, Eli Lilly, so she understands that perspective as well. As Life Sciences has proven to be fertile ground for Avado, I couldn’t think of a better fit and I couldn’t care less that she’s been “out of the workforce.”

Julie is far from unique. Brad Feld, Fred Wilson and others have written about the lack of women in tech yet there is a group of tech veterans re-entering the workforce that are an untapped reservoir. While many of my female colleagues continued working full-time, there are a boatload of them who either worked part time or were full-time Chief Health & Wellness Officers. Their kids have grown up and they are ready to fully re-engage with the workforce. They worked for the defining companies of the 90′s such as Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and others that were the Facebooks and Googles of their time. In other words, they were the cream of the crop then and they are the cream of the crop now. We feel lucky have them join our team and think other startups would be just as lucky if they learn how to engage this untapped reservoir of talent.

Related Articles:

What Pharma Can Learn From the Railroads and IBM

Aetna: The Company Scaring Its Competition And Delighting Startups

Healthcare Disruption: Pharma 3.0 Will Drive Shift from Life Science to HealthTech Investing (Part I of III)

Oracle this morning announced that it is acquiring cloud-based talent management solutions provider Taleo for $46 per share or roughly $1.9 billion, net of Taleo’s cash and debt. Taleo’s solutions basically help organizations attract, motivate and retain human capital, and will serve to boost Oracle’s Public Cloud offering.

The transaction is expected to close in the Summer of 2012. Here’s how Oracle pitches the buy:

Together, Oracle and Taleo expect to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their Human Resource operations and employee careers.

The combination is expected to empower employees and managers to effectively manage careers throughout their entire employment, enable organizations to retain talent and optimize costs, and improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media.

Until the deal closes, Oracle and Taleo will continue to operate independently. According to Taleo, more than 5,000 organizations use its solutions today.

Its stock price closed at just south of $39 yesterday.

Also see:

SAP Will Buy SuccessFactors For $3.4 Billion

Salesforce Buys Social Performance Platform Rypple; Will Launch ‘Human Capital Management’ Unit Successforce

Oracle has tapped Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Apache Hadoop based data management software and services, to provide an Apache Hadoop distribution and tools for Oracle’s newly announced Big Data Appliance.

Hadoop is a Java software framework born out of an open-source implementation of Google’s published computing infrastructure which is fostered within the Apache Software Foundation. Hadoop supports distributed applications running on large clusters of commodity computers processing enormous amounts of data. Cloudera helps distribute Hadoop, and provides practical services around the technology, similar to what Red Hat does for the Linux framework.

Oracle has integrated Cloudera’s distribution including Apache Hadoop and Cloudera Manager software into its Big Data Appliance, a just launched engineered system designed to provide high performance and scalable data processing environments for Big Data. The appliance aims to help companies acquire, organize and to analyze massive amounts of enterprise data.

The appliance is a mixture of both hardware and software that leveraging Apache Hadoop and includes Cloudera Manager, an open source distribution of R, Oracle NoSQL Database Community Edition, Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine and Oracle Linux running on Oracle Sun servers.

In 2010, Cloudera partnered with Quest Software to produce and distribute an Oracle connector for Hadoop. The partnership is interesting considering that some think that an Oracle acquisition of Cloudera makes sense for the enterprise giant.

RightNow Technologies this morning announced that, at its special stockholders meeting, nearly everyone voted in favor of the previously proposed merger with Oracle, who agreed to buy the cloud-based customer service company for $1.5 billion (or $43 per share) in cash at the end of October 2011.

From the press release announcing the overwhelming approval:

Approximately 99.8% of the shares voting at today’s Special Meeting of Stockholders voted in favor of the approval and adoption of the merger agreement, which represented approximately 87.0% percent of RightNow’s total outstanding shares of common stock as of the November 8, 2011 record date for the Special Meeting.

RightNow’s solutions help companies handle customer interactions across a multitude of channels, including call and contact centers, the Web and social networks.

Its products are used by nearly 2,000 organizations across the globe, the company says.

With the acquisition, which is still subject to regulatory approval, Oracle will thus be adding a robust cloud-based customer service offering to its own Public Cloud solution – more info on that here.

Oracle this morning announced that it has acquired RightNow – both companies are listed on NASDAQ – for $43 per share or roughly $1.5 billion net of RightNow’s cash and debt. With the acquisition, Oracle is adding a robust cloud-based customer service offering (see graph below) to its own Public Cloud solution – more info on that here. RightNow’s share price closed at $35.96 last week, so the deal represents a premium of roughly 20 percent on its closing price on Friday the 21st of October.

RightNow’s solutions help companies handle customer interactions across a multitude of channels, including call and contact centers, the Web and social networks.

Its products are used by nearly 2,000 organizations across the globe, the company says.

Founded in 1997, RightNow went public in 2004. The company boasted a market cap of $1.2 billion at market close last week.

The acquisition by Oracle is expected to close later this year or in early 2012. As usual, the transaction is subject to a number of things, including RightNow stockholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

Oracle has closed 6 acquisitions this year. While its takeovers of RightNow and Endeca are pending, the company has completed the purchases of Datanomic, FatWire, Inquira, select intellectual property assets of Ndevr, Ksplice and Pillar Data Systems in 2011 alone.

Oracle has acquired Endeca, a company that powers enterprise search for large companies. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Endeca has raised a total of $65 million from Bessemer, Venrock, Intel, SAP, Ampersand Capital Partners, DN Capital and Lehman Brothers.

Endeca’s core technology enables companies to correlate and analyze unstructured data and provides enterprise search for large companies including Borders, Boeing, the Census Bureau, the EPA, Ford, Hallmark, IBM, and Toshiba. The company specializes in guided search, and auto-categorizing results based on the keywords someone enters. Endeca charges from $100,000 to more than $10 million per installation.

Endeca’s InFront offering allows businesses with tools for advanced merchandising and content targeting for e-commerce. And Endeca Latitude enables businesses to rapidly develop analytic applications that draw information and data from unstructured and structured sources together.

Oracle says that the combination of Oracle and Endeca is expected to more advanced enterprise data management platform. Companies will be able to process, store, manage, search and analyze structured and unstructured information together. For example, Oracle says the combination of Oracle’s own commerce application, ATG Commerce and Endeca InFront is expected to enhance cross-channel commerce, merchandising, and online customer experiences. And Oracle’s Business Intelligence offering and Endeca Latitude will be combined as well to give businesses a more powerful analytics platform.

Endeca currently has over 600 customers.

Other recent Oracle acquisitions include Pillar Systems, and Fatwire Software.

When I first started using Linux, way back in the last century, one of the biggest challenges was the lack of a decent productivity suite of the sort to which every Windows user is accustomed. The only real option was StarOffice, which worked but was unbearably slow to load and cumbersome to use. Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision, the makers of StarOffice, in 1999 and released the source code to the suite in July 2000. Thus was OpenOffice.org born, with the intention of providing a viable open source alternative to Microsoft Office. Sun got bought by Oracle in 2010 and commercial development of OpenOffice.org was officially terminated shortly thereafter.

For a traditional closed source application, Oracle’s abandonment may well have been the end of the line. But OpenOffice.org had been released under the LGPL, the Lesser GNU Public License. This free software license specifically states:

You may modify your copy or copies of the Library or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Library, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

a) The modified work must itself be a software library.
b) You must cause the files modified to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.
c) You must cause the whole of the work to be licensed at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
d) …

So when Oracle called it quits, dedicated members of the OpenOffice.org community pooled their resources and set up The Document Foundation to provide structure and leadership to the continued development of the open source code used by OpenOffice.org.

The Document Foundation is an open independent self-governing meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite.

The new product was called LibreOffice. At the time, this was a simple, direct fork of the existing codebase. A simple find-and-replace would have been performed to substitute “LibreOffice” for all instances of “OpenOffice.org”.

The Document Foundation quickly set out to differentiate itself from the project governance that had gone before. You see, Sun Microsystems had long been requiring contributors to OpenOffice.org to assign the copyright of their contributions to Sun. In many ways, this makes sense and isn’t really a big deal: it allows a single entity to control and defend the copyright of the entire work. But in many ways, such copyright reassignment is anathema to open source collaboration. Moreover, as sole arbiter of the project’s life, Sun had the power to reject contributions for any reason. As such, The Document Foundation specifically rejected the need for copyright reassignment, opening the doors for all comers, and established a strict meritocratic model for evaluating contributions.

So it’s been a year since the formation of The Document Foundation. Development activity has been strong, with more than 300 developers committing more than 25,000 changes. Major commercial contributors include SuSE, Red Hat and Canonical. Hundreds of individuals developers have contributed, looking to improve a project they value.

The first stable release of LibreOffice was on January 25, 2011. Since then it has been downloaded more than six million times, with 90% of those downloads being used on Windows computers. LibreOffice is now the default productivity suite in most Linux distributions today. The Document Foundation estimates that it’s being used by about 25 million people across Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems.

In light of the exodus of developers from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice, Oracle has recently decided to donate the OpenOffice.org code to the Apache Software Foundation, so that the ASF can shepherd it as a true open source project. The old OpenOffice.org is now “Apache OpenOffice.org (incubating)“, and is a member of the Apache Incubator.

Except that Oracle didn’t really donate the code, at least not in the usual sense of that word; nor have they transferred any copyrights. According to Ross Gardler, Vice President of Community Development at The Apache Software Foundation, Oracle “have granted a sufficient license to allow Apache to move forward in a completely unencumbered
fashion. The terms of this license are described in our standard Software Grant Agreement at http://www.apache.org/licenses/software-grant.txt.”

The Incubator is an Apache program for ensuring that new projects develop the kind of community traction necessary to survive. According to the Incubator website, “[a]ll code donations from external organisations and existing external projects wishing to join Apache enter through the Incubator.” This is why the “(incubating)” suffix is tacked on to the already cumbersome “Apache OpenOffice.org” project name. The OpenOffice.org domain has also been donated to Apache, and will at some point move to Apache hardware. For now, it’s still residing on Oracle hardware.

One important thing to note about Apache projects is that they all use the Apache Software License. This is a permissive license that does not contain the “copyleft” provisions of the GNU licenses. This means that Apache OpenOffice.org is now licensed under the ASL, not the LGPL.

If Sun had not required copyright assignment, then the process of changing licenses would be a nightmare: every individual contributor would retain the copyright on their contributions and would need to give their assent to a license change. It’s almost guaranteed that there would be at least some resistance to a license change, which effectively means that no license change would occur.

The switch was easy to accomplish, though, specifically because Sun had previously required copyright assignment on all contributions: when Oracle bought Sun, they immediately gained complete and unfettered ownership of the copyright to all the code, and the copyright holder is permitted to re-license the work at any time.

Today the Apache OpenOffice.org project is alive and well, though they have not yet released anything. They’re still in the process of refining the build process, and building the requisite infrastructure within Apache. They’re also engaged in IP clearance: finding bits of third-party GPL-licensed code and libraries that may have been bundled with the old OpenOffice.org and replacing it with Apache licensed (or compatible) code and libraries. This is a surprisingly non-trivial task, given the size and complexity of the OOo codebase.

I asked Gardler whether Apache has any plans to try to reclaim the status of default productivity suite in major Linux distributions. He replied that there “is no desire to directly compete with LibreOffice or any other open source project. The Apache OpenOffice.org community are interested in creating the best permissively licensed suite of personal productivity tools we can.”

That clause “permissively licensed” is an important one in the discussion about LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org. LibreOffice still uses the LGPL, and while that license is more permissive than the normal GPL, it’s still less permissive than the Apache license. Gardler went on to clarify:

This means Apache licensed code can be reused in any downstream project. It is hoped that there will be opportunities for collaboration on core components that facilitate document exchange between OOo and all other projects seeking to work with ODF documents.

Like The Document Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation is a meritocratic organization, rewarding participants for the quality of their contributions.

Newcomers looking to get involved with Apache OpenOffice.org might want to look at the Help Wanted page on the wiki.

image Flickr‘d

Today, at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, an animated Larry Ellison took to the stage to unveil an assortment of cloud computing services, which will run the company’s long-time-in-coming (six years, in fact), Fusion Applications — most notably the “Oracle Public Cloud”.

And, not one to miss an opportunity, Ellison made sure to take quite a few public jabs at Salesforce — really intended for its CEO Marc Benioff — whose keynote earlier in the day was cancelled due to “overwhelming attendance”. Whatever that means. The cancellation created a hubbub and led to Benioff giving his own “off-campus” keynote at the St. Regis hotel across the street. (You can read our coverage of the Salesforce CEO’s talk here.)

As for the substance of Ellison’s keynote, the launch of Oracle’s Public Cloud is noteworthy in that it puts the company in competition with Amazon, Rackspace, and Salesforce, which are the clear leaders in the public cloud computing space. According to Ellison, Oracle’s new public cloud will be available for a monthly subscription and will include resource management and isolation, security, data exchange and integration, self-service sign up, elastic capacity on-demand, virus scanning, and more.

The Public Cloud will mix PaaS and SaaS capabilities, the CEO said, enabling customers to run Fusion apps, extensions, and custom-built apps all on the new cloud. Along with a database service and a Java service for developers, customers can take “standard Java and Oracle Database apps and deploy them on the Public cloud without rewriting them”.

The Oracle CEO touched multiple times on the fact that the Public Cloud will be based on industry standards, allowing the programs Oracle hosts on the cloud to be easily transferred to a business’ data centers or to other services, like Amazon’s cloud.

So customers can take any existing database and move it to Oracle’s Public Cloud: “Oh and by the way, you can move it back if you want to. You can move it to the Amazon cloud if you want”, Ellison said. “You can do development and test on our cloud and go into production in your data center … and nothing changes. Everything is portable. Your data is portable”. And thus, the Oracle Public Cloud’s value proposition: Its interoperability with other clouds. It plays nice.

Of course, Ellison also made sure to point out that its Public Cloud is not compatible with Salesforce’s cloud, which runs on custom languages like APEX and “proprietary” technologies that do not allow businesses to develop apps in a data center and move them to Force.com or other clouds.

And how about this for a shot at Salesforce? Ellison said that Salesforce’s approach constitutes the “ultimate vendor lock-in”, in which a customer can “check in, but can’t check out”, calling it “the roach motel of clouds”.

Ellison then lobbied against multi-tenancy, which allow customers to share a single app but it keeps their data separate — the very thing that Benioff had espoused earlier in the day. Instead, Ellison said that multitenancy was “was the state-of-the-art 15 years ago” and offers a piddling security model, whereas the modern cloud leverages virtualization for its security.

Under this model, customers “get a separate virtual machine, your data’s in a separate database because it’s virtualized”. Salesforce, on the other hand, “puts your data at risk by commingling it with others”, he said.

Ellison did not say when Oracle’s Public Cloud will be available, but with Fusion Apps having arrived, it can’t be far away. Of course, Fusion has been endlessly delayed, so nothing is certain.

Another notable announcement was the so-called “Oracle Social Network”, which, as you might guess, integrates social networking into Fusion Apps. In other words, it’s a secure collaboration tool that allows customers to find and collaborate with colleagues both in their enterprise and across enterprises, using similar functionality to Facebook (like information feeds) as well as document sharing within their HR system or their own private social network. And perhaps most importantly, Oracle’s new social network seems to be a direct competitor of Salesforce’s Chatter.

Over the last week, Oracle has made some significant announcements and demonstrations of new products and aspects of its cloud computing services, but these have all still managed to pale in comparison to the feud simmering between Ellison and Benioff over the future of the cloud. (More on Benioff’s side here.)

The fight is on. Get out your popcorn, and let the eye-rolling begin!

Image courtesy of The Frontline

The fun continued this morning at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco. Or, I should say, the fun continued at a restaurant across the street. Fine dining and location aside, for those unfamiliar, yesterday afternoon Oracle CEO Larry Ellison cancelled a keynote that was planned for this morning by none other than his former employee and frenemy: CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff.

As we reported yesterday, Benioff tweeted last night to his followers, “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!”

Though Oracle representatives were quick to say that the cancellation was simply a result of “overwhelming attendance”, and that Benioff was offered a keynote later in the week, it’s hard to say that this isn’t the result of something more than a full schedule. Puh-leeze. Then again, whether or not it betrays the simmering feud between Ellison and Benioff (and who has the keys to the “real” cloud), it was also just a genius promotional move by the Salesforce CEO. Let’s call a spade a spade.

In an address to reporters this morning at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco (ahem, not the Moscone Center, the scene of OpenWorld), the Salesforce CEO said that he had petitioned Oracle last night, specifically Judy Sim Oracle’s CMO, who Benioff says he’s known for years, hoping to win his spot back on stage. Sim was apparently not in favor, and as Benioff is scheduled to fly to Ohio on Thursday, Oracle was obviously unwilling to double back and offer Benioff the opportunity to give his keynote today.

In reference to the seemingly passive-aggressive move by Oracle, Benioff said, “normally, no one would have cared what I had to say today”, but because of the traction the cancellation was able to garner last night on blogs, Facebook, Twitter et al, many more people are paying attention to this than might have otherwise. And I daresay the Salesforce CEO was enjoying it.

Benioff said that Larry Ellison had once taught him to read and internalize “The Art Of War” by Sun Tzu, in which the high ranking Chinese military general and strategist advised readers to “ignore the anger” and use it for good. All Ellison had to do in response was say to his staff “let me know what he says, and thanks for bringing it to my attention”, he said. What’s more, according the Salesforce CEO, Oracle knew exactly what he planned to say in his keynote, as they gave Oracle the slides he would share during his keynote beforehand, which he said were very similar in nature to the talk he gave at Salesforce’s Dreamforce Conference back in August.

Not to mention, as the New York Times reported last night, a keynote speech at a top conference like OpenWorld can cost the speaker up to $1 million. According to Benioff, Oracle offered him his money back. So, clearly, they weren’t particularly eager to reverse their position.

Outside of their business strategies, the Salesforce and Oracle CEOs both are quick to acknowledge their mutual respect and admiration, but when it comes to the future of technology, the future of the cloud, and the different approaches that each company takes to their business strategy and revenue models, there’s little to no love lost.

Last year at the OpenWorld Conference, Benioff seized the opportunity to take a few digs at Oracle’s philosophy and its software, most notably calling Oracle’s Exadata system “the false cloud” that is far from aligned from what enterprise customers want and need in today’s cloud computing world. And, of course, Ellison was not one to retreat from the jab, using his keynote to express problems with, in particular, the security of Salesforce’s architecture, saying, “You’ve got many customers and their data just coexist in the same database, and since there’s no fault-isolation, a system failure brings down many customers”. Ellison then showed the audience a slide of Benioff’s most recent book “Behind The Cloud”, that had been altered to say, “Way Behind The Cloud”.

Oh snap! Some might say that this is just “all in good fun”, or pointless drama. But today shows that there is indeed a more-than-superficial divide between these two companies, and even though Microsoft and Oracle are the dominant players in the space, as Oracle, for one, has approximately $36 billion in revenue and a market cap of $144 billion (compared to Salesforce’s $2 billion in revenues and market capitalization of $16 billion), the hardware company is certainly all too aware of how quickly the eager young upstart is gaining.

And if Salesforce is gaining, might it have something to do with Benioff’s conception of the future of the cloud? In the past — and again today — Benioff has been outspoken in his belief that IT companies must become social enterprises — that the social revolution is very real and needs to be a significant part of the IT industry’s future.

Of course, Ellison is quick to point out that Salesforce isn’t a real cloud company, because it is applications-only, rather than apps backed by that all-important cloud infrastructure. And Oracle, Ellison believes, is more typical of a cloud computing company with its end-to-end stack is far from a partial cloud, nor does it lack the virtualization traditionally pictured when one thinks of the cloud — and something that he believes Salesforce does not offer to the same extent.

On the other side, Benioff said that his company’s strategic acquisitions of Heroku, the Ruby-based cloud app deployment and scaling platform, Radian6, and Jigsaw over the last 18 months, while expensive, were important moves forward in allowing the company to realize its social future. “We can’t believe everything ourselves”, he said. In particular, Benioff was so excited about the Heroku acquisition that he led it himself — largely because of the appeal of Heroku’s multi-language and multi-tenant platform, which is what enterprise cloud customers really want, the CEO said.

Because of Salesforce’s tight integration with Facebook, with the Heroku acquisition, Salesforce has allowed developers to go straight to Facebook to build applications right on the social network that automatically integrate social features and make the Salesforce experience more in tune with the current needs of businesses.

While showcasing Chatter (Salesforce’s Facebook for the corporate customer) today, Benioff admitted that his company’s adoption of non-proprietary software and social media is “contrarian”, and many in the industry (including Ellison) disagree with this direction. Yet, he is firmly of the belief that “social technology is shaking our industry at the core” — and don’t expect the company to be pivoting on its social mantra anytime soon.

“The message of this show is proprietary hardware and software are the future”, the Salesforce CEO said, “our message is beware of the false cloud. It is not efficient, it is not democratic, it is not open”. And who does Benioff see as the main proponent of the false cloud? Take a wild guess.

It has also become clear that Benioff’s tweets from last night irked Ellison — as well as others at Oracle, as MarketWatch reported that NetSuite Chief Executive Zach Nelson criticized Benioff’s words in an email saying, “Last time I looked, Salesforce.com is built on the Oracle database, so I think Marc slamming Oracle for not being a cloud provider is a bit bizarre”. Benioff responded by saying that Oracle’s technology is one part of Salesforce’s infrastructure that also relies on technologies like Dell to make Salesforce hum.

Concluding his question and answer session with reporters today, Benioff was of the view that, today, Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference has become a “bigger venue and a more exciting conference” as a whole. While Salesforce may not have proprietary mainframes, he said in a dig at Oracle, Dreamforce is now big enough that the company no longer needs Oracle’s conference to get their message out.

Thus, in reference to his company’s future (or at least his own future) at Oracle’s conference, he concluded: “This is probably our swan song”. And just like that, the standoff takes another step forward.

But wait, did Benioff just beat Ellison at his own game?

(More on the cancellation from last night here.)

Thanks to Reuters for the Excerpt image

Well, well, well. The Oracle OpenWorld Conference is in full swing, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers tomorrow (Wednesday). “Was” being the operative word here. Thanks to a recent update from Benioff’s Twitter account, it seems that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has cancelled Mr. Benioff’s keynote tomorrow.

Hmmm. Instead, Larry will be king of the stage, with a one hour and forty-five minute keynote, kicking off at 2:45 p.m. PST. No word as of yet on why Ellison cancelled the Salesforce CEO’s keynote. Not even Benioff was sure: “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!”

Sorry #oow11 I don't know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I'm disappointed too!—
Marc Benioff (@Benioff) October 05, 2011

As you might have garnered from his tweet, Benioff will likely instead be answering questions and interacting with the media at the Ame Restaurant in the St. Regis Hotel on Wednesday at 10:30 a.m PST. We’ll be there to cover, and will be sure to share any helpful words of advice Benioff has for the man who just gave him the early hook, as they say in showbiz.

Now, we’re not in the business of speculating here, but (at least according to Forbes) Benioff upstaged Ellison last year at OpenWorld, poking holes in Oracle’s strategy, in relation to cloud computing specifically, and so there’s very definitely the possibility that Ellison doesn’t want that kind of mockery on stage before he presents a potentially expansive talk on the state of the cloud. Then again, why invite the Salesforce CEO to the conference if you’re just going to un-invite him?

Especially considering that (as reported by the New York Times) a keynote speech at a top conference like OpenWorld can cost the speaker up to 1 million big ones. Earlier this week, Benioff published a series of blog posts deriding Ellison’s opening remarks at OpenWorld (and has, in the past, been incited by Ellison who posted slides of Benioff’s book “Behind The Cloud, altering it to “Way Behind The Cloud”), told the NYT that he got an email from Oracle this afternoon about the cancellation — and also offering Benioff his million dollars back. Wouldn’t be surprised if the email included “and don’t let the door hit you on the way out”.

The cloud, it seems, is setting the stage for a rumble — as there are clearly at least two prominent executives out there who can’t agree on its future, and who has the keys to that future. (Or who has the keys to the “false cloud”.)

Whether strategic gamesmanship, or a “just because I can” move from Ellison, or perhaps just a scheduling mixup (yea, right), we’ll be tuning in tomorrow to see what unfolds. It should be interesting.

We’ve reached out to Oracle for comment, and will update when we learn more.

Update: Oracle Senior Director of Communications Deborah Hellinger told me that the cancellation of Benioff’s keynote was “due to the overwhelming attendance at Oracle OpenWorld”, which led to Oracle making several session changes. According to the Communications Director, the “Salesforce.com Executive Solution Session” will now take place on Thursday at 8:00 a.m. Benioff apparently has a prior commitment, so will be holding the Q&A session on Wednesday morning instead.

Excerpt image retrieved from SearchCloudComputing

Oracle this morning announced that it has acquired GoAhead Software, which sells packaged service availability software to network equipment providers (NEPs) and other players in the commmunications industry. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

GoAhead, a privately-held company based in Bellevue, Washington, provides software that speeds the time to market of carrier-grade services that need to be always available at all times.

The company claims its software has seen over 100,000 deployments by NEPs to date.

Customers include Motorola, LG-Nortel, Alcatel and Oki.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close before the end of 2011. Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently.

“I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.”

I’m reminded of Daniel Plainview’s admission in There Will Be Blood when thinking about Google.

While the company is still largely beloved by the public, sentiment seems to have turned against them amongst their peers, and even amongst many of the startups around Silicon Valley. While these tensions have been building for months — and even years, in some cases — we’re seeing this on display more clearly than ever now thanks to the patent issue(s).

But why? Why is Google now a villain to many in the industry? I don’t believe it’s because they’re evil, I believe it simply relates to the Plainview quote. Increasingly, Google is trying to do everything. And they have the arrogance to think that they can. And it’s pissing people off.

“Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on,” Google Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, wrote this week when accusing those two companies of trying to destroy Android. And he’s right. After decade of being bitter rivals, Apple and Microsoft now seem to have aligned interests. But you don’t have to wonder what’s going on, it’s very apparent: they both hate Google.

The two recently teamed up to screw Google out of the Nortel patents, spending billions to make that happen. And before that, they attempted to do the same with the Novell patents (though the DoJ blunted some of that attack). Next up for the dynamic duo: the InterDigital patents. Apple is definitely exploring acquiring them, and don’t be surprised if Microsoft is right there to help once again, to ensure Google doesn’t get them.

All of this is even more interesting when you consider that it was once Apple and Google who were closely aligned. And it was a common vision that brought them together as well — appropriately, the end of the Microsoft-dominated computing world.

The two got so close, that Google then-CEO Eric Schmidt even joined Apple’s board of directors. And Google was instrumental in helping create some of the early applications for the iPhone (Maps, YouTube, etc). It seemed like the two would team up to take down the carriers next.

Then things got very complicated when it became clear that Android and the iPhone would soon become very direct competitors. The rest has been history.

But while Apple and Microsoft have been the two highest profile Google combatants in recent months, they’re far from the only ones.

At least just as big of a Google antagonist (and perhaps even more so) is Oracle. While the Apple and Microsoft lawsuits against Android threaten to disrupt the platform and/or make it more expensive, Oracle’s lawsuit threatens to destroy it. Oracle is suing Google over the unlicensed use of Java in Android — its core.

If one of two damning emails are allowed to be used as evidence, it sure looks like Google could be in some serious trouble. Those emails appear to extend the idea of Google’s arrogance. As Android chief Andy Rubin wrote in a 2005 email, “If Sun doesn’t want to work with us, we have two options: 1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language – or – 2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way.”

They obviously chose the latter. And while Sun is no more, Oracle now controls the rights to Java. A very big enemy has been made along the way.

The list continues from there.

Facebook and Google have long been at odds with one another. Now, with Google+ giving Google a significant presence in Facebook’s social game for the first time, tensions are higher than they’ve ever been. While the two sides have been fighting publicly, behind the scenes, it’s worse. This is true even though many of Facebook’s employees are former Google employees. Facebook’s alliances with Microsoft can’t help matters either.

For a long time, Yahoo was Google’s most direct rival. You might think that after Google quickly dominated them in search, there would be peace now. Nope. Yahoo also has no love for Google still to this day. When Microsoft was attempting to buy Yahoo a few years ago, Google was seen as one potential savior. And they almost were, until the DoJ began looking into a potential Yahoo/Google search partnership and Google had to back out. Instead, Yahoo was forced to tie up with Microsoft.

These days, you’ll hear Yahoos complain behind the scenes that Google often just takes ideas they implemented first but never caught on because Google is the dominant player in the space.

Amazon and Google are also increasingly at odds with one another. Amazon is about to enter the tablet space in a big way later this year — and they’ll be doing so with their own flavor of Android. They also have a competing Android app store. And while this may seem like Amazon entering Google’s space, remember that Google went after Amazon first. While Google hasn’t really be able to compete in the cloud storage and services businesses so far, it hasn’t been for a lack of trying.

Out of any of the larger entities in the space these days, is seems like Twitter and Google should have interests that align the most. Like Facebook, many of Twitter’s employees are ex-Google. And while a search deal a couple years ago seemed to pull the two close together, that deal has since expired, and there is no sign it’s going to ever be renewed.

Google has tried to buy Twitter a few times, and Twitter has backed away each time, most recently leaving billions on the table. And while both sides say fairly complimentary things about each other in public still, behind the scenes, again, it’s not good. Many Twitter employees flat out don’t trust Google. And Google+ has exacerbated that situation.

Speaking of failed Google acquisitions, after Google tried and failed to buy Yelp and Groupon, they moved forward on products that competed directly with them. In the process, Yelp has felt Google was actively screwing them in search results. Bad blood galore now.

On the smaller startup side of things, both Color and Path turned down massive acquisition offers from Google. Part of it was because the startups wanted to remain independent, but a large part was also that neither groups of employees wanted to work for Google. Naturally, Google has since been working on products that compete with both — not only Google+, but also mobile apps created through Google’s Slide division.

The list goes on and on. At this point, it would be easier to list tech companies that are completely friendly with Google — because there aren’t many. Again, most won’t speak out publicly about this — partially because Google is still one of the largest acquirers out there and not everyone is Twitter, Color, Path, Groupon, or Yelp, that will turn down hundreds of millions or billions — but if you talk to individuals that work at other companies, it becomes very clear very quickly that there is not a lot of love for Google out there anymore.

In my view, this stems from Google’s desire to do everything — which could threaten the company for other reasons. Once just a search company, they now actively compete with Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Yelp, Groupon, Color, Path — again, just to rattle off a few.

Obviously, it’s Google’s right to do what they think is best for the company. And certainly they have the money to take on all of these different projects. But the alienation of other companies — many of which were former allies — isn’t helping them. And if any of these Android lawsuits — bullshit or not — go through, or if they fail to eventually obtain the patents necessary to protect themselves, Google could find themselves in serious trouble. And if that happens, will anyone be around to lend them a hand?

At this point, I think there will be more companies waiting to kick them when they’re down.

Increasingly, this is the reality bubbling just under the surface: others in the space look at Google and see nothing worth liking. They see an enemy. As Plainview says to his own son at one point, “this makes you my… competitor.”

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talked patents and PR, Spotify, and everything except Google+ for the first time in weeks. It’s not that G+ has jumped the shark; in fact, it is the shark on which realtime video streaming will emerge when YouTube finally goes live. It’s a race with iCloud to get there, with AirPlay-enabled Spotify stoking the fire in the near term.

Social signals are gaining value as feature sets and hardware mature, as we harvest our laboriously-created investments in individual and virtual spheres of influence. For the Gang’s part, we’re going to begin broadcasting live from and to the iPad as events warrant it, starting with a trip to the heart of the emerging Social Enterprise at EvolutionCRM in New York next week.

@Mention Cloud: @stevegillmor @scobleizer @dannysullivan @kevinmarks @jtaschek @borthwick

In the past, I’ve been critical of Google for trying to dance around directly calling out their competitors who are actively attempting to screw them. Today, they’re no longer dancing.

In a post just put up on the main Google Blog, Google SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond takes shot after shot at Google’s competitors. By name, he calls out Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle. What’s this all about? What else? Patents.

“I have worked in the tech sector for over two decades. Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on,” is the way Drummond kicks off his post. He goes on to lay out what he believes is a “hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.”

He talks about not only the recent Nortel patent auction (which Google lost while a group of rivals including Apple and Microsoft won), but also the Novell patent sale (which was also bought by a group including Microsoft and Apple), Microsoft’s insistance that Android OEMs pay them a $15 licensing fee for each device, and the lawsuits against Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. “Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it,” Drummond writes.

While Drummond says that their rival’s “anti-competitive strategy” is driving up the price of patents on the market to insane levels, he believes the law will eventually prevail and “this patent bubble will pop”.

“In this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it,” he notes, going on to say that the Department of Justice is currently looking into if Apple and Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nortel patents was for anti-competitive means.

“We’re also looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio. Unless we act, consumers could face rising costs for Android devices — and fewer choices for their next phone,” is how the post ends.

Damn. Them’s fighting words.

More on this topic:

• How Apple Led The High-Stakes Patent Poker Win Against Google, Sealing Ballmer’s Promise
• Microsoft’s Android Plan: Evil Genius Or Just Evil?
• Google On The Nortel Loss, Patents As Government-Granted Monopolies, And Plates Of Spaghetti

Update: Google Threw A Punch, Microsoft Fires Back With A Missile

Update 2: Microsoft Responds To Google’s Response To Microsoft’s Response

Oracle this morning announced that it has agreed to buy Pillar Data Systems, a privately-held provider of SAN Block I/O storage systems based in San Jose, California, which is said to serve nearly 600 customers across 24 countries.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

An interesting purchase, particularly since Pillar Data Systems is majority-owned by Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison through his venture capital firm Tako Ventures. According to a 2005 CRN article, Ellison invested over $150 million in the business.

It’s worth nothing that Oracle claims the evaluation and negotiation of the transaction was led by an independent committee of Oracle’s board of directors.

Also, the transaction is structured as a 100 percent earn-out with no up-front payment.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in July 2011, exactly a decade after Pillar Data Systems was founded.

On a sidenote: kudos to Michael Romley, who predicted this transaction would (or should) occur back in September 2010.

Fatwire Software’s web content and experience management software powers web presence for organizations, allowing them to deliver relevant customer content, build community engagement and drive site stickiness and loyalty. FatWire currently serves more than 500 customers in industries, including financial services, media, technology, manufacturing, public sector, retail, healthcare and more.

The acquisition will be used to offer Oracle clients improve online engagement across web, mobile and social channels, through website optimizations.

Oracle’s recent acquisitions include ATG for $1 billion.

If you are reading TechCrunch you probably already realize this fact: Flavor-of-the-month consumer Internet companies have a way of hogging the spotlight. If you didn’t, we conveniently published some evidence of it yesterday.

But that reality predates us by at least a decade. In 1999 when the world talked about Silicon Valley, they usually meant sexy dot coms. The fascinating new reality of being able to do anything from buying groceries to downloading music instantly online was phenomenal (if ephemeral), and everyday consumers tended to miss the far larger, equally disruptive and frequently more sustainable businesses being built in enterprise software and telecom.

But Wall Street didn’t: Larry Ellison of Oracle eclipsed Bill Gates for a short time as the richest man in the world, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems were two of techs biggest out-performers of the era and the billions invested in telecommunications made the dot com cash look like chump change. Venture capitalists didn’t miss it either: Substantially more money was put into telecom companies in the run up to the dot com bust, lulled by a sense of false assurance that at least these overvalued companies had “real assets” that could be liquidated if need be.

In 2005 when people were writing headlines about “the return of Silicon Valley,” a lot of people working in technology were justifiably irritated. After all, tech behemoths like eBay, Yahoo, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard never exactly left. Silicon Valley and the tech industry in aggregate was several orders of magnitude bigger than it was pre-Internet bust, even with all the lost jobs and delisted companies. Veterans griped about sites like TechCrunch and ValleyWag making sweeping statements about the Valley, but really only reporting on a comparatively small-money resurgence in the then tiny consumer Internet space.

That focus on the sexy, social, consumer Web over everything else has only gotten more pronounced as those many of those one-time flavors of the month like Facebook, Zynga, Twitter and Groupon have become bonafide giants. The difference is that now the divergence in attention actually makes sense.

But it’s not necessarily between consumer and enterprise; it’s between old and new tech. It just looks like it’s all about consumer, because we just haven’t seen that many big new enterprise companies yet. (Plenty are building steam, and just keeping it quiet. Others just take time to get traction because traction is represented by paying customers, not just eyeballs.)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot the last few months. Once was during a conversation with Jon Swartz, the veteran tech reporter at USA Today. We were swapping war stories about having to report on big personalities like Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison and Tom Siebel back in the day. And he asked, “What ever happened to those huge personalities?”

Sure Ellison is still around, but he rarely does press and, sadly, his antics are even rarer. And the prickly-but-genius Steve Jobs has morphed into a comparatively boring do-no-wrong deity in popular Valley consciousness. There are few others left to even inspire. The biggest tech companies in the world used to be lead by outrageous visionaries. Now they’re mostly lead by boring businessmen so media trained they couldn’t say anything interesting if their life (or stock prices) depended on it.

It hit me again a few months later when I was talking to Peter Thiel about the state of publicly traded tech companies. We talked about embattled companies like Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Yahoo and Cisco that can’t seem to do anything right except hang onto core cash cow businesses. These companies have all either had recent CEO changes or investors are calling for them. In the case of Yahoo, both are happening.

I asked Thiel if anyone could really change these companies’ fortunes or if they were just destined to be value stocks, their best days behind them. He said, “The problem is these big tech companies are just like banks now; all they do is print money. And that’s boring. What would you do as CEO? You could just massively fire people who pretend to be innovating and maximize that cash. Think about it– 90% of Google’s projects don’t make any sense. But [these companies] have [all] identified themselves as technology companies. It’s a big part of their self image.” He continued, “(Running these companies) is just not fun. People are too unfair on Carol Bartz. Yahoo is arguably in a tougher position than old media”

And it hit home again a few weeks ago during the All Things D conference during Marc Andreessen’s talk where he outlined many reasons why there isn’t a bubble in tech. More substantial than his rationale of the fact that everyone is freaking out about a bubble means we’re not en masse buying into one was his point about price-to-earnings ratios of the large tech companies. At the time, he noted that Google’s was 13.7, Apple’s was 12, Microsoft’s was 7 and Cisco’s was 7. Some of those are up since his talk, but they still hover between 9 and 15. “That’s what steel mills trade at when they are going out of business,” he said. “Essentially Android is being valued at zero. The public market hates tech.”

I agree that the P/Es of Apple and Google are somewhat puzzling. Let’s set them aside. For the rest of big tech, the market reaction isn’t necessarily without reason. Big tech–the publicly-traded companies that still control so much of our digital lives and the returns of venture capitalists via endless acquisitions–haven’t been giving the markets much to get excited about for years and it’s getting worse, not better. Worse: They’re not giving employees and customers anything to get excited about either.

This was also pronounced during the entire All Things D conference. I don’t in any way mean what I’m about to say as a knock on a competitor. All Things D is a phenomenal event and the only conference I cover these days other than our own. And while I think no one beats TechCrunch at giving startups a place to debut and assembling the biggest names in the venture-backed ecosystem, All Things D’s annual event rules when it comes to bringing together the big names in big tech. This is a conference, after all, that gets Jobs to appear on stage with Bill Gates. And, yet, most of the big tech names trotted out this year — while worthy of the slot by resume– were just utterly boring to listen to.

Nearly everyone I talked to in the hallways remarked on the vast difference in energy and content between the new guys on stage represented by Twitter’s Dick Costolo, Groupon’s Andrew Mason, Square’s Jack Dorsey and Andreessen and, well, nearly everyone else who spoke. Each of the old-tech guard sat on stage, made semi-amusing jokes, and justifications for why they are still relevant and why they’ll get better.

Eric Schmidt’s dour opening keynote that explored all the areas the still comparatively mighty Google has stumbled turned out to be the perfect table setter. Few of the others were as candid, but the same sorry-we-sucked-for-a-while-but-we-swear-we’re-getting-better justifications were there.  Steven Sinofsky of Microsoft talked about how the new version of Office is more Apple-y…if only all the silos in the company can agree to get behind it. Leo Apotheker of HP explained why HP would still win in tablets and why consumerization of the enterprise would benefit HP, not say, a company great at building consumer experiences. Shantanu Nayaren of Adobe said the whole war over Flash with Apple was overstated, but fortunately other vendors would eventually beat Apple anyway so it didn’t matter. Stephen Elop of Nokia talked about how Microsoft’s operating system would suddenly make Nokia a smart phone powerhouse. And finally, the conference fittingly closed with AT&T CEO Ralph De La Vega answering every angry volley from Walt and Kara about its loathsome network with justifications for why if we only give them the T-Mobile acquisition, all will be fixed. Is anyone buying any of this? 

It wasn’t the problem of the conference’s appeal. As a competitor, I’d love if that were the case. But realistically who in big tech would have been more riveting? You can’t have Steve Jobs every year. Meanwhile, there were plenty of people in the audience I would have rather heard from, including senior executives of surging companies like Facebook, One King’s Lane, and Yelp.

Is it any wonder there was such a frenzy around LinkedIn’s IPO? At least it’s a new script. It’s like when you used to be bored in class and a bird flew in the window and everyone went nuts. A bird probably wouldn’t be that exciting if you were outside playing frisbee.

It didn’t used to be that way. Big technology companies used to do interesting things and if not, many had cowboy personalities to make boring businesses interesting. But who wants to be head of a Nokia or a Microsoft or a Cisco or a Yahoo now? All of these companies have powerful entrenched user bases that aren’t going anywhere, and they’ll all make that justification anytime an analyst complains about their growth. Great. But their businesses are irrevocably declining if not in actual users, in terms of market influence and ability to recruit anyone talented. They can’t do wildly innovative things because stabs at innovation have failed so many times. They are in a total duck-and-cover mode. Who wants to be in duck-and-cover when a world of lucrative startups are exploding into the public markets?

In the last boom era, the publicly traded technology companies were also surging. Cisco’s John Chambers was nicknamed the Pied Piper of Wall Street. Today he is fighting for his job, along with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer. In fact, their biggest selling point may be that so few great leaders want their jobs, and there’s no natural successors in the wings. Those people have all left for other opportunities. (There goes another one with always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride Ann Livermore’s departure from HP.) Then there’s Yahoo: The company so siloed and dysfunctional it’s made Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, and Carol Bartz– three respected leaders with totally different skill sets– each look incompetent. These companies have all essentially become Novell.

Out of the entire tech universe, three legacy companies have stayed as relevant as any startup: Apple, Amazon and Netflix. All three are testaments to visionary founders with a strong will who aren’t afraid to utterly disrupt their companies and cannibalize their own businesses.

The only other legacy tech public company I’d put near that camp is Oracle. And the reason that Larry Ellison outmaneuvered his entire industry? By predicting what is happening now: That the IT revolution was over. That tech was no longer a differentiator for his customers. It was merely table stakes to being in business, like having desks, power and phone lines. He argued the answer for growth was a sheer land-grab of already installed customers who would pay ongoing maintenance and upgrade fees until seemingly the end of time.

Back then everyone said Ellison was wrong. Top business schools wrote new case studies on why tech still mattered, software-as-a-service startups argued they could still unseat Oracle in big deals, and truckloads of experts said that hostile takeovers in the software world would never work because the integrations would be too messy and those companies’ real assets– programmers– would all leave. But Ellison was right. (Although I’d argue at some point a new generation of software will unseat Oracle and its acquired parts. It’ll just take a lot more than the first wave of software as a service companies had to offer.)

In previous decades of Silicon Valley companies were building a new industry, so almost all tech companies had growth potential. Now there’s a stark line between mature technology and technology that is still growing in aggregate. They are simply different industries. Arguing this is still one industry; that all of the companies who make technology are investing in change is like saying any company with a Web site is an Internet company.

As this discrepancy widens between 1990s era tech and today, I was reminded of an interview Thiel did several years ago with CNBC where he was asked what large cap tech names he was bullish on. He answered that other than Google there were no large cap tech names, because companies like Intel and Microsoft are inherently anti-technology companies. Their success, he said, is rooted in the status quo. The best of all possible worlds for them would be the global technology user base never adopting anything new. CNBC’s anchors looked confused at this concept. Microsoft isn’t a tech company? Not too long ago, Microsoft was *the* tech company. 

But Thiel was right. Too many of the companies that built out the IT revolution and Silicon Valley are “technology” companies in name only now. They aren’t disrupting anything, they are doing the opposite. They are desperately clinging to the status quo. They still have massive amounts of cash, massive installed user bases that won’t be switching loyalties anytime soon and those are really the only two reasons they still matter. To fuse Thiel and Ellison’s arguments: They are banks whose job is to print money paid by people who are slow to change their digital habits. Even our parent company AOL is funding its radical turn-around largely off of people who don’t know they no longer have to pay us every month for a subscription to the World Wide Web. (I’ll at least give Tim Armstrong credit for being interesting on stage.)

But it’s even more true now that huge, lucrative opportunities have sucked anyone remotely talented out of those companies. At least people were wary of working at a startup back then. Now it seems risky not to be at a startup. LinkedIn and Facebook alone have proved social media wasn’t a fad. These companies, along with Twitter, Zynga, Groupon and others, are legitimately the most interesting stories in the American business world today, as they play central roles in global political uprisings and represent some of the most anticipated stock market debuts of the last decade.

We can point out Groupon’s shortcomings and risks every day: The stock will still be in high-demand when it debuts. Because the reality is there are only a handful of companies actually inventing new technology and businesses among the biggest public traded tech names today.

The sooner we realize this is no longer one industry, the sooner we can stop the silly bubble comparisons to 1999 and get a handle on why these issues will keep popping. We all want something that’s actually growing and disrupting and inspiring. Silicon Valley and the start up world has gotten to enjoy a lot of it over the last ten years, and Wall Street is sick of just watching.