Dear Larry (Ellison)

I hope this finds you fit and well and that sales of your products and services are barreling along.

I know from past dealings that there is nothing you enjoy more than the rough and tumble of a press conference. You come on stage, take the only seat and ask: 'What do you want to know today?' I've always felt that was brave for a leader in an industry often characterised by massive marketing and PR spend. Do you remember for instance the time I asked when you'd be organising refunds for all those people to whom you apologized for selling the wrong software? Maybe not. It was a long time ago.

This time I'm asking when you might let some of your people out into the world and blog about issues of importance to the Oracle community. I've tried to entice a few with no success. I've even pilloried Justin Kestelyn's efforts. Most recently, Simon Griffiths, a blogger in South Africa suggested: Oracle blogs need to be more human.  As you might imagine, this drew some interesting comments:

Jeff Nolan, who is no stranger to controversy said:

This has been a topic that some inside of Oracle have been trying to bring change on. The challenge is that Oracle is about controlling the message and unstructured blogs don’t fit well with that ideology. Also, Oracle is much more antagonistic toward independent voices than my former employer, SAP.

Chris Selland takes a different if dismissive view:

Why do Oracle blogs ‘need’ to be human? Oracle isn’t human, and it’s pretty obvious they neither care nor try to be. You can disagree with the policies and ideologies Jeff describes, but you can’t say they haven’t been successful.

Your very own Anshu Sharma doesn't think the 'personal' and the company specific should be mixed. These are all good points and the conversation that continues is well worth the reading.

I must admit these voices are all friends (to use the Facebook parlance) who share a common interest in figuring out what's happening in enterprise computing. As you can see, we can be like a bunch of unruly cats. We're all passionate about the enterprise and care very much what happens as technologies evolve and impact people's lives. As I am sure you are. Surely at least some of your people could 'come out' and enunciate what it means to be part of the phenomenon that is Oracle?

Or is Chris right and that Oracle doesn't care because it's not human?

Thank you for your attention and I look forward to hearing from you in due course.