In a recent earnings call, Oracle founder Larry Ellison "dissed" the software as a service (SaaS) industry, calling it a laggard that isn't really living up to the hype. "If you look at the leader, Salesforce.com, they don't make very much money and they've been at it for almost 10 years," he said in widely-reported remarks, adding that "it's hard to point to any software as a service provider that's doing a good job of improving its profitability." The irony, besides the fact that Larry has sunk a lot of his own wealth into Salesforce, is that Oracle finally made money from its own on-demand applications this past quarter. He admitted as much: "We continue to get better at it and grow the business," he said. "(But) it's not really growing any raster than our overall business," and it certainly isn't growing as fast as some had predicted, he noted sourly.
Source: CIO Today