zlacker

>>pavel_+(OP)
For a time I really idolised Larry Ellison. Then I saw a documentary on Oracle early years and someone said - "There was no Oralce v1, as Ellison, "knew no one would want to buy version 1". This sounded both stupid and an urban legend. Till I checked the Wikipedia entry:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Database#Releases_and...

It not only changed my perspective of the man but also the company. One can know a lot about a company's practices from the way it was founded. Now there is nothing about Oracle which surprises me any more.

>>thisis+dd
>There was no Oralce v1, as Ellison, "knew no one would want to buy version 1"

Of the "bad Larry Ellison" anecdotes ITT, most of which do paint him in a very bad light, this one doesn't offend me at all; more like smart marketing advice you can use.

>>smithe+Jh
That's a very bad marketing advice. In case someone finds out what you've done, it's a red cross mark on your brand.

>>gkya+Zu
It's no different from pricing your product at $9.99/month instead of $10/month, or $9.99/month instead of $119.88/year. Or more pertinent, marketing Java 1.8 as Java 8, selling products with random alphanumeric names like "A-Series 7340X", retroactively renumbering previous software versions, or going straight from Windows 8 to Windows 10.

Software version schemes are often started at 0, or other times 1, so why not any other integer? I don't expect software version numbers to mean anything except that higher is (probably) chronologically later. That said I would probably still start numbering internal/beta versions at 1 or 0 and use 2 for the first release.

It's not even in the same league of dishonesty as ubiquitous practices by blue-chip tech companies such as using trial pricing in advertisements, selling "new versions" of software with only trivial changes, selling "extended warranties" on hardware that don't cover the most common causes of breakage, or claiming customers have access to "expertise" developing intelligent zero-downtime SaaS solutions on the blockchain with the deep learning algorithms powering our global AR/VR-enabled IoT cloud.