Intel Corp (INTC)

[rudedog]

The large majority of Oracle sales are on Intel architecture products, either Intel or AMD. Those platforms are by definition standardized, and any tweaks to improve performance for a specific platform are done by the hardware vendor, not by Oracle. It would not be practical to implement anything that would put HP at a disadvantage without also harming the other platforms.

Oracle's stated intention is to do optimization of the whole stack, hardware and software, a la IBM - something only a vendor who has the vertical integration can do. That strategy is primarily about building and maintaining a very high margin business, but it is not a volume strategy, because for the majority of users, the performance gains don't justify the price premium or the lock-in.

If HP aspires to be 'IBM-like' they need to do something similar, and their new CEO would certainly know a lot more about that than the previous one.

Answering the other question, Oracle has a much more complete application stack than MS, and also a higher-performance database engine - but at a higher price. It's really an apples to oranges comparison - Microsoft aims to be a platform provider and looks to their partner ecosystem for verticals, except in a few cases (like the dynamics packages).