Patent filing date is September 7th, 2006.

Since Outlook 2007 does have this feature, it would be the likely candidate for prior art, since it would have been release somewhere in that time frame.

Quoted from the article...

"ISVs were more than willing to work with Sun because they saw Sun as a neutral hardware platform," he said. "But when the Sun platform becomes part of Oracle, and Oracle has a reputation for acquiring companies and replacing the products with Oracle products, then ISVs get nervous. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out."

Ah yes... Oracle has a pretty good reputation of replacing its acquired products... But what is worse (and I have first hand experience as one of those ISVs), is that Oracle likes to leave these acquired products in limbo until the replacements are ready... Support on the old product is virtually non-existent, and migration to the new product (when it actually does come) is like a shot in the dark; then can never give you reliable documentation on how to make the transition and Oracle engineers always insist that it is far easier than it actually is.

I can understand why people would run from Sun products. This is Oracle's first acquisition outside of a software-only company. If a company has to depend on Sun fulfilling their provisioning and support contracts, Oracle's reputation would probably scare away customers that are concerned with potential supplier problems.

Clients are just betting based upon Oracle's reputation with respect to their acquisitions...

Even though they say that they can give you more perks, the call center jobs still sucks...

Why?

Because when a company is proud that it's turnover rate is only 45% (less than half the industry's average), it tells me that this job is something I would never want to touch with a five foot pole (as opposed to a ten foot one).

A company with 45% turnover on 11000 employees means approximately 4950 employees get churned out in a year. That still isn't very good...

Honestly, did your company perform any "due diligence" on the outsourcing company before engaging them in that contract? Any security audits, risk assessments, business impact studies. Did you perform any sort of checks on them, or did you simply engage them on cost alone?

I know startups don't always have the resources to perform the required "due diligence" before handing over the keys, but if you didn't perform these checks, you would be primarily responsible if you've opened up this level of risk and something wrong would occur. I'm sure this is not what you wanted to hear, but CYA (cover your ass) is especially important if you hand over the keys to an outsider and it could involve a significant loss to the company.

If you don't have enough confidence in your decision on behalf of the company, why should the company have confidence in you making decisions for them?

Unfortunately, the publishers won't clue into the fact that they are mostly to blame for the used games market. If they looked at some of their practices as of late, they would see that...

1. Retailers don't enough of a cut from new product sales. That is because retailers get squeezed when the publisher enforces a retail price of $50 or $60 on new product and allow the retailer to barely break even when selling it.

2. Games tend to lose value as they sit on shelves. For example, if you didn't buy the game for $50 when it was new, you probably won't do so 3+ months later unless the price drops. As a retailer, that means I'm losing more money as time goes on; again another reason why not to sell new. Publishers aren't taking any real steps to absorb that decrease in value over time.

Trying to bite the hand that feeds you is certainly going to be counterproductive in the long term, especially when you already bitten off a whole arm.

If only the publishers would realign their take with the supposed value of their product, they would probably be able to sell more copies via retail rather than complain about piracy and used game sales...