 It wasn't for Q-Logic, we wouldn't be here. I want to say thanks to Rob and his team at Q-Logic for providing the boot space for Oracle Open World. And for the folks out there, Oracle, we just know space available for SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, they're hardcore, they want to control all their video operations themselves, the big company, and we got in through Q-Logic and EMC and Intel supporting us, and we're on the ground bringing all the coverage of Oracle Open World. And San Francisco is essentially shut down, traffic's stopped everywhere, Oracle's got 45,000 people in San Francisco and it's just absolutely insane here, biz dad's going on, people partying, doing deals, Dave, all around the world. Oracle is a huge company, 800 pound gorilla, and at the bottom line is that Oracle is one of those companies like Apple that controls the industry at an enterprise level. We know Apple on the consumer side, Oracle's the Apple of the enterprise and they're trying to change, Oracle used to own the CRM, ERP, all those big software, big database applications, now the world's changing to open source, cloud, mobile, big data, and anyone who's developing software knows that that's a big opportunity and Oracle's kind of the incumbent, Dave. They are the big guys that everyone's trying to steal market share from, so whether you're an entrepreneur, startup, or a company, you want to compete with some of those scraps, so for Oracle, they're clutching on to the marketplace, they're trying to control everything, and that's Oracle. You know, John, I'm reminded of a comment that Tom Georgins has made on theCUBE. He said, the headlines are relentlessly bad, but this is good, or maybe he said it in reverse, but yet again, the market is down, 100 points. What's Apple stock doing right now? Apple is down. Interestingly, the NASDAQ is up. So what's the current? Okay, so you can see from the screen here, we have a live picture of the Apple keynote which's going on in Cupertino, California. We could not get theCUBE there in time. We, you know, try and get there and get finance to go do these big events like Apple, and soon we'll be there, but right now, we're covering Oracle, but Apple's announcement is the iPhone 4S, and we're still waiting to hear about the iPhone 5 and other announcements. Obviously, their operating system is shipping like crazy. Big news there is that, you know, Lion has really been a successful product and the iPhone 4S. So you're looking at Apple, yeah, so they're going through the feature listings of the new 4S, and we're going to continue to get coverage here. If I had Wi-Fi up here, I'd have more access to data, so Marcus and Hopkins is yelling the features over the wire here. So basically it's off on no iPhone 5, right? No iPhone 5 announcement yet, but we still may see it today. So I think if you look at the screen, for the folks out there watching the picture here, we just want to do some commentary on Apple, because really we talked about this yesterday here inside the Cube at Oracle, and is that the world is lagging in this enterprise business on the consumerization side, meaning that the user experience and the user interface really sucks compared to what Apple's doing. So if you look at what Apple's done, they've absolutely revolutionized the user experience, the user interface, and even Android, which has some cool features, is so far away from being close to Apple in terms of user interface, user experience, and the iPad, and how they do that is really hard to do. Apple has a huge lead on the tablets. I still don't think anyone's going to catch up to Apple for at least a couple of years on the iPad side. On the iPhone side, we all know how revolutionary that was, and they continue to change the game. If you look at their reader, they're integrating media, iTunes, obviously as iTunes, and the App Store has just been a huge success. Apple continues at every single level to dominate on a performance basis of both products and finances. And you talk about the Apple stores. Apple stores, you know, people thought Apple was crazy for launching retail, Dave, and the fact of the matter is, it's been so successful, successful, because one, the stores are beautiful, and the products in there are good, and Apple takes huge painstaking steps to make sure that the products that go into the Apple Store are good. And what's worse is, well, what's worse or better for Apple, is that they take 50% of the cash. So if you and I come up with a really killer product and get in the Apple Store, we have to give up 50% of our revenue just to be stopped in the Apple retail outlets. So it's a double-edged sword. You get in to the Apple Store, you make a boatload of money on the product, but Apple gets 50% of the revenue. I still think it's a good deal. I definitely would do that deal. Well, and your point about the retail presence, Ron Johnson ended up at JC Penney, right? Ron Johnson's the guy who basically brought Apple to the retail marketplace, and huge. So the news today, John, is that evidently Apple will not announce an iPhone 5, they're going to announce an iPhone 4S, same dimensions, I guess, as the four but more powerful guts. So, you know that teardrop-shaped device that we all saw that evidently ain't happening today. Now, the word is that even if it's not an iPhone 5, the 4S is pretty peppy. I think it's going to have a gigabyte of RAM, it's got Apple's new A5 chip. What do you think that means? I mean, is that, you know, no big deal? Or will people skip over the 4S? Will you buy one? No, I won't buy the 4S. I have a 4, I'm waiting for the 5. I mean, you really have to look at the features. I can't get online right now, and Wi-Fi's down here. I don't know how you're getting on, but I wouldn't, I might buy it, I mean, the features are good, but here's the thing. My speculation from what I've been hearing about the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S is Apple's kind of stuck in a little bit of a halfway spot here, mainly because the iPhone was primarily built for AT&T's network. So you look at the RF side of the business. You've got GSM and CDMA, so you have two different approaches. Even though Verizon Wireless carries the iPhone, it's completely not optimized for Verizon's network. It's optimized for AT&T. So, there's been some discussion around Sprint and iPhone, so I believe, this is my conspiracy theory, that Apple, based upon my data, talking to friends in Silicon Valley, is that the Apple team is really trying to divine the iPhone so it can work across multiple protocols and multiple RF capabilities and transports, mainly because Android supports it as well. So they want to compete there. And why wouldn't Apple want to be on Sprint, AT&T and Verizon? So, you know, I think there's some design challenges. They might have holed off the iPhone 5. For that reason, don't know. I'm still waiting to confirm that or not. Yeah, so that's a good perspective. So you feel like the market feels. What? Breaking news coming in. 1080p camera. That's a feature that I might want to buy. I mean, the iPhone already takes great photos. 1080p camera. That's iPhone 4S. Okay, so we've got breaking news coming across the wire here. It's iPhone 4S has a 1080p camera. That's the biggest feature. Same chipset as iPad 2. Yeah. So we reported on Silicon Angle last year and then last fall that the major improvements to Apple is going to be very much enterprise-like, meaning you're going to start to see some software increases. So what's happening is that the Blackberry and everyone else is trying to be more consumer-like. Apple is being more enterprise-like, meaning encryption, software for productivity apps, integrating at the software level to be a stronger device. So obviously with the 1080p camera, I think you're going to expect to see Apple introduce a more set of diverse features to support the kind of environments that users are expecting, whether it's work or play. Do you think that it's a little bit of catch-up to some of the Android phones that are out there? No, no way. Android's way behind Apple. Way behind Apple. Can you elaborate on that? Well, I mean, Android does some technical things a little bit better and some of the voice recognition, some of the built-in features. Obviously, you know, it's Google, so it's got some integrations with Google tools and Gmail on YouTube. So I think that's a good enough feature set, but overall, it's just not as elegant as the iPhone. Just overall, from a software, just overall software usability standpoint. So the next web is reporting an eight megapixel camera and an A5 processor, a gigabyte of RAM, better optics, and a more accurate differential GPS stage. So, yeah, I kind of agree with you, John. I'm not sure that's going to be enough to push people over the edge, you know? I'm on the fence. Yeah, I mean, you know, Keegan's got his credit card, how about you, David Florey, are you going to buy an iPhone 4S? You're going to go for it? Oh, okay. If we're in iPhone 5, would you go for it? He's waiting. Okay. So I think, look at the video integration, it's phenomenal. I just love the fact that you can just, the camera is so versatile, you can just take photos, it's phenomenal. The iOS has got to get better. The other thing that no one's really talking about is the monetization platform of Apple. Like, if you're a developer, there's been a big debate on which ad networks are actually a better environment for monetization around the ad. Obviously, we've been following that very closely with millennial media, so we know that Apple's doing extremely well, and obviously Google has bought ad mobs, so it's interesting, Dave. I mean, Apple just has such great market power. They are the 800 pound gorilla on the consumer side, and they continue to dominate, and if you've got stock on Apple, I would say hold, I would not sell. Well, it's interesting what's happening in the stock market right now. The Dow is way down, tech is up, the NASDAQ is up, but Apple is off, way off on the news that- Yeah, what's your connectivity? How are you getting internet? Are you on Wi-Fi? No, we've got a Wi-Fi going on. Look for River. Yeah, so. What's the password? Can't say. Huh, can you say it louder? So we're here, let me just reset here. We're here live at Oracle Open World. This is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and I'm with John Furrier, my co-host, who is the founder of SiliconAngle.com. Now, for a lot of you out there, Oracle might be new, Oracle Open World might be new. There's a lot of buzzwords in this world. My Oracle, obviously, big database company, and obviously does a lot of applications, but Sun, it's full stack hardware, software, and to a certain extent, a services company. A lot of you may be new to this world, so we encourage you to check out SiliconAngle.com. Check out our TV site, SiliconAngle.tv. We've got a new site up. It's a vertical publication into services where the new IT web services, IT as a service, SAS meets the traditional services marketplace. It's a site that's being run by Alex Williams and Clint Finley, two writers that came over to SiliconAngle from the Read-Write Web. Big contributions from folks on the Wikibon side, including Bert Latimore and Jeff Kelly, so check out servicesangle.com, check out Wikibon.org. If you got questions, we'll try to get answers. Check out the resources that we have. If you can't find what you're looking for, ping us, ask a question, send us a tweet. I'm at Dave Vellante. John is at Furrier, at SiliconAngle, at Wikibon, and we'll try to get you an answer. Yeah, so Dave, the other news coming from Apple is they announced newsstand partners, New York Times, Wired, Nationally Graphic, and more. We haven't gotten the email yet for siliconangle.com, but I'm soon sure we will. Certainly the Cube videos will be up on there as well, but here's the disruption that Apple's going to take next, and that is the media business. So Apple obviously disrupted the music business, they disrupted the applications business. Expect Apple with the iPad to disrupt the newspaper business and the magazine business. Obviously with magazines and virtual reality and augmented reality, you're going to see Apple do some serious damage there. I predict that eventually they will be controlling most of that marketplace. So the stock's getting crushed today. It had hit a high of a little over 380 just before noon in anticipation. Buy in the rumor, sell in the news. That's exactly what happened here. Of course the sell off is compounded by the fact that there's no iPhone 5. So the stock was up at 380. It's now bounced off a 360 down about, almost 3% for the day. And I'm sure that'll pop right back up. I have no debate at all about that. You've heard John Furrier calling for a buying opportunity. Buying opportunity. He will see how it finishes at the end of the day. We'll keep an eye on the Apple stock. Let's get back to Oracle, Dave. Oracle Open World. You get Joe Tucci here in picture in picture. Joe Tucci, I'll see the CEO of EMC announces he's going to step down in 2012. And they're looking for an heir apparent there. Pat Gelsinger is also in the running. A few other candidates. Obviously EMC is watching the succession plans. And so the debacle at HP and knows that finding a CEO to run, the company is important. So obviously EMC's got really strong management over there. So expect to see EMC most likely look at Pat Gelsinger or someone from their organization internally. I would be shocked if EMC went outside for a CEO, Dave. I think Joe Tucci is too smart. I think the culture of EMC is too strong. And with their positioning and their branding and messaging around cloud meets big data, Pat Gelsinger clearly has a roadmap for success. I am so impressed with Pat Gelsinger that he is bringing that Intel Mojo to EMC. And you're going to see EMC quickly get into the marketplace, move from a storage dominating company to a cloud based services and product company that is going to be enabling the mobile cloud social revolution. I expect them to have a major presence in the unstructured data market. Obviously they have Green Plum, they got Isilon. Still the jury's out on how that Green Plum's going to work out, but still seems to give them a good beach head in the unstructured business. Want to hear how they evolve Green Plum, given Oracle's announcement here with their big data approach. John Mark Risen Hopkins, when the news came out that Tucci was going to step down in 2012, Hopkins wrote a story on Silicon Angle. That was very good. The two front runners for the job, for the Tucci replacement are Pat Gelsinger, as you mentioned, and David Goulden, who's the CFO. Now Goulden's a long time EMC-er. He believes it's on the board of VMware. So he's plugged into the Wall Street scene. So, you know, Gelsinger is not locked, but Hopkins predicted, and I support that prediction, that Gelsinger is next in line. I think that's a big reason why Gelsinger left Intel after 30 years. He's a legend in tech circles, and so I think that he is the heir apparent, and has the charisma, has the knowledge, and I think it's his delusion. Let's, Mark, can you pull up Silicon Angle's site, and let's just review some of the top stories we're seeing on the marketplace today that Silicon Angle's reporting. Obviously Silicon Angle, excuse me, it's reporting, obviously the RIP Zoom. Yeah, I mean, that's a slow death, obviously long time coming. Red Hat acquiring open source storage from Gluster, IBM, security services. These are the kinds of stories that we're going to be covering, okay, as well as the Apple stories, in depth. We have more in-depth covers than any other major tech blog on the marketplace. We cover the breaking news, but we go in-depth, and obviously we are watching theCUBE. This is our flagship telecast, siliconangle.tv, where we bring live coverage at the most important tech events and bring them to you, and we do multi-day in-depth analysis, commentary, and insight to provide to you from the event, and obviously we'll report on other events, obviously the Apple event, if we could get an anchor desk there, we'd be there. But this is theCUBE, our flagship telecast, and we are here in San Francisco, California for Oracle Open World, where Oracle is announcing all their major innovations, and the story here, Dave, is big data, not so much cloud. Last year Larry Ellison was talking about cloud in a box, cloud everything. This year's about analytics, big data, and the future of Oracle, which is a fully integrated hardware software, special purpose-building architecture for the enterprise. And I also want to let people know, go to siliconangle.tv, you'll see all the videos, you'll see the live coverage here, you'll see, check, click on newest videos, you'll see all the videos from this event. You can go to Wikibon and you'll see that we've got up a page on Oracle Open World that has all the videos it'll have, it'll consolidate, it's called Oracle Open World 2011, it consolidates all the videos that we're doing here, all the editorial that's being done. It's a great resource, shout out to Jeff Kelly for putting that up, and you'll see a number of guests, and we've already got, check it out, we've probably got 10 at least, maybe 10 or 12 articles and research notes and editorials up already on this event. We want to cover this like a blanket, if you've got questions, hit us up, we'll try to get you an answer, and let us know what you think, tweet us, and we'll try to help you out. Yeah, so we have a little Wi-Fi problem here, I can't access my laptop here, so I really can't respond to tweets directly, on my iPad a little slow to do that, but if you want to tweet us at Siliconangle, hashtag TheCube, we will respond, Markers and Hopkins will get us the questions, but I want to talk about that story about Microsoft and the Zoom. Zoom is their iPod kind of competitor, been out for a while as a player. The death of the Zoom really puts an exclamation point around the dominance of Apple, and how strong Android has come out of the woodwork, and how Zoom really kind of just never happened, because this is a classic example of Microsoft dropping the ball on doing anything consumer-driven, and one of the complaints about Microsoft, Dave, has been that they have no awareness around consumer. They've never really been a leader in the UI side of the business, they've never really been a leader in the user experience, and we all know they copied Apple, and then they fumbled with the phone, now they have trying to get with Nokia, so I think Microsoft really needs to up their game on the whole user experience, it's been a big theme, they've been very weak on virtualization, so I think Microsoft is in a, really not in a good position right now for me, they're on the track, they're a horse on the track, but ultimately Microsoft has just really been hurting. They continue to dominate their business of selling Windows and licenses, but their ecosystem has been strong, but Microsoft really has to get their game up and bring on more and more of that product leadership, and that could be fast-following too, it doesn't have to be like pioneering, just get some good products out the door. Yeah, I mean we've had this discussion several times, I mean I've asked you before, I'll ask you again, is Microsoft still relevant? I think so, Microsoft is relevant in the world that they're in, but the world's changing, right? There's new users coming on that are entering the workplace, it used to be like back in the old days in the business of auto manufacturers, they wanted to get the people to buy their first car because if they bought their first car, they could stay with that company and keep that brand alive with first-time car buyers. With computing, the same thing is happening, it's consumerization of computing is really relevant, and that's where Microsoft is not relevant. Microsoft is not hitting the mark on the new users. New users come in and go, you know, Microsoft who? Yahoo who? So these older brands in the computer business, just because they have market power and good cash flow with their incumbent franchises, really are hurting to the new users. The new users will ask themselves, why would I ever want to use a Microsoft product? And you know what, that hurts the overall Intel PC business and that gives us, again, more strength to the argument that Apple will continue to dominate with their product leadership, with their execution, and overall for financial performance. I think it's very symbolic that IBM recently surpassed Microsoft in terms of market cap. They're both hovering around 200 million, 205, 203, Microsoft's a little ahead right now, but essentially Microsoft decoupled IBM's mainframe business, took IBM out of the monopoly, and was the most valuable tech company in the planet. And now here's IBM with its new business model over the past 10 or 15 years crawling back and now is at least an equally valuable company. Of course, Apple is the big king in the block now. Yeah, I mean, I think the way you can explain the IBM transformation to take over the leadership position in terms of market cap over Microsoft is simply put, they're executing on their business and they're actually transforming their business. So what Microsoft has not done as well as IBM is that IBM has absolutely moved with the marketplace. They sold off Lenovo PC to still supply that product to their customer base, expanded their services business, essentially execute on the execution side, brought in more revenue streams, and IBM's got some dogs in their portfolio. I mean, they've struggled with Lotus and transforming that brand. Again, that's just a whole nother conversation. The debacle of Lotus, but that's, again, a whole nother conversation. But in general, IBM has executed extremely well. They've great corporate marketing, as Ray Wang pointed out, but for the most part, it's pure execution. I think Microsoft has fumbled on the execution side and the roadkill of products is just endless. Phone, Zoom now, it just goes on and on. So, is Ballmer the right CEO? I still think I like Ballmer, but, you know, something's got to change. I mean, they got to start establishing some execution in their business, and that might mean cannibalizing their existing Windows and Office business. What about Microsoft and Cloud? What's your take there? I think they have a huge opportunity with Cloud. Obviously, Azure is not a small platform. They have scale. Microsoft has scale, so I think, you know, I hate to use the word pivot, but, you know, since that's being kicked around a lot in the community these days, Microsoft can pivot with Cloud. They do have scale. They just got to get their act together and get out of the politics that goes on there. And when I talk to people inside Microsoft, there's two camps. There's the, well, we're Microsoft, we're big, we can do a lot of cool things. And then there's another camp that says, this is so political, it's a disaster. And the interesting thing about Microsoft, and this is more on the website, if you look at Yahoo and Microsoft, both have failed, in my opinion, to really cross over to the new architecture of Web 2.0 and social. And I'll give you an example. If you look at the management team of Yahoo and the management team of Microsoft, the MSN and their online and cloud operation, in essence, what you have here is a complete swip swap of people. If you look at the history, and this has not been posted out there, so this might be a good blog post for some of our writers, because I have yet to report on this. The top management at Yahoo is ex-Microsoft. The top management at Microsoft on the search side is ex-Yahoo. So there's been a complete flip-flop of the management team on both companies. So the Yahoo guys went to Microsoft, Bing, and then the Microsoft guys went to Yahoo. So that, to me, tells a story. Well, and we have Craig Patel coming on shortly, maybe even bring him in a little earlier, from VMware, and VMware obviously has a lot of Microsoft, former Microsoft executives, not the least of which is Paul Moritz and Todd, who's been on theCUBE a number of times. Todd Nielsen. So, yeah. I mean, VMware isn't exactly the kind of company we look at that's emerging, that quite frankly has the DNA to take territory down on the new marketplace. I mean, you said to start VMware, we had the cube there. VMware was very active in laying out a year ago in 2010, their architecture, which is in essence a kind of a software mainframe, as we talked about, that's Paul Moritz laid out. Larry Ellison's completely copying the same exact messaging of VMware, but he's taking a completely different twist on it. He's vertically integrating performance and hardware. So, interesting enough, is they both have huge ecosystems developing. I see Oracle as a monster ecosystem, but VMware's got a very robust ecosystem developing, and there's, I think, a lot of money to be made in VMware. The question is, how does that all kind of cross-connect? Well, I think VMware is driving a lot of the discussion in the data center, and its owner, EMC, I think actually has a lot to lose when you start thinking about Oracle, and what Oracle's trying to do with Exadata, and grabbing more of the storage stack, so it's going to be interesting to see how they... What's the market cap of VMware right now? What's the market cap of EMC? I'd like to, interesting, get those stats. So, VMware is trading in a range of about $30 billion, maybe $33 billion, and EMC, let me just pull them up, problem guessing around $50, but we'll take a look at EMC's. $33 billion. $33 billion is VMware, EMC's around $42. $42, okay, so less than EMC, so the question that I have is when... No, no, EMC is still about $10 billion more valuable than VMware, the interesting thing about it is, EMC owns 80% of VMware, so if you do the math, a disproportionate proportion of the value of EMC's value is VMware, much higher than... My joke at the cocktail parties that I go out in Toronto Silicon Valley is, can't wait for when VMware spins off EMC, and that'll happen once the market cap increases to over $42 billion. But my contention is that EMC is a great way to own VMware stock, because you get the great cash flow of EMC, I think the core EMC business is undervalued because everybody's putting a premium on VMware, and because EMC, Tucci has said, I'm not going to spin it off, people devalue the core EMC piece, so it's a great way, a more conservative way to own.