Initial Competitive Impact
Oracle Card's primary value lay in the fact that, at the time, it was Oracle's only product to offer GUI support on Microsoft Windows. It was therefore sometimes included in sales pitches to potential clients by virtue of the fact that Windows was becoming increasingly popular on the desktop at large corporations. Oracle's primary application development tool, Oracle Forms 3, was character-based and did not run under Microsoft Windows (although it could run in a DOS window or natively on DOS without Windows). Oracle was desperately working on developing an upgrade (Oracle Forms 4) that had GUI features, but development was behind schedule.
A handful of large clients, including the U.S. Postal Service, were known to have developed applications with Oracle Card for internal use. But Oracle Card had no broad, commercial success as a development platform, despite the fact that its feature set surpassed that of Apple's HyperCard in nearly every respect (platform support, database connectivity, vector graphics support, better color support, faster performance, and a richer plug-in architecture).
Eventually Oracle Forms 4 was released, meaning that support for Windows was no longer the exclusive domain of Oracle Card. Because Oracle's customers tended to be more interested in standard, formed-based database applications, rather than in the sorts of data-driven multimedia applications that were possible to create with Oracle Card and its successor, OMO, Oracle eventually threw its full weight behind Oracle Forms 4, casting Oracle Card/OMO into oblivion. However, the Oracle Card team was led by two Oracle employees who have gone on to form their own, successful, technology companies: Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, and Evan Goldberg, founder of NetSuite.
Read more about this topic: Oracle Media Objects
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