ReadWriteWeb

Not long ago at all, Oracle laid claim to building the systems that managed a majority of the world's data. This year, the group making the same claim is a spinoff from Yahoo.

The onset of Internet-size databases and cloud architectures brought about architectural quandaries about the nature of relational databases that no one had ever thought they'd have to ponder just a few years earlier. Making tremendous strides in this department in a very short period of time -- literally last June -- is Hortonworks, the newly independent company that produces the Apache-licensed open source database system Hadoop, and the latest partner of Microsoft. This week, ReadWriteWeb talks with Hadoop co-creator and Hortonworks CEO Eric Baldeschwieler.

Certainly the theory that Oracle had no plans for Sun Microsystems following its acquisition, has been completely deflated. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison always wanted to be able to deliver database devices that come pre-configured, and Sun has given him the resources to deliver it. But besides a guest appearance by the manager of the San Francisco Giants and a rock-blasting video of the America's Cup race, last Sunday night's keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco mostly featured Ellison pacing back and forth on stage reciting performance numbers.

"Communications is at the heart of ecommerce and community. By combining the two leading ecommerce franchises, eBay and PayPal, with the leader in Internet voice communications," announced eBay's CEO in September 2005, Meg Whitman, "we will create an extraordinarily powerful environment for business on the Net."

By 2005, what Meg Whitman had learned about "ecosystems," such as they are, would have had to have come from her tenure as president of Stride Rite Shoes, the maker of Keds; and later as chief of Hasbro's Playskool division, where she directly oversaw the marketing of Mr. Potato Head. Inspired by the reintroduction of the toy brand into popular culture with Pixar's Toy Story, Whitman's innovations included the licensing of the brand to television, leading to the 1998 premiere of Fox Kids' "The Mr. Potato Head Show."

For a conference whose host boldly proclaims, "We live in the post-PC revolution," most of the innovations introduced by partners and third parties at this year's Dreamforce conference are probably best suited for viewing from your favorite PC Web browser.

One huge exception this week comes from Seesmic, which came to fame with its multi-channel social networking tool that became an ecosystem unto itself. This week at Dreamforce, Seesmic is demonstrating its prowess with correlating social data for business, with a CRM platform built on the Salesforce API that's custom-designed for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.

Those of us who lived and worked in the glorious, adventurous era of computing that was the late 1970s and early '80s have a different perspective. I was a consultant and developer before I became a journalist in 1984. My colleagues from that time and I frame the iPhone and iPad in the broader context of a bigger history. The iPhone, I've seen and heard over the past several hours, has changed people's lives.

Maybe. But what has truly made Apple successful, as a longer-range view of history will reveal, is a set of best practices, not any single gadget or an audio-cassette-ready philosophy on life. Steve Jobs learned these practices and principles through trial-and-error, though he became their most brilliant practitioner. And the fact that he and his company executed on those principles and capitalized upon them, and no other American company in any industry in the past quarter-century has done the same, is the greatest takeaway from the recent history of American business.

I had lunch with one of my favorite Internet entrepreneurs today, Mark Sawyier, the CEO of Off Campus Media. The company provides college students with apartment listings near their schools, and what started out as an idea five years ago is now a multi-million dollar business. Sawyier came to this business without any formal training in computer science, business, management, or other technology training, yet he is a natural when it comes to running a modern-day Internet business. In the short time we spent today, he came up with a few bon mots and wise thoughts that I want to share with those of you that are thinking about starting your own businesses.

This summer, Apple is expected to launch its next iPhone, and new reports describe it as a "completely redesigned handset" as well as a "total rethink from a design standpoint." To start, the iPhone 5's internals will be different - the device will run on a new, combined CDMA/GSM/UTMS chipset from Qualcomm, which will support both AT&T and Verizon here in the U.S., as well as other carriers worldwide - perhaps even an expanded lineup, as would now be possible. Along with the iPad 2, this chipset change represents the transition away from Infineon as the iPhone and iPad chipset maker. Going forward, Qualcomm will make the chips for all Apple mobile devices.

But as of this morning, it seems that the most notable thing about the iPhone 5 is not a sum of its features but the fact that it will be a major iPhone launch that will occur without Steve Jobs' daily presence. Although the ailing Apple CEO stated via press release this a.m. that he will continue his role during his medical absence, COO Tim Cook will be in charge of day-to-day operations at Apple.

Consider the iPhone 5's 2011 launch as Apple's dry run for a future without Steve Jobs at the helm. Can it still be "magical?"

Yesterday, I wrote about the things you can do to prepare your startup's website pre-launch. But your online presence doesn't solely exist on and shouldn't solely rely on your company website. And it's incredibly valuable that just as you work on it, that you work to develop an online presence for you, the entrepreneur.

Case in point: the relaunch this past week of SpeakerText, whose CEO Matt Mireles I had a chance to talk to. Looking back at the first mention of SpeakerText on ReadWriteWeb in January, that story begins, "You've probably never heard of Matt Mireles." But now, despite a back-to-the-drawing-board period for SpeakerText where the company itself was pretty quiet, if you're active in entrepreneurial circles online, you're much more likely to have heard of Mireles. He blogs and comments. He's active on Twitter and on Hacker News.

Children's literary character Pollyanna is supposed to teach the value in maintaining a super sunshine-filled attitude. The lesson echoes, perhaps, the notion that "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Social pleasantries aside, this is probably no way to run your business. And in a recent blog post, VC Ben Horowitz agrees, cautioning CEOs against falling into the trap of being too nice and too positive. "Tell it like it is," he advises.

Being a CEO of a company is, as one CEO recently told me with a certain amount of exasperation and exhaustion, "a 24-hour-a-day, 7 days-a-week job." It's all-consuming, all-encompassing, and in many ways when it comes to the success or failure of a company, all-important.

But despite the high-stakes involved in being a CEO, it's a position that all-too-often only receives rigorous feedback and a thorough performance review when things goes desperately awry. And even then, the measurement of "a good CEO" is often merely just a reflection of "good financials." But surely there's more to it.