Bellwethers such as International Business Machines and Oracle should fare relatively well, in our view.

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Suffice it to say that along with Oracle database software, we'll need cheap, massively parallel machines as servers for these huge online databases.

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Where is the incentive for Oracle to tell millions of Java users worldwide to disable Java on their local machines?

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For larger warehouses the competition comes from Oracle's 9i database and IBM's DB2, and these have the advantage of running on machines from IBM, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard that are familiar to big businesses.

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