Even Oracle hasn't been immune to the effects of openness. Its last big turnaround in enterprise software, back in 2000, coincided with a massive opening up of access to Oracle executives and their thinking, as well as an influx of ideas, good and bad. This back and forth genuinely animated the discourse between Oracle and its customers and, I believe, made the company a sudden contender in a market that it largely had left for dead on a mountain of database revenues for many years.