Sales Flat on Blah Friday; Dubai Still Flailing

Two different takes on Larry Ellison’s Oracle (ORCL) computer software company grace the newspapers today. The New York Times reports Ellison is having a hard time dealing with regulators in the European Union over the way his company is structured. Oracle owns MySQL, a free database product that was considered a competitor to Oracle’s proprietary and extremely expensive homegrown software. Because Oracle bought Sun, which, in turn, had purchased MySQL, the E.U. is worried Ellison will abandon open-source software and push customers, actively or passively, towards a paid model. That’s something Ellison denies, saying the products serve very different markets. The article’s larger point is that open-source software, like MySQL, is often very difficult to value on a balance sheet yet indispensible to the community that maintains, evolves, and uses it. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, sees Ellison as an old-style vertical integrator, ignoring ontological musings on open-source software in favor of a calculating look at the facts: Ellison is gobbling up and integrating the supply chains he needs to keep businesses humming. Ellison’s purchase of Sun may be less about MySQL and more to do with that company’s niche hardware products, which would give Oracle a computer line on which to deploy its software, a first for the company.

Google (GOOG) is having a hard time turning Japanese, reports the Times. Nothing about the company’s culture, from its sedate marketing tactics to its austere home page, matches up with the business environment it has encountered in Japan. There, the search company is a distant second to Yahoo (YHOO). Google retains hope in the fact that cell phone users in Japan watch 10 million YouTube clips every day. Part of the problem may be that Japan is still a relatively insular culture, and whereas Yahoo’s Japanese branch is viewed as a “native” company (it’s run by a Japanese communications company), Google is viewed, says one analyst, as “a foreigner who’s learned how to speak some Japanese.” Some cultural blunders, like its peeping-tom Google Maps camera-cars and identification of neighborhoods of formerly “untouchable” families on historical maps, haven’t helped. “But,” unsurprisingly, “Google keeps trying.” The country is simply too big, and too connected to the global market, for the company to ignore.

The Comcast-NBC Universal deal is still in the works, also according to the Times. The discussions are focused on how the television and movie studio properties will integrate into the cable operator’s existing business structure. While some NBCU executives seem to be excited to be moving out from underneath current corporate parent General Electric’s “Six Sigma” and quarterly-profit-motivated management styles, others are realizing that NBC Universal could end up being a mere cog in Comcast, which, unlike GE, is almost solely devoted to creating and distributing content.

In fat times, owning a bank could be, well, a license to print money, but right now, some banks are in such dire straits, says the Journal, “that potential buyers won't touch them at any price, even if the government agrees to eat losses on the failed bank's bad loans.” This presents a problem as the FDIC seizes failed institutions and, primarily, attempts to sell their carcasses and deposits to healthier banks. The FDIC is already facing nearly unprecedented payouts from the insurance fund it keeps to protect depositors at wiped-out banks from being wiped out themselves.

Black Friday saw more people go out to spend less money, according to the Washington Post. Analysts sounded completely unsurprised, but are expecting big things for today, Cyber Monday, when office workers traditionally shop from their desks and look for big sales online. No mention of whether the fact that far fewer people are gainfully employed this year, compared with last, had any impact on analysts' optimistic projections.

Finally, Dubai is still under the microscope. The NYT says big brother Abu Dhabi is protective of the ritzier Emirate but seems willing to let it sweat a little, since news of its imminent default came as such a shock. The Journal paints a grimmer picture, reporting that Abu Dhabi said it would help local banks with fresh loans, but pointedly did not say the same thing about wiping out the Emirate’s own debts. Questions about the complex relationship between the two Emirates led Dubai’s ruler to tell journalists to “shut up.”