[exelius]

Oracle is not quite as fucked as everyone else on the rest of the list. Oracle has the benefit of offering products that solve very real, very complex business problems: they aren't selling technology infrastructure. Oracle's core products are largely around financial and operational automation, and they are well understood by integrators across many industries. Their biggest threat is something like Salesforce -- but even then, the capital cycle for ERP systems is something stupid like 15-25 years. IBM is largely in the same boat as Oracle, albeit with slightly more government focus.

Oracle is ultimately a software company. Where their customers run that software is largely irrelevant to their core business. Is there margin to make by running an Oracle cloud? Sure, but the bulk of their profits are made just by licensing their LOB software packages and the associated annual support contracts. Oracle will be fine, and Larry Ellison will be able to buy an even bigger yacht in a decade.

[fredkbloggs]

The real reason Oracle is still making money (though never nearly as much as analysts forecast) is none of the above. It was mentioned in the article and has been discussed here many times in the past as well. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10207495 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9953657. Oracle's sales force is trained to use "license audits", threats of same, and various forms of bundling, such as MSAs and minimum sales commitments, to sell what Oracle wants to sell, not what the customer wants or needs. They are very effective in this, and it is the primary reason Oracle remains in business.

That said, the Oracle database product, while extremely expensive and obnoxiously licensed, is not without technical merit. There is a genuine market for it, just not a $50b one. One could say the same for what these other so-called dinosaurs are selling.

[exelius]

You're right about their sales practices -- and I've got more than one client who are slowly ripping out every Oracle product they have as a result. Oracle treats enterprise software sales like it's still the 90s, but in a lot of their markets there is no other serious vendor.

Oracle makes the majority of their money off of industry-function-specific ERP software that runs on top of their database platform. That's a market that's very hard to disrupt or displace, because you have to develop deep domain expertise in dozens of different industries and functions. Their technology platform licenses often sneak in the back door -- the customer wants the solution, and if they have to pay for the DB as part of the solution, then it's just part of the price.