[krylon]

Bryan Cantrill has called Oracle the North Star of Rage - whenever you are confused or lost, you can realign your coordinate system relative to Oracle.

I have never had to deal with Oracle, but every time I read something about them in the news, I think of of that nice quote and tend to agree a little more with Mr. Cantrill.

On the other hand, I wonder why they do this? This can only hurt Java. I would imagine some companies will take this as a sign and go with .Net where they presumably do not have deal with problems like this one.

[xenadu02]

Let me tell you... my company got acquired by Oracle. We thought things would be OK. Nothing changed immediately. Slowly but surely they turned the screws. 5 year laptop replacement policy. You get the corporate standard laptop and you'll like it. Sales? Oh those guys can buy new Macs every two years, they get whatever they want. Then you understand where Software Engineers rank in the company hierarchy. Oracle took the average price of our product from $100k to $5 million for the same size deals. Our sales went from $5-7m to more than $40m with no increasing in engineering headcount (team of 15). Didn't matter when bonus time came, we all got stack-ranked and some people got nothing. As a top performer I got a few options, worth maybe $5k.

Oracle exists to extract the maximum amount of money possible from the Fortune 1000. Everyone else can fuck off. Your impotent internet rage is meaningless. If it doesn't piss off the CTO of $X then it doesn't matter. If it gets that CTO to cut a bigger check then it will be embraced with extreme enthusiasm.

The culture wears down a lot (but not all) of the good people, who then leave. What's left is a lot of mediocrity and architecture astronauts. The more complex the product the better - it means extra consulting dollars!

My relative works at a business dependent on Micros. When Oracle announced the acquisition I told them to start on the backup plan immediately because Oracle was going to screw them sooner or later. A few years on and that is proving true: Oracle is slowly excising the Micros dealers and ISVs out of the picture, gobbling up all the revenue while hiking prices.

tl;dr: If your company is getting acquired by Oracle run away. I wish I had followed my instincts and bailed out much sooner. The place is horrible as a matter of policy to drive down the cost of software engineers so they don't have to make as many layoffs from their constant stream of acquisitions.

[paulstovell]

> Oracle took the average price of our product from $100k to $5 million for the same size deals. Our sales went from $5-7m to more than $40m with no increasing in engineering headcount (team of 15)

Not that I like the Oracle sales model, but that is impressive. Playing devils advocate, perhaps they are justified to treat sales so well.

[zzalpha]

Yeah, I was a bit baffled that was cited as a failure of some kind.

This just tells me pre-acquistion they weren't charging what the market would bear for their product, by a factor of 50.

Which is probably one of the reasons Oracle bought the company in this first place.

[coleca]

It also could be that Oracle realized the customers had some degree of perceived lock-in, so they jacked the price up to milk the customers dry on license renewal time. The customers paid once because they had little alternative, but started their transition to something new as soon as they could. The well will run dry quickly. They do the same thing with Oracle DB license audits, and burned CIOs pay the penalty and instruct their teams to start removing as much Oracle as they can as fast as they can so it doesn't happen again.

[tluyben2]

I even ran away when Oracle acquired our main partner (BEA). My colleagues didn't understand (ramblings of a paranoid CTO or whatever) but sure enough Oracle basically cut all deals we had and made our business worthless after all that investment. A few (techies) got out in time and they managed to pivot after that successfully. I left Java completely; never used it after that.

[Bombthecat]

IBM is doing the same thing.axway too. And I bet a ton of others too.

Making money is no soooo easy: hire sales,drain the engeneers.

[beachstartup]

> On the other hand, I wonder why they do this? This can only hurt Java

because they can. because it makes money. because it works. because the people who choose to base their entire technology stack on proprietary software are used to paying exorbitant fees for stuff that's available for free because they don't have any confidence in their own ability to solve problems.

i mean, the real question is: why wouldn't they do this? everytime i see ellison's megayacht parked in santa monica bay when i drive up pch i know exactly why.