[TheRealDunkirk]

> > Each vendor has its captured market...

> This is false.

You have no further to look for Oracle's captured market than the US federal government. When Snowden talks about the realtime interception, tracking, and monitoring of any and all electronic communications, worldwide, he's talking about the NSA using Oracle databases to do it. Ellison made the company successful by selling the as-yet-unproven technology of a relational database to the FBI (IIRC), and it's just continued from there. This is the environment that led Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun, to famously quip, "You have no privacy. Get over it." He knew that the NSA was collecting everything it could, and storing it in an Oracle database running on Sun hardware. Well, the commodity hardware caught up, but Postgres is still struggling to match the features Oracle had 20 years ago, so Oracle DB is still the king of enterprise databases, where cost is no object. Ellison owns government IT, which is what leads him to be so smug about his success. Even if all Fortune 500's would cut Oracle off, Oracle would continue to rake in piles of cash from the government. It is the definition of a captured market.