[mrmcd]

> But they’re way behind, need to spend tens of billions to have a competitive global cloud infrastructure, and have a much more severe customer problem than IBM: their customers hate them

Had a good, long laugh at that one. Jesus, is there anyone on this planet that doesn't regard Oracle as the corporate equivalent of a slimy, violent mob boss?

[koolba]

Overall a great read. There's a bunch of funny lines. I like this one:

> You may not get fired for buying IBM, as the old saying goes, but it is increasingly likely your employer will go out of business if you’re in an industry where technology matters.

[vdalal]

Talking of great lines...

* "Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each spent more on CAPEX in 2017 than Oracle has in its entire history."

* "That red line you may mistake for the x-axis is Oracle’s CAPEX spending"

* "Maybe they are reconciled to sitting at the children’s table of cloud, but the problem for both IBM and Oracle is cloud is eating their existing businesses. It has eaten the server business and now starting to feast in earnest on software infrastructure, including the database, which is the profitable heart of these companies."

* "Both companies have acquired a number of SaaS applications, which will bolster their sense of self-worth and belonging in the cloud, but there is little to no platform leverage associated with these apps (and platform leverage = profits!!!)."

* "Watson which is in serious contention to be the biggest “overpromise and underdeliver” in tech industry history, now blockchain as they try to save humanity from our looming existential tomato provenance crisis"

* "And their (IBM’s) customer problem is who their customers are at this point: the disrupted. You may not get fired for buying IBM, as the old saying goes, but it is increasingly likely your employer will go out of business if you’re in an industry where technology matters."

[toyg]

And it’s a shame, because they didn’t need to be that way. They used to have some of the best tech; they still own some impressive products. But their constant game of “raise prices, reduce actual delivery, lie about it all” has antagonised so many people, that is hard to see how they can continue.

They could piss off us nerds and survive, but they’ve now lost a lot of credibility among C-level execs too, at this point. And to cap it off, they’re trying to force customers to make big migrations to cloud products that are simply not as good as the existing on-prem versions, just so they can toot inflated cloud numbers to Wall Street analysts.

And again, they didn’t have to: just sell both cloud and on-prem and let your customers choose.

[brazzledazzle]

I saw some holdouts but for a lot of them their tune changed when Oracle's enforcers told them how much they owed (retroactively) for running Oracle on Virtual infrastructure. You see, you don’t pay for per-processor you are actually using. You pay per-processor you could possibly use. Even with live migrations each instance could only live on two physical hosts at any one time but they had to pay for the entire VMware cluster.

You have one team trying to save the company (however fruitless it might be) by creating a cloud and being forward thinking and you have another team that’s trying to squeeze their existing customers for every drop. The former can only be hampered by the latter.

A tip for anyone running Oracle: I have a friend at a previous employer who put the screws to Oracle by running some non-prod on a massive box and just creates instances on the fly with docker containers for developers and automated testing. Of course I’d ask an attorney before doing that, YMMV.

[sanxiyn]

It's very sad, because I am a big fan of Oracle's technical work. Oracle Labs' work on GraalVM is nothing short of technical wonder. MySQL is progressing well under Oracle: MySQL 8.0 finally (finally!) got window functions. And so on.