[da_chicken]

They're a victim of their own success. They became a monopoly and the quality of their product stopped mattering. They're an example of Steve Job's comments on Xerox's failure[0]. It happened at Oracle, IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. It's happening now at Apple, Intel and Google.

[0]: https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM

[toyg]

I agree on the overall theory (dominance in a sector tends to shift internal incentives in such a way that the result is an ossified development structure), but I think Jobs' terminology is imprecise. Larry Ellison is not really a product guy first and foremost, he's the definition of a tough salesman. The "bad guys" are a more generic variety of "corporate type" who can materialize in any department, really. Typically they power themselves up the ladder with "cost efficiencies". The most recent Oracle CEOs (Hurd and Catz) fit that profile to a T.

En passant: another big name that suffered from this phenomenon was Nokia.

[cryptonector]

I've a feeling that Oracle succeeded by accident. They won the race to win mindshare without understanding that that's what they were doing, and have since rested on their laurels and high pressure salesmanship. You see their lack of attention to mindshare in... everything they do.