[scarface74]

And then I’m stuck with the 4th (?) place cloud provider with a horrible reputation. Choosing Oracle definitely would violate the CYA rule - “No one ever got fired for choosing $what_everyone_else_chooses”. I would be safer choosing Azure or even GCP.

[lucianf]

Er, I'd argue that aiming for safety and/or following the crowd aren't really the ingredients of a sound decision making process. On that basis no challenger would ever stand a chance.

[scarface74]

That’s not my problem. Everyone looks out for their own self interest. Let’s say that OCI and AWS both statistically had the same uptime. If AWS went down for a day no one is going to question you as CTO for choosing AWS, besides you’re in the same boat as everyone else. If Oracle Cloud went down, everyone is going to be questioning your decision.

But, the saying initially was about IBM. The CTOs in the 60s and 70s who chose IBM instead of one of their competitors in hindsight made a good decision. You can still buy hardware from IBM today that can run COBOL programs written thirty to forty years ago. All of IBMs competitors are long dead.

From a recruitment standpoint, you can easily find someone who knows or wants to learn AWS or Azure - Oracle Cloud - not so much.