[dpapathanasiou]

Hard to say if the switch to Oracle (and the resulting expenses) was the reason for their demise, but I was surprised by this:

"In 2000 they were doing around $24 million per quarter with a gross margin of 21%."

Wow. How could you get off to a start like that and blow it all?

[bpeebles]

Well, it never was listed that Oracle was the reason, just that it was one of, and indicative of why it failed. If the MySQL solution was working, which the answerer on Quora implied, and there was no immediate sign of its failure, I think transitioning to Oracle at the cost of millions of dollars is a pretty big mistake.