Yeah literally nothing about Oracle is useful or innovative. It’s like the WalMart of tech companies; just kind of exists and has rested on its laurels for a decade+.
Kind of a strange analogy. Walmart provides immense value to millions of people. They've developed an infrastructure that delivers cheap products to areas that otherwise would have few other options.
Oracle is the antithesis of Walmart. They provide insanely expensive options to corporations who are already locked in to their products.
One of the saddest days was when Oracle bought Sun and effectively killed all their open source projects overnight, like OpenOffice and MySQL. Yes, those things are still technically around, but they're not getting any serious development, and all the core developers of those projects have forked them into new open source projects.
Walmart has contributed to the decline of small businesses in rural areas[0] and they compensate their employees so little that they officially encourage their employees to take advantage of the social safety net[1] despite ever increasing annual net income[2] captured largely by the non-productive latter-generation Waltons.
Not to go too off the rails, but they only “contributed to the decline” by being a better option for customers that switched from small businesses in rural areas to Walmart.
A lot of small businesses are bad. Bad hours, bad selection of products, bad customer service, bad prices.
They’re often held up in some idyllic form, but it’s clear from the behavior of their own customers that Walmart provides these customers more value.
My wife teaches in a small, poor town that is off the beaten path. It is just outside of what most would consider the suburbs (we live on the edge of a suburb and she commutes through rural area to get there). The only grocery store in town is what used to be a locally owned and supplied store, and is now under the branding of a "Piggly Wiggly Xpress." The options are to go there, Dollar General, or drive almost 30 minutes to another option, one of which is a Walmart. Everyone who can just drives to the Walmart.
The local grocery store is the worst excuse for a grocery store I've ever seen. There are only a handful of fresh vegetable options, including $1/lb bananas and $5/head iceberg lettuce. Everything is overpriced and there are very few healthy food options. Apparently a lot of people due to transportation limitations can ONLY shop at this store (or Dollar General), which is expensive and mostly has unhealthy options. There are talks of a Walmart coming in, and I have no doubt it would be a huge quality of life improvements for folks in the town.
And then they leave the area after a while leaving nothing for anyone. I posted the links for a reason and that's because they support my claims. People like to ignore the facts in favor of their feelings and emotions.
They're held up in some idyllic form because while they're worse for customers, they're on average much better for employees. 'Small business' isn't just meant to be heartwarming when talked about as important - small businesses also spend a much larger percentage of their money on wages.
This feels like a false dichotomy to me (if it’s true which I’m not certain of).
It’s not very good for employees if your small business customers don’t like you and as a result you have to close.
A local car dealership may be great for its employees by ripping off customers and generally being a terrible experience, but I won’t have much sympathy when direct to consumer sales come and wipe them out.
Small businesses need to offer something of value to customers that’s real and differentiated as opposed to a narrative of their own self interest. In short - they have to be competitive. There’s no reason they can’t do this while also being good to employees.
A lot of the complaints I see come across as sour grapes and trying to legislate their existence rather than just being better and caring about what customers want.
At its best capitalism is a force for aligning value and interests between provider and customer. On net this leads to more efficient distribution and better outcomes for the most people.
At its worst it’s rent seeking and leveraging local power over people without choice. Small businesses often fall on that side of the spectrum to me.
It's not that simple. Small businesses, like small anything, are less efficient than larger versions. The inefficiencies inevitably bother customers.
It just so happens that in business, much of that inefficiency is the number of employees required per unit of economic activity. Ultimately all employees are an unwanted cost to the consumer. Small businesses have fewer options to avoid that cost, so they account for more employment.
Before Amazon took the crown of using technology for ruthless efficiency, Walmart was king.
I remember reading articles 10-15 years ago about how the minute someone scanned an item at the cash register, Walmart's inventory systems, which knew what product was on what shelf and in what quantity, would automatically order refills from the supplier.
They have always been highly innovative and tech savvy when it comes to the supply chain, at least for physical retail.
>the minute someone scanned an item at the cash register, Walmart's inventory systems, which knew what product was on what shelf and in what quantity
I wish this were the case, but anyone thats tried to do online grocery shopping at walmart knows that a lot of stuff shows out of stock, but is actually there in real life.
The online ordering is not tied into the realtime supplychain. The inventory mgmt that walmart developed is now ubiquitous among the largest retailers. Walmart is mow on or behind the innovation curve.
I don’t disagree that Walmart is making strides on the online shopping front but I also think they are only fighting for survival/relevance and would not produce anything new or interesting without this pressure. In contrast, companies like Amazon relentlessly develop new products and new technologies (see AWS). It’s not a response to external pressure — they don’t need to innovate to stay alive. They really embody the disruptive ambition / anything is possible mentality that fuels Silicon Valley. I sound like an Amazon fan boy but I’m the opposite haha just pointing out a difference in the DNA of these two companies.
Walmart had the largest corporate database in the world at one point in time (about a decade and a half ago), and used it to build a brutally efficient supply chain.
Innovation in process engineering and operations isn't really discussed much here, but it's almost assuredly had a much greater impact on keeping inflation at bay (helping the median American's salary stretch a little farther) than anything Amazon has ever done.
I don't think Oracle is a innovation focused company but its a bit naive to think they are just resting on laurels. They bring in nearly 40 billion a year in revenue and this year tried to buy tiktok. It's not like people are twiddling their thumbs over there just because the software they make is typically used by enterprise companies in unsexy ways.
Oracle has been a good steward of MySQL. I thought it was over when they acquired Sun, but the performance and features have really improved since then.
I would be more in the mood to praise Oracle for this development, had they not shown how far they could go to hurt Java's community/ecosystem just to squeeze a penny out of it.
Oracle is the antithesis of Walmart. They provide insanely expensive options to corporations who are already locked in to their products.
One of the saddest days was when Oracle bought Sun and effectively killed all their open source projects overnight, like OpenOffice and MySQL. Yes, those things are still technically around, but they're not getting any serious development, and all the core developers of those projects have forked them into new open source projects.