Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pipo234 95 days ago
> Output is a lot harder to measure, which means it can be fudged easily.

First and foremost, this is about Oracle. For the short period I worked there, my impression about culture and tech was: mediocre. Not excellent, not poor but just a around average.

Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially? I believe it's being ruthless to customers, employees and suppliers combined with cooking the financials.

Which bring me to your remark about output being difficult to measure. Imho Oracle had been exceptionally good at manipulating and obfuscating their output. And this was true long before AI came to the scene.
2 comments
onlyrealcuzzo 95 days ago
Oracle is mediocre because it could be.

That's probably where you'll end up if you're a company where that's an option.

No one was ever going to switch databases to a better DB as long as:

1) they did the bare minimum to ensure no alternative existed where switching made any sense.

2) they never charged too much where it made sense to switch thinking along the lines these businesses made decisions.

It's like the resource curse played out on a company scale.

If you have no incentive to get better, you won't.

link
oxag3n 95 days ago
> Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially?

Tons of mediocre enterprise software is built on Oracle DB.

Why enterprises are vendor locked-in? There are very few large enterprise players in every industry that implement all kind of ISO, standards, got an army of business analysts to generate million of requirement pages. Any new player must fight against that artificially overblown legacy systems, design and prove migration process is possible etc.

Here are just a bunch of industries my family/friends worked in and had first hand experience with these legacy systems - Airline (PSS), Banking, Healthcare, Hotel, Telecom.

link
pipo234 95 days ago
Sad, but true.

And if they had it their way, Oracle would have similarly strangled every last customer of Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, Solaris, etc. to squeeze out every last dollar.

And then make it look like they're innovating.

link