[shrubble]

A friend met with Oracle salesdroids (his company has spent a few million with them in the last few years).

They told him everything is oriented towards AI, to the point that otherwise profitable software is not being updated and development has stopped on anything new.

Oracle has a lot of niche solutions and the one my friend’s corporation uses is profitable but not on the AI path, so it is being put into maintenance mode.

[kstrauser]

That’s makes sense in its way, if they’re convinced and absolutely certain that’s the future. By analogy, I bet there were some carriage manufacturers who bet the farm on internal combustion engines when horse drawn carriages were still popular. It would seem insane at the time for them to give up their reliable business for something risky and unknown. However, in retrospect it would seem like bad business to throw resources after dead-end product lines, even if they’re valuable, because each dollar not advancing their automobile R&D was a dollar wasted on legacy stuff.

I’m not saying AI is the next internal combustion engine. If Oracle is certain it is, though, then that sounds like a more rational move.

[Kostic]

Time to copy&improve the niche solution.

[jcgrillo]

Absolutely unhinged behavior. If orcl goes nuts over chatbots and dies that will make this strange and profoundly icky era in tech all worth it.

[forinti]

The good bits will be sold off. Some of their products are very valuable, even if you don't like them.

[jcgrillo]

Yeah I don't dispute they have (had?) successful products. Just saying for a company to abandon successful products in favor of a wildly costly gamble is insane. To even arrive at the point where it seems like a "tradeoff" is delusional thinking--like, "we're going to stop supporting this successful product because the future value of this other thing is greater"... what? They've contorted themselves into believing that the future value that product is irrelevant, and all their customers whose trust they're burning are irrelevant, because... chatbots?

[forinti]

It seems reckless and unnecessary even if the gamble were 100% a sure thing, which no gamble ever is.

Even if AI is a game changer, it doesn't mean that your business model will have a role in it.

[echelon]

You can use AI to eliminate Oracle from your org's dependencies.

[kspacewalk2]

In a roundabout way, AI may just eliminate Oracle from my org's dependencies

[marcosdumay]

That's rational. Oracle has bet the farm on AI, if they don't make it work they will fail.

[forinti]

It doesn't seem rational to me that such a big company wouldn't prefer to diversify.