Oracle's Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring With Customers (lightreading.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Oracle's aggressive sales tactics are turning off customers, setting a roadblock in the company's race to catch up with Amazon Web Services in the cloud, according to a report on The Information. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. Oracle is threatening customers of its on-premises software with potentially expensive usage audits and strongly suggesting those customers could solve their problems by moving to the cloud, The Information says. But the tactic is backfiring. "Several big Oracle customers, including oil and gas exploration company Halliburton, toy maker Mattel and electricity provider Edison Southern California, have recently rejected big cloud services deals proposed by Oracle, according to an Oracle employee with knowledge of the situation," the publication reported. "Oracle representatives had suggested the customers strike the deals to avoid expensive audits of how they were using Oracle software, according to the employee. Instead, that approach to selling cloud is irritating customers," it added.

Comments

When did software geeks become the Mob?

[JoeyRox]

Shakedown tactics like demanding payment for protection are straight out of the Mob's playbook.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle does this to government agencies all the time. It works quite well. All of them cave to demands to buy more licenses or face audits.

It's racketeering.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just about Oracle, not software geeks. Oracle's company motto is "be overtly evil." They have to be evil even in situations where they're able to calculate that they shouldn't! Let this be a lesson to everyone who thinks moral flexibility isn't a virtue.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

It's racketeering.

Then it's time to hit Oracle with a RICO Act . . .

. . . if Oracle hasn't already paid off the district attorneys . . .

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

No, they couldn't. The provisions in the enterprise schemes that Oracle and other large IT organisations set up in return for offering deep discounts to their biggest customers almost invariably contain significant obligations around audits, which will be expensive and disruptive regardless of whether anything contravening any terms is actually found.

The correct solution is probably to respond in kind. "Nice Oracle deployment we've got, and quite lucrative for you guys over many years now. Be a shame if the relationship broke down and we had to spend that money migrating our whole infrastructure to [competitor] instead."

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Billly Gates]

I am not a Gnu zealout by any sense of the means but being addicted to proprietary file formats is evil.

We all hate Microsoft for doing this but Oracle and IBM have been doing this long before MS rise and in my eyes is less evil than Oracle today. Microsoft at least gives you the bone if you go to Azure and Office 365 by including other features and tools vs buying a copy.

It is no different than ransomware once you are hooked. If your customer data or a MUST HAVE mission critical app has an Oracle dependency using proprietary PSQL your choices are to pay the ransom to Oracle, get sued, or shut your company down. Take your pick?

Halliburton probably figured it would be cheaper to fight in court then pay the ransom as they have lots of money and I would guess seat licenses that Oracle is drooling to charge.

Meanwhile IT costs keep going up even though technology should make them go down. They just lay us off and replace us with Indians and pay Larry Ellison the difference.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shakedown tactics

Wait, what? Is Oracle charging the customer for the cost of the audit or is the extra expense due to the customer being charged for licenses they're using but never paid for? The later case is hardly a shakedown.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[DogDude]

We all hate Microsoft for doing this

Do you have any evidence of this? We've been using Microsoft enterprise-class software (not just Office) for years, and we've never been threatened with an audit.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

We all hate Microsoft for doing this

Do you have any evidence of this? We've been using Microsoft enterprise-class software (not just Office) for years, and we've never been threatened with an audit.

I should have been more clear. I was referring to proprietary data formats and lockin which they did quite well in securing Windows and Office on the desktops.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

I blame goats for Oracle.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[fustakrakich]

Since when was Oracle run by 'software geeks'?

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[giggleloop]

It's about the same as an IRS agent approaching you and saying "It'd be a real shame if you got audited. I hear some agents are being very, very thorough these days. No stone unturned. Oh! On a completely unrelated note, I need a favor from you..."

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Then it's time to hit Oracle with a RICO Act . . .

It's time to hit Oracle with a tactical nuke.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

The audit is expensive itself. And, Oracle seems to always find problems. They don't charge for licensed used, but also for the model of processor they run on. And the definitions keep changing. I suspect there are problems in every multi-site, multinational company.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

One
Raging
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the IRS budget keeps getting slashed, audits are down not up, and I imagine quality is also suffering. I know people who are in arrears with the IRS and frankly am stunned at how nice & forgiving the IRS is. From my perspective too forgiving. Dodging taxes should cost you more not less, otherwise there is an incentive to dodge taxes.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Microsoft was first formed. Welcome to capitalism!

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure why it would work. If they did that where we work the answer would be âoeSue us. The federal government pays what it thinks is legal and fair. If you think itâ(TM)s not so, go talk to our federal lawyersâ

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

When they approched out business we switched to postgresql

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[hackingbear]

Because once the application are written to one flavor of SQL and the large amount data stored into that database, it is prohibitively expensive and disruptive to migrate out, so the vendor has an upper-hand to the existing large paying customers (who typically have under-trained developers.) This strategy would only backfire in attracting future customers once the stories spread out.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Because once the application are written to one flavor of SQL and the large amount data stored into that database, it is prohibitively expensive and disruptive to migrate out

It's probably expensive, yes, but whether it's prohibitively so depends entirely on your circumstances. Maybe you can afford to hire enough smart people to get the job done if the alternative is being forced to migrate to some new cloud/subscription mess, which itself comes with a lot of risk and with unknown stability and uncertain future costs.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

You realise Oracle don't just do database right?

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[HiThere]

Well, I realize I found their database terrible, the sales tactics abominable, and decided to never do business with them again. I never bothered to consider whether they did anything beside the database, because the quality of the database was only a part of my reason for avoiding them.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[HiThere]

Apple has historically been much more a proponent of proprietary file formats than IBM has been. It may well be true that not many files use EBCDIC encoding, but they *could*.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[slickwillie]

Criticism of Microsoft

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've actually used and developed against their cloud offering. It's not really cloud. If you want to scale, you put in a request and then argue with a person on a support call as to why you need to scale. I keep getting the impression that it is all manual. None of their documentation is complete. I got to speak with one of their developers about how to use a new feature since there was no documentation on it. She couldn't tell me how to create the right request to call it, even though she was on that team. When the docs are present, I sometimes wait 2-4 minutes for a simple webservice call to respond. So if they move customers away from their on-prem offering, I can certainly see them going to Dynamics instead.

I'm planning on writing a big article with my boss on the experience we've had. It has been downright comical at times. We still can't get our company to realize this is going to cost them in the long run.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle sales people are not geeks. They generally know nothing about technology nor their products.

They get the Pre-sales architect to provide all the tech info while they just think about how to make customers buy more stuff...

They are not nerds.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle were never geeks... it's just the place that stuff geeks make go to die.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect from Larry Ellison?

Honesty?

You've got to be kidding...

Customers HAVE to pay for his private jet(s), his Hawaiian island, his mistresses, and his lifestyle,
not to mention all his legal bills from the women he's raped.

The man is a scumbag, pure and simple, and deserves a few prison terms.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

The mob copped it from Oracle

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's always that guy that says 'just use postgres', it shows how naive people are when they think Oracle just sell database. The real battle ground in Oracle for cloud is in enterprise application offerings like Siebel, OAG, MFT, EDQ, OPA, BIP, SOA, APM etc. which underpin critical business applications. The migration strategy for these elenents is far more complex than a simple database with a few SQL queries.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trumpicle? Boracle? Snoracle? Abusacle?

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Netflix was just a DVD company the database was Oracle with a single monoliths c Java application called javaweb. As the migration from DVD in the Datacenter to Streaming in AWS was made Oracle was switched with Cassandra. During the transition many outages were caused by dual sources of truth that got called Roman Riding (riding 2 horses by standing on each one with one foot, any disparity and you fall). It tools years to decouple the two. The dvd.com business stayed in the Datacenter with Oracle, for a few more years. AFAIK, dvd.com is now Oracle free.

Branch by abstraction with a data abstraction service is your friend when you want to move away from a legacy data store. Many a java developer will love Oracle because it will do a lot of stuff where the DBA writes the SQL code for them so they do not have to write the code themselves, a little like java serialisation. It is not easy nor cheap to migrate but in the long term much better than sticking with Oracle.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Darinbob]

You get stuck with the sunk cost problem. You're spent tons of money rolling things out to support Oracle. Now the yearly cost is high, but it's still a lot smaller than starting from scratch, so the companies stick with it. Never mind that the IT staff that are trained in Oracle and don't have experience in anything else have a vested interest in keeping Oracle lest they get replaced at the same time that Oracle is replaced.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Netflix was just a DVD company the database was Oracle with a single monoliths c Java application called javaweb. As the migration from DVD in the Datacenter to Streaming in AWS was made Oracle was switched with Cassandra. During the transition many outages were caused by dual sources of truth that got called Roman Riding (riding 2 horses by standing on each one with one foot, any disparity and you fall). It tools years to decouple the two.

Interesting. That is what I thought you would have to do. Find a place to start the transition and transition that chunk on test machines, before eventually going live with that chunk, and then resolving any final bugs. Rinse and repeat. Of course any query that has to cross both databases would have to be dealt with in code. Cassandra is written in Java, which presumably could manage to do something like H2's macro's which are ultimately java. That way those macro's might be able to dig into the oracle database and give one apparent interface. How well that would work in practice who knows. A lot of planning would definitely be required.

There was an apparent C version of cassandra. Not sure how ready for prime time it was.

My own irritation with nosql, is if you don't need the scaling, then something like h2 or even sqlite, if you can use it, is going to give you a larger set of possible queries. The guys at work who know way more than me like Microsoft way more than Oracle. The little I've done with Microsoft seems to, for the most, part just work.

I wonder if all the hype about object relational mappers is really worth it, when faced with a choice of moving away from Oracle. Certainly they might make the next move easier. I'm just somewhat mistrustful of adding arbitrary layers of abstraction during a programs core number crunching mission.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[StormReaver]

When they approched out business we switched to postgresql

I'll skip the details, but we, though our circumstances were not so dire, switched out all Oracle instances under our control to PostgreSQL because we got sick and tired of every aspect of Oracle's database (the software, the sales and marketing departments, the piss poor customer support, etc.).

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[NicknameUnavailable]

They aren't software geeks. Silicon Valley are just all marketing and PR people who usurped the image of nerds for the sake of a disguise.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[sg_oneill]

Oracle does this to government agencies all the time. It works quite well. All of them cave to demands to buy more licenses or face audits.

It's racketeering.

Oh yeah. I worked for the department of parks in australia for a few years and it boggled my mind that on a team of six in development, one guy ended up spending most of his time dealing with bullshit Oracle licensing. We ended up ditching all that code and moving it to Postgres. But it wasnt enough to flush them out. Problem is accounts where dependent on Oracle financials, and once they've locked you in, its very hard to get them out. The worst part was , we where new department at the time, formed from the state govt merging a few related govt departments, and via one of those we inhereted that stupid accounting software, AND their audits, agressive and malevolent behavior from reps. Its just bullshit and it blows my mind governments can get intimidated like that. Theres bit of a legend of them threatening an audit raid on one of the local military bases and being informed that trying to force ones way onto a military base is a good way to get filled with lead. I never did find out if that was a true story.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[jezwel]

Responding to any audit is expensive in terms of hours wasted. The Ts & Cs for many enterprise products are onerous - besides the normal CPU brand, sockets and cores for each physical server, you might need to report on processer stepping, VM movements between hardware - including to other sites - hot and cold spares, heartbeat DR servers, and concurrent usage where there is no way to prevent overages. You'll also need to have good doco on the commissioning, OS and app install (by who and on what hardware) process, plus hardware decommissions.

They can be a massive amount of hours wasted gathering and defending actions.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure how the audit proves expensive. Oracle would need to do it at their own cost and, for database-only users, would likely be pointless. Not like you'd be exceeding licenses on ODBC connections.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a certain large retailer and can tell you point blank sales tactics like this have blown up in the face of MS, IBM, and Oracle in our shop. Yes it cost a lot of money but by the end of this year weâ(TM)ll be 90% or more free of Each of them. The only place left in our shop for any of them is if we have a proprietary package that requires their stuff. Otherwise their hardball tactics ticked off our CIO who very colorfully told us that he wanted their software out of our shop. We wound up spending more on engineers than we had in the past but reduced our overall IT spend to the tune of tens of millions of dollars per annum. And, weâ(TM)ve moved almost everything to open source technology.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Bing Tsher E]

Which is the reason to never, if possible, get tangled up in the Oracle web.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Bing Tsher E]

Apple's bootup sequence is historically completely opaque and closed. Until they were taken over by NeXT, there was really no way to boot another OS directly on a Mac. Even today when I want to boot up my SE/30 into NetBSD I have to use a little stub bootup of Mac OS 7 with an exploit application to start the NetBSD bootloader. The Mac OS launcher application even spits out a little suicide-like message as it hands off.

In general, Apple loves and embraces closedness. And they've been litigous motherfuckers almost from day 1.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Bing Tsher E]

Yeah, it'd sure be nicer if the Democrats had won in '16 so the IRS could be the nasty mofos we all remember fondly. There are probably whole layers in the IRS org sweating bullets that their corner of the swamp will be next to be drained. The statute of limitations hasn't passed for those Obama glory years.

Still, the people who voted Dem in '16 should be eager to help the IRS take their money, for nostalgia's sake.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Bing Tsher E]

Wrong topic. This isn't about a company formed by a nerd like Bill Gates that grew out of control. Ellison was an evil bastard from d 1.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Bing Tsher E]

Is it an article for inside your organisation? You can gurantee there is a NDA somewhere Oracle will spring on you if you relate your experience in the trade press. They are true professionals.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Bullshit. Every giving lazy ass GS I worked against was focused Pugh not getting blamed. Throwing away taxpayer money to make a vendor walk back a threat to complain was just called Thursday.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Billly Gates]

The reason for this was the mere 128K of ram wasn't enough back in 1984 to have the mac do all what Steve Jobs wanted it to do. The answer was a custom ROM chip with part of MacOS on it to clear out more ram for apps. Hell, the original Mac even had a chip just for freaking icon processing.

The Apple boot sequence was put on the ROM to conserve the ram.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Billly Gates]

Apple did give us HTML 5 and kill flash. THANK GOD. IE 6 was killing all innovation last decade and it refused to ever die. The iphone and demand to view their shitty IE 6 only sites on it propelled HTML 5 as Firefox itself wasn't enough to kill of IE 6 specific CSS and javascript hacks.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only way Apple "gave" anyone html5 was integration into ios8 in 2014.

Steve Jobs' desire to nuke flash and replace it with an open, standards based alternative doesn't mean that Apple had any formative influence. In fact, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and most internet heavyweights were the early adopters, incorporating html5 by 2012, after the standard was first published in 2008.

Jobs deserves props for trashing flash publicly in 2010, but the writing was already on the wall. Flash was an obsolete, proprietary, insufficient tool that made security and compatibility a nightmare for web based software development.

It took Apple 6 years to hop on the bandwagon, and Safari integration is still janky.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[thegarbz]

Then it's time to hit Oracle with a RICO Act . . .

In general whenever you think about doing anything with the RICO act to an organisation, just slap yourself in the face a few times, and then actually go through a normal list of federal crimes or civil contract law. RICO was designed to bring down the kind of organisation that didn't exist on paper. If you could throw a RICO book at Oracle, they'd already not exist, be paying a long backlock of federal fines, and Larry Ellison would be donating his net worth to as many people as possible to stay out of prision.

So no, it's never time to hit a corporation with a RICO Act: https://www.popehat.com/2016/0...

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[thegarbz]

It's probably expensive, yes, but whether it's prohibitively so depends entirely on your circumstances.

Your circumstances got you into using Oracle in the first place, it is prohibitively expensive to switch your application. If it weren't you wouldn't be using this type of platform in the first place.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[thegarbz]

If this is a concern for you then you probably deserve to get audited.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle, and Cisco are the worst tech companies in the world. It used to be IBM and Microsoft doing the big shakedowns.

Instead Oracle buys its way into software that people are already using like Java and MySQL and then turns around and pulls this shit. Cisco did the same with linksys to try and get users of cheap linux routers to use their Cisco IOS based overpriced gear ... in their homes and small businesses. Linksys was then sold to Belkin, who is being sold to Foxconn.

I want Oracle to DIAF. Very little of what they do is of any public benefit and it would do the world a lot of good if Java, MySQL, VirtualBox were released back into a public trust and not dicked around anymore by Oracle licencing.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Siebel is shit. AT&T Wireless used it during their 2.5G/3G migration, and it was a glorified MSIE ActiveX plugin wrapping a raw database, and slow as fucking molasses.

It is garbage. You can do the same thing in a HTML5+Javascript and four lines of php to handle INSERT, DELETE, SELECT and UPDATE.

Or at least whatever AT&T was sold was utter trash.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

.... tired of every aspect of Oracle's database (the software, the sales and marketing departments, the piss poor customer support, etc.).

But all that will be fixed if you move to the cloud.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who voted Dems are probably eager to help the IRS because it had been weaponized against conservatives under Obama.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, both the federal police and the military are authorised to use lethal force if someone tried to force their way onto a military base.

Iâ(TM)d expect that running the gate would simply get the oracle salesâ(TM)s Repâ(TM)s Audi stuck on a pop-up crash barrier, however.

Oracleâ(TM)s sales culture turning off customers is nothing new - Iâ(TM)ve seen simply appalling behaviour from them for 20+ years.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Microsoft has threatened customers with audits. Iâ(TM)ve worked at two places where their were more Microsoft lawyers than salespeople in the âoesalesâ process, and audits were threatened in order to encourage the customer to opt for all you can eat, all employee licencing

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[zaphirplane]

Why is it wrong, get the right number licences in the first place. Let the mood down roll

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

You too kind. I won't write what I would say to them because children might be reading. I do Dr for really big companies. Many of them were running oracle ovs virtualization. I finnaly asked some why they were running the crapiest hypervisor. Answer was that if they wanted to run oracle db VMS on VMware they would need to pay for all cores no matter how many they were using. But if they used oracle obs they could just pay for the cores allocated to the vm

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Juju]

We are doing something similar. Although, the approach is more progressive.
We are switching from Oracle to PostgreSQL for new projects, and will move the existing databases as opportunities arise...
One can only hope that Oracle DB will follow Solaris in the slow death by free software, Oracle has an history of trying to monetize what can be had for free and failing miserably. I wonder how fast they will manage to kill Java given their current history of alienating customers.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Surely that at least depends on how long you've been using it for? Some places have been on Oracle for many years, and the alternatives have come a long way in that time. Migrating fundamental infrastructure in your organisation is always risky, expensive, time-consuming and generally not great, but being abused by a supplier who holds you captive isn't great either.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because once the application are written to one flavor of SQL and the large amount data stored into that database, it is prohibitively expensive and disruptive to migrate out, so the vendor has an upper-hand to the existing large paying customers

This is why some other db vendors are advertising loudly compatibility with oracle sql code ...
And it is always a balance - how annoyed are you with "current situation" and how much it will cost to change current situation ...
if it is low, you will pay and proceed with your business
if it is high, you will evaluate other products
if it is in the range of tactical nuke or "hell hath no fury" ... you will start migration project
Just be reasonable ... and calculating like good sociopath ...;-)

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[bad-badtz-maru]

We did the same. It was a two year project because we were knee deep in pl/sql code but it worked out very well in the end. We also used Oracle's B2B product, which we switched away from at the same time. The motivation for the swap came after Oracle hit us with an audit and demanded payment for a data warehousing option enabled on a single dev server, an option we had never used (or requested). That Oracle install had been performed by a oracle consultant sourced by our oracle sales rep, but this apparently didn't matter. My boss was ultra-enraged, as the unexpected bill caused us to exceed the software budget for that year.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Cederic]

You do realise Siebel predates HTML5 and php?

Not that you can buy it any more, Oracle stopped selling shit branded Siebel years ago.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Count yourself lucky...We are medium sized business, less than 1000 but more than 500 employees. We had those compliance audits 4 times in past 8 years. Every time we were in compliance. Last time I asked the guy, hey how come I am getting this almost on a routine basis, his answer basically was well your agreed to it, when you click yes to the EULA. Not so sure, what criteria they use to decide who needs to be audited.

However, linux made huge inroads in our data center as a result.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Billly Gates]

Apple really wrote the first HTML 5 draft as HTML 4.01 was too cutting edge for IE appearrently back in 2007 back in the first iPhone. Google quickly hopped on board and Firefox was eager to follow if everyone agreed to a standard. Google now is taking leadership but objects like canvas were central.

True it took until 2014 when old IE verion 8 went eol before it became mainstream. If the first iPhone didn't come out we might of still been using HTML 4.

Apple really is not updating Safari anymore after Steve's death. They don't need to as people moved on and they can't cotail off Chrome anymore since webkit got forked into blink. But back in the day IOS and safari were cutting edge.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[thegarbz]

Some places have been on Oracle for many years, and the alternatives have come a long way in that time.

I see the words you strung together, but I translated them to: Oracle has become entrenched in the business and everyone we know is trained in it, and we all know how to service it and moving away would be an unmitigated disaster.

Migrating fundamental infrastructure in your organisation is always risky, expensive, time-consuming and generally not great, but being abused by a supplier who holds you captive isn't great either.

Oh I agree. But that sentence there will not win you over with management.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Bing Tsher E]

And none of it could ever, under any circumstances, become public knowledge? Nobody could ever reveal anything that would allow third party bootloaders to work? Yes, there truly was 'One Apple Way.'

The IBM PC had a large ROM, too. The original had an entire BASIC interpreter in ROM, similar to what a Commodore or an Apple II had.

But the commented assembly langauge source code for the BIOS (but not the BASIC interpreter) was published for generations of IBM PC versions, at least up to the PC-AT, That was called an 'open architecture.' Apple didn't have one on the Mac. At all. You couldn't even open up the case without special tools designed to be proprietary.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

More than once either Microsoft or its front, threatened to audit me.
That was back when I used DrDos, and wrote my own software.
Not a microsoft program on my system.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

The IRS does 3 types of audits:
* Digital, in-house data only;
* Compliance;
* Suspected or probable underpayment;

Digital audits have increased;
Compliance audits have dropped;
Suspected underpayment inquiries are about the same;
Suspected over-payment inquiries have been eliminated;

Digital Audits are divided into two classes:
* Does everything look kosher;
* Is everything kosher;

The difference between the two is that the first looks at percentages, and deviations from the mean, whilst the second correlates data on the return, with financial data from third parties.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[HornWumpus]

Which is why smart devs stick to ANSI SQL as much as practical, and leave a standard way of finding all the vendor specific code.

Sure, you are porting stored procedures. But 90% of your data layer should 'just work'. It's expensive and time consuming, but cheaper than Oracle licensing.

Software vendors need to beware of being Oracle only. Sure some places are Oracle shops, but others won't touch Oracle at all. Smart ones will consider the DB, but _absolutely_nothing_else_ from Oracle, not even Java.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[HornWumpus]

Oracle stopped using lube during their yearly marketing visits with management, read the fine summary. Management is looking for a safe escape.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

So? what can you do about this? Oracle owns JAVA and will audit and jack up license fee?
Thanks to all those idiots who don't know how pointers works.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But that sentence there will not win you over with management.

No doubt you're right, at least regarding a lot of businesses. Without both management and tech people on board, you're certainly not going to escape the trap, and if Oracle believes that's the position you're in, you have no leverage at all in negotiations.

In that case, management just has to accept that they wrote a blank cheque to an organisation like Oracle and now they have to pay up.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the problem, it's never enough. Oracle will find a reason to fine you. That's their shakedown racket. Small intricacies, play ball or get audited. No one passes an audit. Unless they play ball.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it a natural D1?

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

Facts.com

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Applehu Akbar]

I for one am not the kind of person who uses the Offtopic mod to mean "I disagree politically." Your comment is totally clear and applicable to the discussion: any scheme for raising revenue that cannot be made simple and automatic deserves all the cheaters it attracts.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Aighearach]

If you're switching to postgresql then the stored procedures are easy to port.

People who think it is hard probably don't know about the options.

Smart companies with big databases hire generic DBAs, not BrandyBrand(TM) Certified people who appear to be technical employees working for you, but because their training is company-other-than-yours dependent they actually act as sales engineers for the vendor!

There is no reason to consider the BrandyBrand(TM) DB once you look at the cost, and realize that you have to hire a DBA either way; if you choose postgresql then the DBA is your whole cost! And they don't even cost more than BrandyBrand(TM) DBAs.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[HornWumpus]

Devil is in the details.

I've been around long enough to be very skeptical of compatibility layers. Validating can be non-trivial, but at least you'll build tests (you should have had all along).

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Aighearach]

The migration strategy is especially complex because consultants "see them coming" when they see they're transitioning from Oracle; those clients are used to paying more than 10 times what people using alternatives pay, and so the rates go up. Yes there is a lot to replace, but you're replacing low quality stuff that is designed to be a huge mess with much simpler stuff that has less parts and where each part is less complicated.

Oracle tricks these companies that see themselves as being super-duper-enterprisey into spending more money on COTS than a custom system would cost, and in that environment, the more you're willing to spend to move to a new system the sooner you're saving money.

I could save some of these companies millions of dollars if they wanted, but unfortunately the management failings that lead to being in that situation also get in the way of admitting and correcting the mistakes. But as long as they choose a small technical consultancy instead of a big company flogging clients from yesteryear they'll still save a lot, even while getting fleeced! That's just how much more it costs to use Oracle than to use postgres. Even IBM DBII would save them money.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[thegarbz]

Management is looking for a safe escape.

Exactly. And the argument presented is not that safe escape. Management will do what they do best. Look at the pros and cons and then decide that anal really only hurts the first few times and then you kind of get to like it.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[thegarbz]

Interesting my reply ended up in the wrong part of the thread...

Management is looking for a safe escape.

Exactly. And the argument presented is not that safe escape. Management will do what they do best. Look at the pros and cons and then decide that anal really only hurts the first few times and then you kind of get to like it.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Aighearach]

I should have been more clear. I was referring to proprietary data formats and lockin which they did quite well in securing Windows and Office on the desktops.

Not really. I remember in the late 90s people kept telling me that I couldn't work any job using computers without MS Office, because File Formats. The thing is, my tools opened the files just fine, and people could open and read my documents fine too. Sometimes there would be problems between different people on a project sharing files, because they had different versions of MS Office, so they'd give the files to me to load and re-save in an open tool which all tended to produce portable files. So it was never true. And eventually people stopped saying it, without anything having changed.

It took over a decade for most people to comprehend that free software and open source are real options and not an imaginary hippie commune from a movie. For people already using it, of course, we're in the 20th year of Linux on the Desktop.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Aighearach]

It was a typo; it was supposed to be software Greeks .

Spoiler for Furreners: it means people who lived at Fraternities or Sororities while attending University.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only on shitty design. Blame the architect, not the vendor.

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[zippthorne]

As the migration from DVD in the Datacenter to Streaming in AWS was made Oracle was switched with Cassandra.

A database product called, "Cassandra"? Name's a little on-the-nose, isn't it?

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[StormReaver]

I wonder how fast they will manage to kill Java given their current history of alienating customers.

Thankfully, SUN had the foresight to GPL Java before selling it to Oracle. There are many companies capable of collaborating on Java maintenance and development when Oracle fucks it all up.

Re:When did software geeks become the Mob?

[q4Fry]

I heard this as "o. rich a.c.l.e.," but GGP might repurpose it again to say "racketeering."

Re: When did software geeks become the Mob?

[Anonymous Coward]

When is having a customer pay for licenses they are using without paying for considered racketeering?

Sleazy Beard

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who has ever looked at Larry Ellison's super-villain beard could have seen this coming...

Not news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle has been doing this shit for years. Fuck them.

Re:Not news...

[Anonymous Coward]

The NEWS is that people are finally waking up and realising that if they have to move, why not take a bigger picture and consider moving off Oracle? That's the difference this time. (You HAVE to move? So might as well move away from Oracle.)

SQL Server on-cloud is available with, as I understand it, straightforward and transparent pricing. The only real question is the cost of moving may mean moving your whole ecosystem.

(If you're using database agnostic tools like Tableau, you're probably okay. If you've been running your company on Oracle Financials.... yeah, moving off Oracle is not a trivial (nor easy!) thing; but not impossible.)

Re:Not news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle sales being horrible bastards has been a known thing for at LEAST 15 years.

Hell, I remember a Sybase ad from about a decade ago saying, essentially, "Oracle salespeople are monsters, move to Sybase."

Re:Not news...

[b0s0z0ku]

The customers don't want to be "on cloud" -- they want to stay local. How much would moving to a competing local solution cost?

Re:Not news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Careful with that answer, if you are honest and say 'everything we have been spending we did not have to spend' the sales people will come knocking on your door.

If you are dishonest and say 'well we need windows licenses and having an SQL database with tech support is really good' then you continue to not make waves and have indicated that the emperor does have clothes, which is the correct business response.

Truthfully with HDD's being so cheap and computers so powerful there is little reason not to run things in house. It is more cost effective, you have more fine grain control when you need it, and no one will come poking around in your business. It ends up saving money hand over fist which all these companies are trying to get into their fists. If you switch over to linux, you lose all the microsoft license costs and you lose all the audit threats. If you switch over to mongodb you loose all the oracle license costs and all the audit threats. You will be more secure, your IT systems will run flawlessly and tirelessly like good little machines should, and you will just feel better that everything works and everyone is working and not dealing with the latest IT explosion.

Re: Not news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Only Sybase is as shitty as Oracle.

Worked for a large MNC who used Oracle which merged with a company using Sybase.

Sybase knocked on the door demanding $50m because your âoenumber of employeesâ doubled for your enterprise licensing terms.

Both Oracle and Sybase are monsters.

Re:Not news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Same happened on my previous job; the cost is now less if the system moved out of Oracle than keeping it, even if it requires changing the server side software. It is too bad, as the service had been there for 15 years and only thing that changed was Oracles new policies from hell.

Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is why anyone would continue to use Oracle software knowingly anymore?

They've always been bad. And the fact they basically just grabbed the red hat source and threw in a slightly modified kernel and started competing against them directly is just 1 other example of the kind of company they are

Re:Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've asked myself the same question, and I think the true answer is that it's a generational problem. Current CIOs and middle managers came up during a time when "nobody ever got fired for buying Oracle", and it had a reputation as being the only DB capable of scaling up and being reliable.

It's a very different world now, but these decision-makers still carry the same old bias. People who have exposure to PostgreSQL, for example, and see that it's viable in the real world, will be much less inclined to hold themselves hostage to Oracle. And even some of the suits might eventually start questioning the amount of money they are bleeding away on licensing.

Re:Not new..

[ngc5194]

This is similar to the question I've been asking: Are there any happy Oracle customers? My (limited) research suggests that the vast majority of Oracle customers have one of three characteristics: (1) They don't know any better, (2) They have more money than time/expertise for converting, (3) They're locked in.

Are there other reasons? Is there anyone who would choose to do a new implementation using Oracle these days? For all I know there may be a lot of people who would, but I've never knowingly met any of them.

Re:Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle is more than just a database. It's an ecosystem of applications. You structure your business process around Oracle. Everyone gets trained on Oracle. You can go to a competitor, but you have to re-train everyone and change your business processes. That may be not a big deal for a small/mid-sized company. If you're a large company, it's just not going to happen. You'd rather just bend over for Larry.

Re: Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

The DB is the only good thing they have (if you donâ(TM)t consider the cost and their tactics)

Their apps are shit. Oracle financial services? Peoplesoft? They are all shit and Oracle buy companies and run them into the ground by abusing customers and extracting âoevalueâ and leave the products to languish in obsolescence.

Re:Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

This is similar to the question I've been asking: Are there any happy Oracle customers?

Yes, however, they just signed the contract and the Ecstasy hasn't worn off yet.

Re:Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

1 and 2 are special cases of 3. All large software (and hardware) companies attempt to maximize #3. All business do, for that matter. Oracle has been better at it than most, but it doesn't stop the others from trying.

The modern move to software subscriptions (rather than purchasing a forever license and upgrading when it makes sense) even for PC stuff is another way to maximize lock-in. For instance, I very much like ACD Canvas graphics software - far more cost-effective than the equivalent combination of Adobe & ESRI - but they've recently moved to subscription-only like the others so I suspect I've bought the last update from them. I don't use it in a business, so having an ongoing expense writeoff makes no sense - I'm not making money with it to take the tax writeoff against. OTOH, their file format is very proprietary, so shifting to some combination of other stuff once Canvas no longer works (shouldn't be a near-term problem, with Windows' backward compatibility, but when the time comes for a Linux shift...) it will be difficult and a clear technical lock-in is present.

Re: Not new..

[Bing Tsher E]

Talk to a shrink about that Stockholm Syndrome. Get yourself free, man.

Re: Not new..

[Bing Tsher E]

Everybody is moving to subscription.

Autodesk bought Eagle, and now you have to pay by the month, no matter what, unless you hold an old license. It's been good for the KiCad project, though. I feel bad for the old-line Eagle devs.

Re:Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

Only reason companies stick with Oracle is the fucking Data Analysts/DBAs they gave in-house whose job depends on writing fucking PL/SQL code and also making sure every new application/architecture is still based on doing huge amount of work on Data Loading/Procedures/Triggers etc. Don't blame Oracle. It's the people at these companies. Loosers.

Re:Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

The Agony is definitely here, however.

Re:Not new..

[Billly Gates]

(4) The non IT geeks, but financial and statistician math nerds LOVE Toad and all the cute dashboards of real time business intelligence they can impress their MBA friends with.

To them it's not psql but the other tools that no competitor besides Microsoft has.

They are the ones who think they can boss IT around and get it done because they like their tools and IT will obey or be outsourced.

Re:Not new..

[John_Sauter]

...Are there any happy Oracle customers? My (limited) research suggests that the vast majority of Oracle customers have one of three characteristics: (1) They don't know any better, (2) They have more money than time/expertise for converting, (3) They're locked in.

My experience is also very limited, but I can assure you that there is at least one customer who has all three characteristics.

Re:Not new..

[Aighearach]

why anyone would continue to use Oracle software knowingly anymore?

Corporate executives often simply look up to people who are trying to screw them over! They look at Oracle and say, "Gosh, I wish we could screw our customers the way Oracle screws us, I sure love that rich guy for making so much money! I want to be like him! I'd never switch."

Re:Not new..

[Aighearach]

Are there any happy Oracle customers?

Lots of them, especially executives who have a solid firewall between the technical departments and themselves.

Re:Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah this is not new. My previous experience with Oracle reps 20 years ago they were entitled, aggressive, and over confident in a product that was by any measure expensive without being an outright winner. Back then, as now, there were many options for database providers. In particular Postgres was an established and credible alternative but lacked the "support" of a large multinational like Oracle or Microsoft. So people who don't know any better look for a safe option, which actually makes sense if you're not immersed in database technology. But if you're a large enough organisation to be considering Oracle then you're large enough to have database expertise on staff.

Re:Not new..

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a large enterprise company that has IBM iSeries, Oracle, and MS SQL environments. In my humble opinion (as a systems analyst, not a dev/dba) here's how the stack up: iSeries has the best performance but is the hardest to manage (especially rare to find good RPG devs, etc.), MS SQL has the worst performance but is the easiest to mange, Oracle is somewhere in the middle- mediocre performance and mediocre to manage. We also have teams that use NoSQL like Gemfire, Greenplum, etc. but that's mostly Cloud stuff for Big Data. I personally would love to get everything off Oracle into the i, but as our old IBM guys get older, it may be wise for us to get everything ported out to something free like postgres

No shit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Letâ(TM)s be honest, Oracle in the cloud will deliver a far better SLA than any internal IT team will and almost certainly will offer WAY BETTER point in time backups.

That said, it would hammer the last nail of vendor lock-in to Oracle and Oracle has historically been in a race to provIng that not even VMware can fuck their customers nearly as bad as they can once they are locked in.

I just spoke with a company for a database solution and they offered me service after service and they were all great. I then said, Iâ(TM)m talking to them because they are not Oracle and I wonâ(TM)t sign any agreement that would let them treat my company the way Oracle does.

Re:No shit!

[Anonymous Coward]

And then what happened? Did you make an agreement with the not-oracle?

Re:No shit!

[b0s0z0ku]

Yeah, but it's not Oracle's place to ram the cloud down customers' gullets "for their own good." If customers want to keep running in-house, it should be their right and they shouldn't be threatened for refusing to run with the latest "cloud" fad.

Re:No shit!

[Bert64]

There's lots of "should" and "shouldnt", but the fact is if you are locked in to oracle you are subservient to their demands and you have no rights.

Oracle Auditing

[Anonymous Coward]

Have always resulted in million dollar fines. If you donâ(TM)t need to use Oracle then donâ(TM)t because there are cheaper alternatives. If you use Oracle then make sure the details of the contract is available to all and that the DBAs audit the usage annually.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[youngone]

An audit might be the reason the company I work for is ditching Oracle.
I received an email a couple of weeks ago detailing how we are going to migrate everything to SAP (so it might be worse, I wouldn't know).
I am guessing, but I would imagine we spend millions per year on Oracle, so Larry won't be happy. Yay!

Re:Oracle Auditing

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I received an email a couple of weeks ago detailing how we are going to migrate everything to SAP (so it might be worse, I wouldn't know).

Oh shit, now you're really fucked. I mean barbed-wire-wrapped-baseball-bat-in-the-ass fucked.

I have had more exposure to SAP installs/systems than I ever cared to, and in each and every case the whole thing was a tremendous clusterfuck from start to...well, I would say "finish", but a SAP project is never finished. NEVER. It's never completed and so the money flows steadily out the door like a river...forever.

Run like the wind, brother. Run and don't look back.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[szabo.m.peter]

Are you talking about the project, or the operational use?

Re:Oracle Auditing

[Anonymous Coward]

Ouch, the worst possible move. You really should consider changing companies. No matter what your position is you will be impacted negatively because SAP touches/worsens everything.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[serviscope_minor]

I have had more exposure to SAP installs/systems than I ever cared to, and in each and every case the whole thing was a tremendous clusterfuck from start to...well, I would say "finish", but a SAP project is never finished. NEVER. It's never completed and so the money flows steadily out the door like a river...forever.

The company I work for switched to "concur" by SAP for travel stuff. It's sort of like they decided to combine the worst bits of paper forms with the worst bits of computer based forms, then dizzle a fine layer of dog poo over the top.

Re: Oracle Auditing

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked with SAP deployments, I can say it is a hassle but improves overall business profitability. Unless you are internal IT support and don't get OT, then it sucks. But as a consultant, it is great for my bottom line. My customers... Not so much. But they didn't want to spend twenty grand on a one off for me to redo their schema, so fuck em annually for the same on licensing and "support".

Re:Oracle Auditing

[youngone]

We also use Concur, so I expect the move has already started.

You are correct. It is poo.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[Anonymous Coward]

An audit might be the reason the company I work for is ditching Oracle. I received an email a couple of weeks ago detailing how we are going to migrate everything to SAP (so it might be worse, I wouldn't know). I am guessing, but I would imagine we spend millions per year on Oracle, so Larry won't be happy. Yay!

Oracle is really really bad, but SAP is a thousand times worse and more expensive. If they made that decision because of an audit then those that made the decision need to be sacked.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[Anonymous Coward]

I have understood how a so technologically backward company like SAP makes it/ . And the half baked people who practice craft get so excited taking about HANNA.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[thegarbz]

The company I work for switched to "concur" by SAP for travel stuff. It's sort of like they decided to combine the worst bits of paper forms with the worst bits of computer based forms, then dizzle a fine layer of dog poo over the top.

We did this migration last year. It was awesome[1]. So much better.

[1] This post is not a vote of confidence in SAP but a vote of no confidence in the IBM solution we used previously.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[thegarbz]

What are you talking about SAP is the best thing you can do for your business.

You'll lose track of finances and accounts owed and your business expenses dramatically decline as a result.
The trick is to work with suppliers who also use SAP and then they'll lose track of the fact you haven't paid their bills.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[serviscope_minor]

[1] This post is not a vote of confidence in SAP but a vote of no confidence in the IBM solution we used previously.

Aaah IBM: the living embodyment of "no matter how bad you think it is, it can always be worse".

Way back we used to have this system called "agent" or "travel agent" or something. It was amazing, you sent it an email and it must have had some mad-ass NLP or something since it parsed out your requirements and emailed back you an itenerary.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Are you talking about the project, or the operational use?

Yes.

Re: Oracle Auditing

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought SAP was a part of Oracle.
Between their sales reps, c/service, tech support,and audits, they might as well be the same company.

Find a half backed FLOSS solution, and hire a couple of devs to fix it. The financial cost will be the same, but you won't be dealing with sales reps that think Python is a snake, or tech support that doesn't understand the problem with Billy Drop Tables.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[HornWumpus]

When I was a road warrior, I had the best damn travel agent.

They knew all the tricks regarding gaming the reservation system.

For example: I need to fly RTF now, but all the flights are full. No problem, they book me to London, then cancel the international leg. Warn me to get to the gate early, so I'm not the one to get bumped.

Re:Oracle Auditing

[serviscope_minor]

For example: I need to fly RTF now, but all the flights are full. No problem, they book me to London, then cancel the international leg. Warn me to get to the gate early, so I'm not the one to get bumped.

Ha! Nice.

The rise of these systems is ultimately because of poor accounting practices. Someone (presumably) does the math and sees how much $ is spent on the travel agent and how much they can save in their department by switching to an automatic system.

The thing is becaue of poor practices, their department is never charged for the extra time that everyone else starts to incur. You know an hour or two here and there per trip wragling the travel system (as opposed to 5 minutes emailng the agent), then the next three hours whining about it because it's so fucking annoying, and the lost productivity ot the extra stress etc. And of course the extra employee time spent tooling around at airports because they can't use the travel agent's neat tricks any more and so on and so forth.

Re: Oracle Auditing

[Anonymous Coward]

Sooo, it's delinquent bills all the way down? ;)

They didn't...

[YuppieScum]

What happened was that accountants and MBAs took over the running of their companies, and all they know is that the purpose of any and all companies is to maximise shareholder value.

Re:They didn't...

[Billly Gates]

Oracle was always expensive as hell. They just were slightly cheaper than IBM's DB2 and didn't require an expensive IBM mainframe contract back in the 1980s. Larry's answer always was I had payroll to meet for my developers back then.

A company's goal is always to raise the shareprice forever with never an end in sight. The rest of the world is making money by selling to China in the past 20 years. Oracle unfortunately can't do this as Chinese do not pay for software so they need a new creative way to bump up the shareprice.

Re:They didn't...

[rhadc]

In business school, they taught me to value the customer relationship over its lifetime. They also taught to think of all of the folks involved in the lifecycle of the product, including impacted non-customers, as important stakeholders. Oracle's approach has always been shortsighted, but it's painting with too broad a brush to treat all of the business educated as dollar chasing world breakers. Oracle's faults are Oracle's. Their shortsightedness is the result of *not* listening to sound advice, including that of MBAs.

Re:They didn't...

[fluffernutter]

In business school, they taught me to value the customer relationship over its lifetime.

Are you sure they didn't say, "Screw 'em in the ASS!" and you maybe misheard? Because I don't see much valuing of customer relationships going on out there.

Re:They didn't...

[hackingbear]

Not sure how this news relates to China. But Oracle has a huge presence in China and earn a lot revenue from there. Don't get brainwashed by Western media.

Re:They didn't...

[Anonymous Coward]

That was FY 2006 - totally irrelevant today. How about some recent data?

Re:They didn't...

[rastos1]

In business school, they taught me to value the customer relationship over its lifetime.

/me checks your UID

Match.

Re:They didn't...

[thegarbz]

In business school, they taught me to value the customer relationship over its lifetime.

The value of the customer relationship is not fixed. Either you're not doing the lifetime cost assessment or you went to one of those crappy business schools that preach "the customer is always right". Screwing over a few customers for money at the expense of losing some of them may be a right business choice. ... Especially when you have vendor lockin on your side.

Re:They didn't...

[Anonymous Coward]

Their shortsightedness is the result of *not* listening to sound advice, including that of MBAs.

You had me right up until that point.

See, the problem is so many people who get MBAs these days do it straight after getting their first business degree, and who have never actually held a real job of any relevance and have no actual skills and experience.

I've never met a single such person who knew fuck all about running a business, or the specific business in which they find themselves. They have canned solutions, know nothing about the subject domain, and are generally the biggest idiots I've ever met.

To me, there is no more useless person than someone who only has a undergrad degree in business followed by an MBA -- because they don't know a fucking thing about the real world, have never actually done anything in business, but claim to have the solution.

Those kinds of MBAs, in my direct personal experience, are a recipe for some terrible management.

So, maybe Oracle is listening to MBAs after all.

Re:They didn't...

[Cederic]

I'm curious, but why did you link a press release about Asia Pacific revenues when claiming a large presence in China?

Total APAC revenues in Fiscal Year 2017 for Oracle were 15% of their global total, and China is just one of multiple markets in that region (which also includes, e.g. Malaysia, Japan and India).

Add in the Chinese constraints on foreign cloud services (i.e. Oracle's primary sales focus right now) and it's just not a great country for them.

Maybe their recent deal with Tencent will change that, but don't pretend it's all milk and honey right now.

Re:They didn't...

[HornWumpus]

value the customer relationship over its lifetime.

They are, but think Heroin dealer...sure a few will slip the hook, but the rest are just resources to be milked until they die.

Re:They didn't...

[epine]

Their shortsightedness is the result of *not* listening to sound advice, including that of MBAs.

Clearly, in business school, they wrecked your brain.

Oracle made a staggering amount of money on their original business proposition by applying maximal extraction leverage at every opportunity.

Everyone knows that maximal extraction leads to an ultimate goodwill implosion. But the dividends alone from that stockpiled mountain of cash are a fine, eternal goodwill replacement. (Check any competent MBA textbook's index under "NPV".)

It's not the essential function of business to endure for all eternity. Sometimes a vigorous four-decade rape and exit is such a great plan as to make Napoleon himself blush with modesty.

The amazing thing here—at this point—is that this only a soft exit. Oracle is still poised to make another metric fuck-tonne on the downslope through liberal application of the Stockholm-syndrome vise grips. Shortsighted, FTW (and the plane, and the yacht, and the private island). The problem here is that Oracle's conduct was so ruthlessly effective, it's hard to spin any retrospective narrative that doesn't make capitalism stink, just a little bit.

It's definitely not what you learned from Capitalism Made Odourless (which I'm guessing is the primary MBA textbook that extirpated so many previously functioning brain cells).

Fortunately for you, given your educational background, modern neurology now believes that brain cells do regenerate, given time and half a chance. Try to avoid a second sustaining a second concussion over the next ten years or so. Hope remains for a full recovery.

Re:They didn't...

[Applehu Akbar]

Not sure how this news relates to China. But Oracle has a huge presence in China and earn a lot revenue from there. Don't get brainwashed by Western media.

As China tires of dealing with Oracle, it will develop its own implementation of SQL, which it will then sell to the world at a discount. Oracle goes poof.

Re:They didn't...

[Aighearach]

Often for American companies "Asia-Pacific" only means Australia and Japan. And sometimes only Australia.

Re:They didn't...

[Aighearach]

They don't even teach those things in the same classes.

"The customer is always right" is part of marketing and PR classes, it is never part of the business classes.

You might be mistaking the quality of the student for the quality of the lessons the school teaches; graduates of MBA-mills might really even be good enough at business to keep the subjects straight, and the school might nevertheless have a working strategy to lead them to a passing grade in each class. But even there, a student who understands the material might be getting the same lessons as they would at a "better" school.

Re:They didn't...

[Cederic]

Oracle's financials don't show China separately, and they're unlikely to be including China in the Americas or EMEA.

But either way, it's still rather tricky to find out just how large their sales in China are, and that in itself suggests it's not a major market for them.

Wake me when they switch DBs

[Ungrounded Lightning]

"Oracle representatives had suggested the customers strike the deals to avoid expensive audits of how they were using Oracle software, according to the employee. Instead, that approach to selling cloud is irritating customers,"

But are they irritated enough to bit the bullet, port their mission-critical processes to a non-Oracle database and kiss Oracle goodbye? (If not, they've knuckled under and are going to be locked in to Oracle's products and pricing forever - or at least until a later generation of their own management.)

If Oracle is already pressuring them to port to a different DB (their cloud product) they've got a golden opportunity. Yes it might be more effort to port to some other DB then Oracle's own "other DB". But much of the work to absorb any differences - the port, the testing, and the dual-DB cya period - will be the same in either case. So it's only an increment, rather than the whole price of a DB port, to go to a different DB.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[Billly Gates]

"Oracle representatives had suggested the customers strike the deals to avoid expensive audits of how they were using Oracle software, according to the employee. Instead, that approach to selling cloud is irritating customers,"

But are they irritated enough to bit the bullet, port their mission-critical processes to a non-Oracle database and kiss Oracle goodbye? (If not, they've knuckled under and are going to be locked in to Oracle's products and pricing forever - or at least until a later generation of their own management.)

If Oracle is already pressuring them to port to a different DB (their cloud product) they've got a golden opportunity. Yes it might be more effort to port to some other DB then Oracle's own "other DB". But much of the work to absorb any differences - the port, the testing, and the dual-DB cya period - will be the same in either case. So it's only an increment, rather than the whole price of a DB port, to go to a different DB.

... and switch to? The only thing equal is MS SQL Server which is also expensive and could do the same shit Oracle did.

No MySQL and PostGreSQL are not options unless you serve web content and do simple database stuff. People who buy MS SQL Server and Oracle use their AI, financial, and advanced reporting tools. Business Intelligence APIs are HUGE right now and it is also possible it is not them but their other software they purchased is using Oracle as a requirement.

In the old days when software was made in house you could avoid these problems. But the MBA's love packaged software for savings RIGHT NOW and this is what you get.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, you don't switch from Oracle (say, Exadata boxes) to something comparable as there is nothing directly comparable. What companies do is rethink their approach to BI, reporting and such and move to SaaS solutions, while simplifying greatly. The old days, where Fortune 500 companies would invest double digit millions in 1x and millions in ongoing spend in BI tools are gone.

I am an enterprise architect, worked for a few very large companies and currently am CIO-1 in a 50bn company. We ditched Oracle and moved serverless all the way, and are reaping double digit million savings. Not to mention we don't have to run this shit.

Oracle, in the meantime, is on a mission to push existing customers to their weird and overdue cloud thing. It started about 4 years ago, and their tactics started with stripping their own salesforece of commisions on on-prem solutions. Then price hikes. Now, I hear, auditing. (We've since cancelled all our licenses so luckily that's not one of my problems anymore).

As to why people stick and swear by Oracle - Exadata offers support for insanely bad queries and still manages to make a pretty good job running them. This is a good solutions for companies with incompetent, outsourced dev teams that don't mind paying for the licenses. But the number of such companies is going down and Oracle must see the writing on the wall - they are going the IBM way of being relegated to niche solutions, US gov't contracts and the like. And by looking at IBM numbers, it's not exactly a pleasant place to be.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[rkcth]

How is Postgres not an option? I’ve used it in some super heavy installations and it’s always been amazing. In fact if we are only discussing the database itself, Oracle has less features in many areas.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[sad_]

Not only that, but if you use the 'enterprise' version of PostgreSQL, you even get an oracle compatibility layer.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[GuB-42]

No MySQL and PostGreSQL are not options unless you serve web content and do simple database stuff. People who buy MS SQL Server and Oracle use their AI, financial, and advanced reporting tools.

Not all of them. Some of them use Oracle because they used Oracle 20 years ago and don't want to change, even though any SQL database would work. I know by experience.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[TheDarkMaster]

Honest question. Why PostgreSQL is not it an option? It is used extensively in my company serving millions of people (government) and works well, I do not remember having had any problems with it.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[bad-badtz-maru]

I'm going to guess he means that the amount of 3rd party software, such as BI tools, that can interface with PG is very limited compared to ones that can interface with Oracle.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[Billly Gates]

When you install SQL Server or Oracle you have the option to install Business AI and Excel plugins like smart view to connect to your data and autogeneration of reports scripts and Java apis to do ERP and other things. It stopped being just a table 20 years ago.

This creat a lock-in but also non programmer financial analysts who live and die by the tools to generate cute dashboards and detailed Excel outputs for the MBA bosses. Postgrsql is a cute database. No more no less.

Really this is an example of Foss starting out great and ahead but then falling behind by a few decades. Oracle and MS saw the threat 20 years ago with MySQL and others like Paradox and Sybase SQL so a while ecosystem of templates and apps were made for the MBAs and this is how then won.

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[HornWumpus]

Do you know what an Oracle DBA makes vs other database DBAs?

That's a pretty penny for a glorified backup monkey. (which is all many DBAs are, not all, but many.)

Re:Wake me when they switch DBs

[TheDarkMaster]

But you're actually talking about applications that use Oracle as a base, not Oracle database itself. For example here in my company we create PostgreSQL-based applications on a daily basis, we create complex analysis tools, BI, reports, graphs and etc, everything our customers may need we develop and we do not depend on any tool that requires the use of Oracle.

Is this really news!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this still 2014? This is old news for anyone who is or has been an Oracle customer. This is what is behind the rise of Amazon Aurora and other alternative options.

Has anyone ever been happy with Oracle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never heard from anyone in IT of any form of happiness, satisfaction, or even basic respect for any Oracle product, service, or interaction of any kind. The highest possible praise I've heard is "it's pretty much what you have to use in this segment".

It's one dinosaur I'm happy to see eaten by the anklebiters.

3rd paty database

[Teun]

Halliburton is regularly audited by the oil companies they work for and I assume they don't like the idea of having their sensitive information stored in a 3rd party database that is hard to audit.

Re:3rd paty database

[Tony Isaac]

Are you saying that a cloud-based Oracle instance is harder to audit than an on-premise Oracle instance?

Why? As a programmer with a lot of years dealing with databases, both cloud and on-prem, I see no difference.

Re:3rd paty database

[thegarbz]

These oil companies are migrating to cloud based services en-mass, happy to fork over huge contracts even for their mission critical / business sensitive things.

Don't confuse the consumer cloud with what enterprises do. I may not like the idea of linking my windows account to my microsoft account, but those Fortune 500s are all about linking entire active directory systems into the cloud.

Re:3rd paty database

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he is indeed saying that and I can't for the life of me understand why you see no difference between auditing the security of data stored locally, and auditing the security of data stored on servers that you don't have any control over. I'm also not sure why you would think that you being a database programmer means you have any experience in auditing security issues.

Re: 3rd paty database

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot.

Sometimes, being the biggest asshole does not work

[gweihir]

It may get you a job as president, but selling software and services to people that _know_ your stuff is overpriced and inferior is a bit of a different situation.

Professor Stefan Halper

[Anonymous Coward]

Operation Crossfire Hurricane is news. This isn't.

Re:Professor Stefan Halper

[Anonymous Coward]

Ssshhh.... That story doesn't push the narrative forward.

Re:Feeling very gay today

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Larry, maybe you should have a talk with your overly aggressive salesmen instead.

when the PHB said that extortion drives in $$$$

[Joe_Dragon]

when the PHB said that extortion drives in $$$$

ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[Qbertino]

... ripe for disruption.

There are some good FOSS projects that have potential, but they haven't reached critical mass yet. I suspect some player getting inroads within the next decade and giving Oracle and SAP a run for their money.

Looking forward to that.

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[FormOfActionBanana]

Name one?

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[Anonymous Coward]

MongoDB?

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[FormOfActionBanana]

That's not an ERP system...

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[Anonymous Coward]

MongoDB is not an ERP solution.

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's barely a database solution.

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one?

xTuple is one, uses postgres for the backend.

Godawful stuff, but it has potential.

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[gravewax]

If you don't even know what an ERP solution is then why the fuck even comment!

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not even a database, much less ERP software.

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not even a fruit name.

Re:ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh noes.. you bring up nightmare. It's awful stuff alright, even compiere (is it even developed anymore?) was better than xTuple last time I tried (decade ago).

Re: ERP is one of the last bastions ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha, the real joke is that everyone always hates their erp system, no matter how good it is.
It is just a really hard problem to solve (model your entire business in software)

The Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am so glad to be doing business with Oracle. They are the ones I go to by choice to fulfill my software needs because they my interests at heart."
- No one ever

Same company that put malware in Java updates

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember this is the same company who put toolbars and other garbage in the UPDATERS for Java. Not just the main installer. It took years of angry user complaints before they finally removed that crap. Oracle has long been utter scum and companies would be wise to look for alternatives where they exist.

Re:The mob? It's Trump University shit.

[HiThere]

In Oracle's case it was already legal. (I don't know which of Trump's actions you think applies to this case.)

Being legal is not the same as tolerable.

Re: Oracle and Microsoft...

[saloomy]

Oracle has some pretty draconian tactics. I used to work for an Oracle EBS customer, and let me tell you, they are just like the mob. First, their fees are partially calculated by business revenue, which is absurd. Secondly, they failed to inform us of various software licenses on the technology side we would need to acquire which was only disclosed once we were partially through implementation. Turns out some ancillary oracle software we purchased wouldn't work without yet more oracle middleware to integrate back to the EBS suite.

Then, once they purchased Sun, the performance / processor license vs the cost of said licenses basically incentivized us to invest in slower, bulkier servers through absurd processor core multipliers which differ based on the kind of CPU you used.

Oracle sales are the mob, for sure!

After spending 20 years dealing with Oracle...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I can honestly say they are positively rotten to the core. If Google's motto (until recently) was "Don't be Evil", Oracle's founding principles are, "Be Evil. Fuck those that think you're Evil. And above all, fuck your customers just as you would a competitor. It's all our money anyways."

Ok, so I may be exaggerating a wee bit, but I think I've adequately captured the spirit of the company. Larry Ellison is an unabashed sociopath, and it echoes in every corner of the company.

Fuck Oracle

[pestilence669]

Once upon a time, an employer of mine attempted to license a few $100,000 worth of their software. It wasn't a high enough amount for Oracle to speak with us, so we ported off of it. They and their partner networks wouldn't even return our calls to accept our money in hand.

I wish I could feel sympathy but

[nightfire-unique]

.. if you run Oracle, you kinda deserve what you get. The company has been honest and upfront about how they treat customers from day one.

Re:I wish I could feel sympathy but

[iggymanz]

nope, never saw these audits before 5 years ago in the many clients I've worked in medium sized businesses, they're a recent thing. hard to move off of oracle, but my present employer is pushing for that after nearly two year long audit where oracle kept trying to find ways to screw them over...but finally lost interest. wasted incredible amounts of time and money of course.

Re: Oracle and Microsoft...

[Bing Tsher E]

Oracle has always been like that. They are the muleskinners of enterprise software. It's just in Larry's blood.

Phasing out Oracle, too.

[Maavin]

We are fed up with constant policy changes for licensing. Each time infrastructure is changed to acomodate for policy changes, they change again. FU...

Oh and there is the fun tactics of: "So you used enterprise features (which you can use without warning or agreeing to something *snicker*)? Poof, you have an enterprise edition now, please pay up, or else!"

Re: Phasing out Oracle, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds eerily like an audit finding that I saw that identified that java had unlicensed 'enterprise features' enabled. Turns out a developer added a flag to the jvm start up when testing/debugging that enabled additional features they weren't even using. There is no way a company could ever pass an audit unscathed.

SAP

[jools33]

I have twenty five years experience of working on SAP - and I can say only one of the implementations I worked on was as you described, and it was solely as a result of catastrophically bad management. If it was as bad as you say I find it hard to believe that SAP would maintain the kind of customer base that it has today.

Re:SAP

[Headw1nd]

So you've been working on one implementation for 25 years?

Everybody hates them, but too few hate them enough

[lusid1]

Every technologist on the planet, every single one of them not on Oracle payroll, hates this company, their products, and most of all their tactics. But not enough of them have the influence or the grit to move to something else. Now is the time. Oracle wants you to move to the cloud, so do it now. Just move to some other cloud. Any other cloud, any other application stack, it really doesn't matter where it is or how much it costs to make it happen. It will be worth it in the end.

BDSM

[Anonymous Coward]

> Are there other reasons?

From my observations as an employee in a medium $CORP for the last six years, Oracle and its customers have a relation very much akin to what, among persons, would be characterized as BDSM. The customers are really getting what they crave for, although as an outside observer you might get a different impression.

What I don't know (I wasn't that deep in the inner circles) is whether they've agreed on a stop signal.

Why not use dBase III?

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard that one is awl write.

My daughter got audited...

[Anonymous Coward]

...by Oracle. And she runs a little lemonade stand! She got a $15K fine for not having a computer that could run their apps.

When they sold out to investors...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and brought in the bean counters. Now they've become slaves to their own greed, becoming held to ridiculous notions of speed and "efficiency" over quality and robustness.

Project management

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a huge oversupply of poorly defined and poorly managed computer implementation projects, with a topping of scope creep.

Dump Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were ever to become the person in charge, the first thing I would do is come up with a migration plan OFF Oracle. It is by far the largest line item in our budget and just this year we learned that a server covered by hardware maintenance needs a separate software maintenance contract to get patches since we are one version back on the OS. Don't get me started on the giant sucking sound called PeopleSoft...We could hire a dozen flunkies from college to write a better system at a fraction of the cost.

Re:Feeling very gay today

[Anonymous Coward]

Funnily enough, I was just thinking that it's such a nice day I should put on a summer frock...

Coming soon, Java audits

[bad-badtz-maru]

With Oracle's recent announcement that they intend to start enforcing Java licensing in commercial environments, the Oracle audit problem will only get worse. With the rate at which organizations are dinged for database licensing, imagine the fat checks that will be cut for commercial use of the JRE.

Oracle hardball is nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

They pulled this, "Buy our stuff or face an audit" crap when they were pushing Exadata hard. I'm sure they pulled it before then to push other products.

Nothing new....

[Anonymous Coward]

But I've observed Oracle doing this more frequently as well. Still running Java on the desktop? Watch out.

Sounds familiar....

[erp_consultant]

I recall being on an implementation one time where Microsoft had given the client a sweetheart deal on SQL Server. Basically gave it to them for free. So right in the middle of the project they decide that we are switching from Oracle database to SQL Server database. In the Enterprise Software game this is a big deal.

Since Oracle also owns the application software, as well as the database, the SQL is written optimally for Oracle. While they support other DBs like SQL Server and DB2, the bug fixes arrive earlier for Oracle. We had to tune every line of SQL, every query, every report. Reports that took 30 seconds to run in Oracle were taking 5 minutes to run in SQL Server. We got it done in the end but it was basically a nightmare.

I see others on this thread saying just switch to Postgre SQL. If it's not tied to back end applications that are also from Oracle then sure, it might be a viable option. When you are running Enterprise software that is essentially running your entire business (HR, Payroll, Financials, Inventory, Logistics, etc.) then it is going to be a very tough sell trying to convince your CIO or CEO to switch to a different database platform. The risk is simply too great. Most likely you are going to be told to suck it up and make it work.

Oracle, of course, knows this and that is what allows them to get away with these strong arm tactics. I suspect this is a large part of the reason they got into the Enterprise software business in the first place. It gets their hooks further into the client and makes it all that much more difficult to exit. It is also part of the reason that they are taking the threats from Workday and other cloud vendors so seriously. It is one of the few ways that companies can escape the clutches of Oracle and still run their business without undue risk. Now, cloud software presents risks of its own but that's another discussion for another day :-)

VirtualBox Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful with the Oracle VirtualBox Extensions, they are not free. IP's are recorded, letters have been sent. You have been warned.

Re:VirtualBox Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why we now use KVM and virt-manager to run VMs on our Linux machines. Used love/use VBox but since Oracle got its fangs into it, its gone down the shithole....

Bob

[Anonymous Coward]

We all hope that this is going to be start of the end of this company.

Bov

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle DB and middleware is dieing and they know it better than us this is why they try to get every possible dollar out ot it

This is a dabase design error

[Applehu Akbar]

For any software company, product licensing should be bulletproof and transparent to the user, as with Adobe. When you install any of the company's products it should be obvious what your legal status is, because an unlicensed product won't install and an expired license should make the product unusable.

If you're a database vendor (a database vendor!) and your user has to submit 23,000 pages of documentation to prove that it's using your product in a valid way, and then you're still not sure, Oracle's board ought to be horsewhipped.

Over-milking the captive audience?

[ErichTheRed]

I can't think of any environment I'm familiar with that isn't actively trying to get away from Oracle. I think they know this too and are just trying to squeeze out the last few drops of money. Basically, anyone doing business with Oracle is doing so because they're stuck with them. This is also true for the other big legacy software houses like CA, MicroFocus, Symantec, etc...where old software packages that hold together the core of large businesses go to live out their retirement years.

Everyone thinks of the database product, but Oracle has bought tons of mission-critical software packages (PeopleSoft, Siebel, etc.) and owns their own huge ERP stack. All require that core database product, and all are exceedingly difficult to move away from. Anyone who waves away the complexity of an ERP system change with "just move it to the cloud" is extremely naïve.

And speaking of cloud, is it a shocker that these companies aren't exactly enthusiastic about buying Oracle Cloud? Our company got hit with a beyond massive bill to relicense PeopleSoft on-premises and bought the Oracle Cloud version. Talk about permanent vendor lock-in...I'm sure Oracle will charge a few million in "exit fees" just to get the data out!

Someone is screwing Halliburton?

[zawarski]

Damn shame. What is this world coming to.

Re: software geeks become the Mob - TRUE

[gabrieltss]

We WERE and all IBM shop. Then we were forced BY IBM to install a piece of audit software on ALL servers and ALL desktops., It runs constantly to make sure we are adhereing to our licenses. Even if the server or desktop contains NO IBM software. That program eats up system resources. So we have been dumping ALL IBM software and hardware. We started with Dumping RAD and RSA and went to using Eclipse and STS for Java development (that chopped over $30K/Year off our budget. We are down to only a hand full of WebSphere servers - we are migrating to JBoss/Wildfly and standalone Spring Boot apps. We are down to only a few AIX servers - those are all going to RHEL (and a few to Windows). We are one by one replacing our in house written applications that ran on AS/400's and will be dumping the AS/400's within 5-6 years. We are Almost done migrating all our databases off of DB2/AIX to M$ SQL Server. Those should be done by the end of the year. Pretty soon IBM will have lost us as a customer entirely. We figure we will save in the neighborhood of almost $500K+/year in licensing, maintenance fees and new licenses. IBM's lost - just because they wanted to FORCE us to install their audit software. We installed their crap and then gave them the big middle finger! So a big Fuck You to IBM! More companies should do this sort of thing, then MAYBE these Mafioso big tech companies would get the message.

No data is private in the cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a basic tension betwen companies like Google Oracle MS Amazon etc and businesses. No data / conversation / strategy document / lawyer's correspondence is safe in the cloud. These companies refusing the cloud know that. These are companies that play the hardest of hardball and are used to having it played against them - they know how the world really works. They are no going to be lured by the usual BS the Silicon Valley trots out to more naive consumers- oh the convenience ! oh the cost saving ! oh the reduction in costs ! oh our security ! IOW, the refuseniks aren't as stupid as Silicon Valley needs them to be.

So Silicon Valley is going to extort them into it, and of course, these same companies recognize this tactic to, and what it implies about Oracle et. al's actual motivation. At this point, you really have to ask yourself, as they are, why MUST things live on someone else's servers ? What - or who- is really driving cloud services?

Companies are allegedly in the business of giving other companies solutions they want. This is a solution they don't want, but Oracle et. al keep ratching up the pressure, trying to submit thier "customers".

By analogy, you are not Google's customer and they don't create services for you. They create them to gather information and developed detailed psych-social-sexual profiles about you then sell those profiles to their real customers- anyone with a wallet. Worse, increasingly, they develop those profiles on you to achieve their own political / social / biological (23AndMe) engineering ends. This is like your worst enemy knowing absolutely everything about your physical, personal and professional life and aspirations - what will they do with it and how could they handicap your life, unseen by you?

This is exactly the scenario the refuseniks are trying to forestall.

From a societal perspective, you can't have five increasingly ideologically homogenous and frankly megalogmanical and messianic companies with God Knowledge of every person, corporation and other entity on the face of the planet and physically in control of the information necessary for everything from daily logisitics to long term strategy .

Sorry but it's true and really quite obvious- that's the road to fascism / communism / one world government what you want to call it.

Re:Everybody hates them, but too few hate them eno

[lactose99]

Every technologist on the planet, every single one of them not on Oracle payroll, hates this company, their products, and most of all their tactics.

This is true