5 ms·

At this rate Oracle is going to be the next Yahoo.

by soreasan 9y ago

camus2 9y ago
No. Oracle is mainly B2B, and executives love Oracle solutions.
- boubiyeah 9y ago
  Never understood why they loved it. Is it just so they can say "not my fault, our project is only using big name frameworks, DBs, etc so I did all I could?" Or is it because they don't even begin to understand what's going on in the tech scene and just buy what appears to be the most shiny, expensive solutions?
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    > Never understood why they loved it. Expensive parties, gifts etc
    - nailer 9y ago
      I've had an enterprise vendor offer to drop money into my personal account to make sales. Not naming them, but the sad thing is they actually did have the best product in their space by a long shot. The ones who sucked were probably even better at bribes.
      - pm90 9y ago
        That sounds like the definition of a bribe, which is a crime. I would advise you to not make this information public or at least public under an account that can be traced back to you.
        rl3 9y ago
        Why should he care? He didn't say he accepted the bribe, merely that it was offered.
        fma 9y ago
        My company requires we need to report that stuff. Also need to take a training every year on what you can accept and what you can't.
        rl3 9y ago
        Perhaps it was reported. He didn't specify either way, possibly for good reason.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        icelancer 9y ago
        >>That sounds like the definition of a bribe, which is a crime. It is. It happens all the time. I get similar offers regularly in my growing startup. It's usually couched better than that, but it's not rare.
        nailer 9y ago
        I'm aware of this, that's why I mentioned it. I didn't accept the bribe and am happy for this to be published under my real name.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - rbanffy 9y ago
        I have seen a high-profile CTO dismissed for just cause because he accepted an invitation to speak at a vendor conference in Paris. When hired, we signed a very strict code of conduct document that prevented us from accepting any valuable gifts from vendors. A vendor once sent me a mug. I had to open the box in front of a witness.
  - ternaryoperator 9y ago
    Support is one reason. If your database goes down, they'll send a team of engineers to figure out what's wrong. If they have to, they'll bring in hardware to duplicate your systems, and have engineers working on it 7x24 until they find out what's wrong. Not many vendors can provide that level of service, and if your business requires it, you're willing to pay for it.
    - surge 9y ago
      The funny part is IME, their support sucks, at least compared to another big vendor like IBM.
  - bigiain 9y ago
    Great salespeople. Like _really_ good. (Often borderline or unequivocally evil... As other comments in this thread show.)
    - stesch 9y ago
      I was once in a meeting on site. The task was to get some data from an AS/400 to a Linux server and display it on a website. Text files would have been enough to cache the data. But you never know how a project can change over time so I proposed PostgreSQL or IBM DB/2. The latter in case they absolutely wanted to pay for a database and they are already using an IBM AS/400. (We were using PostgreSQL and Informix.) At the meeting they said they have already bought a license for an Oracle DB. Without consulting us. So we were forced to use it without prior experience.
bigiain 9y ago
With the _big_ difference that Oracle are _really_ good at writing invoices and cashing big cheques... All of the really talented Oracle people I know are enterprise sales people, and they're _really_ good. All the good tech people I know "joined" via acquisition and jumped ship as soon as financially sensible.
- disordinary 9y ago
  I'm surprised companies still buy Oracle software, I figured that they were only in business because of Vendor lock in from governments and large corporations.
  - bigiain 9y ago
    Because Oracle do not sell to the sort of people who read Hackernews, they sell to people who read Financial Review and CIO Monthly or whatever. Same as SalesForce, Adobe, and a whole bunch of other "enterprise" software businesses that most dev's ignore or write off as pointless. I worked at a place where I saw two renewals for AdobeCQ licenses paid while I worked there at ~$600k/year, all the time we were using Alfresco underneath (and I see now that site is running on Sitecore...)
    - disordinary 9y ago
      Probably, although I work for a government department that uses Oracle extensively but no new projects are on the platform, eventually everything will be migrated off it (mostly to the SQL Server hosted on Azure).
      - bigiain 9y ago
        And let me guess - the project timelines for "eventually everything will be migrated off it" run easily into seven figures of Oracle invoices? (And realistically the delays in those migration projects will mean double that gets paid to Oracle before they're completely out of your billing system?)

At this rate Oracle is going to be the next Yahoo.

camus2 9y ago

No. Oracle is mainly B2B, and executives love Oracle solutions.

boubiyeah 9y ago
Never understood why they loved it. Is it just so they can say "not my fault, our project is only using big name frameworks, DBs, etc so I did all I could?" Or is it because they don't even begin to understand what's going on in the tech scene and just buy what appears to be the most shiny, expensive solutions?
- rbanffy 9y ago
  > Never understood why they loved it. Expensive parties, gifts etc
  - nailer 9y ago
    I've had an enterprise vendor offer to drop money into my personal account to make sales. Not naming them, but the sad thing is they actually did have the best product in their space by a long shot. The ones who sucked were probably even better at bribes.
    - pm90 9y ago
      That sounds like the definition of a bribe, which is a crime. I would advise you to not make this information public or at least public under an account that can be traced back to you.
      - rl3 9y ago
        Why should he care? He didn't say he accepted the bribe, merely that it was offered.
        fma 9y ago
        My company requires we need to report that stuff. Also need to take a training every year on what you can accept and what you can't.
        rl3 9y ago
        Perhaps it was reported. He didn't specify either way, possibly for good reason.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - icelancer 9y ago
        >>That sounds like the definition of a bribe, which is a crime. It is. It happens all the time. I get similar offers regularly in my growing startup. It's usually couched better than that, but it's not rare.
      - nailer 9y ago
        I'm aware of this, that's why I mentioned it. I didn't accept the bribe and am happy for this to be published under my real name.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      I have seen a high-profile CTO dismissed for just cause because he accepted an invitation to speak at a vendor conference in Paris. When hired, we signed a very strict code of conduct document that prevented us from accepting any valuable gifts from vendors. A vendor once sent me a mug. I had to open the box in front of a witness.
- ternaryoperator 9y ago
  Support is one reason. If your database goes down, they'll send a team of engineers to figure out what's wrong. If they have to, they'll bring in hardware to duplicate your systems, and have engineers working on it 7x24 until they find out what's wrong. Not many vendors can provide that level of service, and if your business requires it, you're willing to pay for it.
  - surge 9y ago
    The funny part is IME, their support sucks, at least compared to another big vendor like IBM.
- bigiain 9y ago
  Great salespeople. Like _really_ good. (Often borderline or unequivocally evil... As other comments in this thread show.)
  - stesch 9y ago
    I was once in a meeting on site. The task was to get some data from an AS/400 to a Linux server and display it on a website. Text files would have been enough to cache the data. But you never know how a project can change over time so I proposed PostgreSQL or IBM DB/2. The latter in case they absolutely wanted to pay for a database and they are already using an IBM AS/400. (We were using PostgreSQL and Informix.) At the meeting they said they have already bought a license for an Oracle DB. Without consulting us. So we were forced to use it without prior experience.

bigiain 9y ago

With the _big_ difference that Oracle are _really_ good at writing invoices and cashing big cheques... All of the really talented Oracle people I know are enterprise sales people, and they're _really_ good. All the good tech people I know "joined" via acquisition and jumped ship as soon as financially sensible.

disordinary 9y ago
I'm surprised companies still buy Oracle software, I figured that they were only in business because of Vendor lock in from governments and large corporations.
- bigiain 9y ago
  Because Oracle do not sell to the sort of people who read Hackernews, they sell to people who read Financial Review and CIO Monthly or whatever. Same as SalesForce, Adobe, and a whole bunch of other "enterprise" software businesses that most dev's ignore or write off as pointless. I worked at a place where I saw two renewals for AdobeCQ licenses paid while I worked there at ~$600k/year, all the time we were using Alfresco underneath (and I see now that site is running on Sitecore...)
  - disordinary 9y ago
    Probably, although I work for a government department that uses Oracle extensively but no new projects are on the platform, eventually everything will be migrated off it (mostly to the SQL Server hosted on Azure).
    - bigiain 9y ago
      And let me guess - the project timelines for "eventually everything will be migrated off it" run easily into seven figures of Oracle invoices? (And realistically the delays in those migration projects will mean double that gets paid to Oracle before they're completely out of your billing system?)