Sometimes I wonder if it's just not some kind of stockholm syndrome. You're an enterprise class CxO and negotiating with Oracle is playing with the big boys.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just not some kind of stockholm syndrome. You're an enterprise class CxO and negotiating with Oracle is playing with the big boys. All CxOs around you sing praise for Oracle. You can reasonably well get Oracle to drop their prices with 40% at a new sale, so now you feel like an ace in negotiating. Things are looking great. Then you have to pay. And again. And again. Meanwhile, the support is bad, the quality is low, and people start to grumble. It turns out that 60% of a lot of money is still a lot of money, and you're in a position where you have to defend what you've bought to your peers. Oracle is very helpfull here, it has an enterprise aura that rivals Steve Jobs' reality distortion field. Oracle makes sure the other CxOs you meet are very pro Oracle and very enterprisy. So you either drown or learn to sing the qualities of oracle. At that point, you're ready to be one of those peer CxOs that will lure the next generation of CxOs into oracle's traps. Add to all this that at the end of the 1990's, oracle was the best database, no discussion. It coasted along on that reputation until now. Postgres is mostly there today, but this is 20 years later