13 ms·

"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this

"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

gtirloni 8y ago
Yes, Oracle is bad. No, I don't love or even like them. But quoting Bryan's dramatic speeches every time Oracle or Ellison are mentioned is adding next to nothing to the discussion at this point. It's a great way to incite anger though.
- tsomctl 8y ago
  My point is that this doesn't bode well for Tesla. My biggest complaint with Tesla is that they don't provide service manuals or have an open parts department for their vehicles. For comparison, pretty much every other major auto maker will sell you a book telling you how to fix anything on your vehicle, and will sell you the parts and special tools to do so. Not Tesla, and given what we know about Ellison, I very much doubt he will encourage this to happen.
  - puzzle 8y ago
    You also know what this means for relationships between Tesla and Waymo. Let the fireworks begin...
  - midnitewarrior 8y ago
    Apple started the path to normalizing this, and I believe it's core to being responsible for the entire user experience. Personally, I'm not a fan of this, but I understand the motives aside from profit. If a Tesla gets poor maintenance by an unskilled shop, when the vehicle crashes and kills the driver, Tesla gets the black eye and has to defend itself in the media and in front of the NHTSA. Tesla's stock takes the hit. When a Mac crashes, it's because Apple's hardware or software has a bug (something in Apple's control). Apple doesn't have an open ecosystem like th.e PC world. When a PC crashes, you also have the hardware manufacturer to blame for faulty hardware. What about OS and other system customizations the manufacturer puts in there? Those coukd crash it too? All the public hears is "My Windows crashed." and Microsoft looks bad. No fault is brought upon the consumer who thought a $220 PC was going to be a quality machine, not does it fall to the non-brand foreign bargain PC manufacturer for building a $220 that's doomed to provide an awful experience. Instead, the world hears that "Windows Sucks." Given this, I appreciate why a company would opt to do the things Tesla has done in order to protect its brand. However, I try to avoid doing business with companies who do this, as I value consumer freedom.
    - mancerayder 8y ago
      All well and good -- solid arguments except when you consider things like: Apple's Mac Pro (the big tower) had upgradeable RAM and video, and the newer versions (the little black shiny pretty cylinder) were soldered on. That's less about lawsuits and support costs -- it's memory for God's sake and everyone else lets the consumer physically upgrade it, even many laptops. It's about going through the cartel to get the upgrade, which is marked up 3X, 4X. Apple is recent -- anyone remember Sun?
      - Retric 8y ago
        Playing devils advocate. RAM is the #1 cause if computers crashes largely because people think cheap or overclocked RAM is fine. Windows would have a vastly better reputation if it was always paired up with good hardware.
- warent 8y ago
  This is actually the first I've heard the speech, so to me personally it added value at least.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    Yep, I've stopped being annoyed by seemingly repetitive comments. On any given topic there is always both a gtirloni who has heard it a million times and a warent who never has.
    - nindalf 8y ago
      Oh I love repetitive comments. Top comment on every article about an advertising company -> "remember! you're not the customer! you're the product!" followed by a bunch of folks praising this profound insight.
      - Fnoord 8y ago
        There's herds upon herds who do not realise that "profound insight" because of a lack of transparency. So when truth is being unleashed about e.g. Facebook, it allows for people to be waken up. (FWIW, it has worked for me, though yes it was annoying.)
      - sanderjd 8y ago
        This is a great example of what I'm talking about. I'm pretty certain that concept put in those words was new to me in some HN comment at some point, and I'm even more certain it was already tiresome to tons of people by that time. This happens all the time.
- philipov 8y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  I clicked through to these comments because I didn't know who Larry Ellison was and wanted to get an idea of what the HN community thinks of this move. Seeing this as the top comment gives me a pretty good answer about that.
- cbm-vic-20 8y ago
  And it gives Tesla fans a scapegoat if the company does anything stupid in the future.
geofft 8y ago
Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? How did Ellison conclude that shipping mediocrity is more profitable than shipping excellence?
- AlexB138 8y ago
  In large part by exploiting government contracts, as I understand it. Government procurement is about as far from a free market as I can imagine, and is pretty easy to exploit.
- vibrato 8y ago
  Service contracts
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And inertia and lockin is the game. Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs". And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.
    - lordnacho 8y ago
Rainymood 8y ago
To be fair, this critque is more a critique on companies inside capitalism and it works when you remove all the Larry Elliot bashing and replace it with the word company: >There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than companies. >And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. >Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to said company, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' >You need to think of companies the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about companies. I don't see the problem here to be honest. If people want to continue giving money to Oracle for their mediocre products ... that's on them, not on Oracle really.
- peteradio 8y ago
  Its unfortunate if you viewed Tesla as a game changer or a rising star. Bringing someone on with the character to marginalize all value for the quickest return, that might bother some. So if you were someone who wanted to give money to Tesla now you might think twice. This isn't about Oracle this is about Ellison.
  - Rainymood 8y ago
    Come to think of it that is indeed relevant and I completely skipped over that. I am bullish on Tesla and financially have skin in the game as well. So far Tesla has been quite volatile but I'm bullish on the long-term.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- darkerside 8y ago
  It's even less of a critique than an observation at that point. Lawnmowers are useful, and if you thought they were friendly, you're using the tool incorrectly.
kevin_b_er 8y ago
I won't anthropomorphize the lawnmower, but since Larry Ellison is a person, and our broken US legal system consider Oracle a person too, then Oracle has already been anthropomorphized by judicial fiat. Both are greed.
sys_64738 8y ago
Whenever I read this and the java guy Gosling they are incredibly negative about Oracle. One wonders if there is something behind all this as it appears they were figures of respect and authority at their previous company. But upon being consumed by Oracle was that still the case? I get the impression that there is underlying bitterness and resentment festering here due to something like that.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- EamonnMR 8y ago
  In the linked speech he goes over exactly what he thinks Oracle did wrong in excruciating detail. There's no mystery here.
- geodel 8y ago
  Well Java guy got his picnic canceled by Oracle as he detailed on his blog. If I had been dreaming of eating hot dogs at picnic for months and it got canceled at last minute I wouldn't be happy either.
  - bitL 8y ago
    Important detail is that the picnic was fully paid already with no refund; cancelled because why should ex-SUN have fun/higher salaries, when the rest of Oracle haven't?
    - glogla 8y ago
      That sounds like a horribly toxic company. As expected of Oracle.
throwaway765456 8y ago
I've always wondered how Mr. Cantrill felt when in 2015, after years of hearing his vitriol about Oracle, more than a few of his Joyent team left him to follow Mark Cavage to Oracle including Node.js frontman TJ. This would have been a substantial hit to the tight US development team. Has Mr. Cantrill spoken on how he processed that?
- jen20 8y ago
  Probably best not to feed the obvious trolls, but I'd imagine somewhat vindicated when the self-same mistakes made by Cavage that took a long time to correct in Triton appeared in Oracle's cloud APIs a few years later.
- bcantrill 8y ago
  I hit on some of this in the Reddit AMA that happened in 2015[1], but that AMA was asking the more general question about losing people, not the more specific question about losing people to Oracle. The answer is that it was of course gutting and surprising, and it took a while to process -- it was hard to not read it as a personal rebuke! But of course, people don't generally alter their career trajectory to spite others (that is, you don't hear "Yeah, my new job is a terrible team solving an uninteresting problem within an awful company -- but boy did I ever stick it to my former boss!"), but rather to seek their own opportunity. So I came to accept that each of them (and there were quite a few!) left for the opportunity they saw at Oracle. As for why Oracle: at the time, they were building a de novo cloud, and they were doing it by hiring engineers away from other cloud providers, with a sharp focus on compensation. And in particular: for the ex-AWS'ers at Joyent, one of their former senior colleagues at AWS (Don Johnson) had gone to Oracle to take a leadership position[2]; I think it's fair to say that those who went to Oracle saw themselves as joining Don as much (if not more) than they were joining Oracle. Of course, none of this made it any easier for me or for the team to swallow -- and it has been of little solace that those who left for Oracle have (of course!) discovered that Oracle is what it is, with several of them having now left Oracle for other opportunities[3]. They may have learned about themselves what Oracle taught me about myself: that in addition to the team I'm on and the problem I'm solving, the company's larger mission is, in fact, important to me -- and that Oracle's emptiness in this regard can be crushingly soul-depleting. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_of_joyent_the_father_of_dtrace_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_o... [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2014/oracle-hire-100-engineers-seattle-new-cloud-infrastructure-center/ https://www.geekwire.com/2014/oracle-hire-100-engineers-seat... [3] https://twitter.com/mcavage/status/969762887530037248 https://twitter.com/mcavage/status/969762887530037248
dirkgently 8y ago
It's like all the @$$holes in the same (board) room.
malmsteen 8y ago
there are winners and people who complain. it's mutually exclusive

gtirloni 8y ago

Yes, Oracle is bad. No, I don't love or even like them. But quoting Bryan's dramatic speeches every time Oracle or Ellison are mentioned is adding next to nothing to the discussion at this point. It's a great way to incite anger though.

tsomctl 8y ago
My point is that this doesn't bode well for Tesla. My biggest complaint with Tesla is that they don't provide service manuals or have an open parts department for their vehicles. For comparison, pretty much every other major auto maker will sell you a book telling you how to fix anything on your vehicle, and will sell you the parts and special tools to do so. Not Tesla, and given what we know about Ellison, I very much doubt he will encourage this to happen.
- puzzle 8y ago
  You also know what this means for relationships between Tesla and Waymo. Let the fireworks begin...
- midnitewarrior 8y ago
  Apple started the path to normalizing this, and I believe it's core to being responsible for the entire user experience. Personally, I'm not a fan of this, but I understand the motives aside from profit. If a Tesla gets poor maintenance by an unskilled shop, when the vehicle crashes and kills the driver, Tesla gets the black eye and has to defend itself in the media and in front of the NHTSA. Tesla's stock takes the hit. When a Mac crashes, it's because Apple's hardware or software has a bug (something in Apple's control). Apple doesn't have an open ecosystem like th.e PC world. When a PC crashes, you also have the hardware manufacturer to blame for faulty hardware. What about OS and other system customizations the manufacturer puts in there? Those coukd crash it too? All the public hears is "My Windows crashed." and Microsoft looks bad. No fault is brought upon the consumer who thought a $220 PC was going to be a quality machine, not does it fall to the non-brand foreign bargain PC manufacturer for building a $220 that's doomed to provide an awful experience. Instead, the world hears that "Windows Sucks." Given this, I appreciate why a company would opt to do the things Tesla has done in order to protect its brand. However, I try to avoid doing business with companies who do this, as I value consumer freedom.
  - mancerayder 8y ago
    All well and good -- solid arguments except when you consider things like: Apple's Mac Pro (the big tower) had upgradeable RAM and video, and the newer versions (the little black shiny pretty cylinder) were soldered on. That's less about lawsuits and support costs -- it's memory for God's sake and everyone else lets the consumer physically upgrade it, even many laptops. It's about going through the cartel to get the upgrade, which is marked up 3X, 4X. Apple is recent -- anyone remember Sun?
    - Retric 8y ago
      Playing devils advocate. RAM is the #1 cause if computers crashes largely because people think cheap or overclocked RAM is fine. Windows would have a vastly better reputation if it was always paired up with good hardware.
warent 8y ago
This is actually the first I've heard the speech, so to me personally it added value at least.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  Yep, I've stopped being annoyed by seemingly repetitive comments. On any given topic there is always both a gtirloni who has heard it a million times and a warent who never has.
  - nindalf 8y ago
    Oh I love repetitive comments. Top comment on every article about an advertising company -> "remember! you're not the customer! you're the product!" followed by a bunch of folks praising this profound insight.
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      There's herds upon herds who do not realise that "profound insight" because of a lack of transparency. So when truth is being unleashed about e.g. Facebook, it allows for people to be waken up. (FWIW, it has worked for me, though yes it was annoying.)
    - sanderjd 8y ago
      This is a great example of what I'm talking about. I'm pretty certain that concept put in those words was new to me in some HN comment at some point, and I'm even more certain it was already tiresome to tons of people by that time. This happens all the time.
philipov 8y ago
https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
daveFNbuck 8y ago
I clicked through to these comments because I didn't know who Larry Ellison was and wanted to get an idea of what the HN community thinks of this move. Seeing this as the top comment gives me a pretty good answer about that.
cbm-vic-20 8y ago
And it gives Tesla fans a scapegoat if the company does anything stupid in the future.

geofft 8y ago

Isn't the whole premise of capitalism that people motivated by money will build useful things for the world? How did Ellison conclude that shipping mediocrity is more profitable than shipping excellence?

AlexB138 8y ago
In large part by exploiting government contracts, as I understand it. Government procurement is about as far from a free market as I can imagine, and is pretty easy to exploit.
vibrato 8y ago
Service contracts
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
Right now, there's a whole bunch of businesses and governments that are trapped on oracle. That's because they were the only game 20 years ago. And inertia and lockin is the game. Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs". And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.
- geofft 8y ago
  Is there a standard capitalist solution to lock-in? (Or is it too new of a problem to have been researched?) This seems like a fatal flaw if your goal is even merely free markets and vibrant competition, not even improving society. Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.
  - lordnacho 8y ago

Rainymood 8y ago

To be fair, this critque is more a critique on companies inside capitalism and it works when you remove all the Larry Elliot bashing and replace it with the word company: >There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than companies. >And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. >Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to said company, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' >You need to think of companies the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about companies. I don't see the problem here to be honest. If people want to continue giving money to Oracle for their mediocre products ... that's on them, not on Oracle really.

peteradio 8y ago
Its unfortunate if you viewed Tesla as a game changer or a rising star. Bringing someone on with the character to marginalize all value for the quickest return, that might bother some. So if you were someone who wanted to give money to Tesla now you might think twice. This isn't about Oracle this is about Ellison.
- Rainymood 8y ago
  Come to think of it that is indeed relevant and I completely skipped over that. I am bullish on Tesla and financially have skin in the game as well. So far Tesla has been quite volatile but I'm bullish on the long-term.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
darkerside 8y ago
It's even less of a critique than an observation at that point. Lawnmowers are useful, and if you thought they were friendly, you're using the tool incorrectly.

kevin_b_er 8y ago

I won't anthropomorphize the lawnmower, but since Larry Ellison is a person, and our broken US legal system consider Oracle a person too, then Oracle has already been anthropomorphized by judicial fiat. Both are greed.

sys_64738 8y ago

Whenever I read this and the java guy Gosling they are incredibly negative about Oracle. One wonders if there is something behind all this as it appears they were figures of respect and authority at their previous company. But upon being consumed by Oracle was that still the case? I get the impression that there is underlying bitterness and resentment festering here due to something like that.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
EamonnMR 8y ago
In the linked speech he goes over exactly what he thinks Oracle did wrong in excruciating detail. There's no mystery here.
geodel 8y ago
Well Java guy got his picnic canceled by Oracle as he detailed on his blog. If I had been dreaming of eating hot dogs at picnic for months and it got canceled at last minute I wouldn't be happy either.
- bitL 8y ago
  Important detail is that the picnic was fully paid already with no refund; cancelled because why should ex-SUN have fun/higher salaries, when the rest of Oracle haven't?
  - glogla 8y ago
    That sounds like a horribly toxic company. As expected of Oracle.

throwaway765456 8y ago

I've always wondered how Mr. Cantrill felt when in 2015, after years of hearing his vitriol about Oracle, more than a few of his Joyent team left him to follow Mark Cavage to Oracle including Node.js frontman TJ. This would have been a substantial hit to the tight US development team. Has Mr. Cantrill spoken on how he processed that?

jen20 8y ago
Probably best not to feed the obvious trolls, but I'd imagine somewhat vindicated when the self-same mistakes made by Cavage that took a long time to correct in Triton appeared in Oracle's cloud APIs a few years later.
bcantrill 8y ago
I hit on some of this in the Reddit AMA that happened in 2015[1], but that AMA was asking the more general question about losing people, not the more specific question about losing people to Oracle. The answer is that it was of course gutting and surprising, and it took a while to process -- it was hard to not read it as a personal rebuke! But of course, people don't generally alter their career trajectory to spite others (that is, you don't hear "Yeah, my new job is a terrible team solving an uninteresting problem within an awful company -- but boy did I ever stick it to my former boss!"), but rather to seek their own opportunity. So I came to accept that each of them (and there were quite a few!) left for the opportunity they saw at Oracle. As for why Oracle: at the time, they were building a de novo cloud, and they were doing it by hiring engineers away from other cloud providers, with a sharp focus on compensation. And in particular: for the ex-AWS'ers at Joyent, one of their former senior colleagues at AWS (Don Johnson) had gone to Oracle to take a leadership position[2]; I think it's fair to say that those who went to Oracle saw themselves as joining Don as much (if not more) than they were joining Oracle. Of course, none of this made it any easier for me or for the team to swallow -- and it has been of little solace that those who left for Oracle have (of course!) discovered that Oracle is what it is, with several of them having now left Oracle for other opportunities[3]. They may have learned about themselves what Oracle taught me about myself: that in addition to the team I'm on and the problem I'm solving, the company's larger mission is, in fact, important to me -- and that Oracle's emptiness in this regard can be crushingly soul-depleting. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_of_joyent_the_father_of_dtrace_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_o... [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2014/oracle-hire-100-engineers-seattle-new-cloud-infrastructure-center/ https://www.geekwire.com/2014/oracle-hire-100-engineers-seat... [3] https://twitter.com/mcavage/status/969762887530037248 https://twitter.com/mcavage/status/969762887530037248

dirkgently 8y ago

It's like all the @$$holes in the same (board) room.

malmsteen 8y ago

there are winners and people who complain. it's mutually exclusive