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You would think, but the stock price is still going up and they have a lot of cash on hand. I don't really understand why anyone does business with them, but th

You would think, but the stock price is still going up and they have a lot of cash on hand. I don't really understand why anyone does business with them, but they are likely to be around for a long time. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL?p=ORCL https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ORCL?p=ORCL

markus_zhang 5y ago
They are probably going to last really long considering the impact they made before FAANG took off. Many of their customers are governments and quasi-government companies (think bank and telecom) so I actually think they are going to last a lot longer than we want.
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  I wonder at what point anyone will be willing to work for them and at what salary, though. Surely there comes a point where even paying triple the standard rate, you can't get more engineers working on dusty old code while remaining profitable and their customers' best offer.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Golden time for retired contractors. The same you see for the COBOL generation.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
>>why anyone does business with them, but they are likely to be around for a long time The answer is partially in the question. For large enterprises where large part of IT is a strict cost centre - the "boring" areas of HR/Pay, Financials, CRM, ERM, SCM, etc - predictability, support, longevity, reliability are far more important than sexiness, new technologies, or even immediate cost of license compared to cost of change and uncertainty.
- basch 5y ago
  And most Oracle "customers" probably arent interacting with Oracle directly. They are buying a financial system or erp from a vendor who is Oracle under the hood. They might get to the product selection stage and be looking at 3 industry specific products built on Oracle vs NetSuite. Either way Oracle wins.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > predictability, support, longevity, reliability You can get all of those with postgres too.
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    I mean, yes and no. "No", for the purposes of many traditional non-IT large enterprises. CIO of large company sees value in having "one neck to choke" for their HR Application, Proxy Server, Web Server, App Server, Database Server, Enterprise Service Bus, Search Engine, Monitoring Software, etc. A simple licensing and support model with streamlined contract model as opposed to 27 bespoke contracts with "never heard of them" consulting/support companies for each level of the open-source stack which "nobody owns" (https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/northamerica/ https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort...). At ground level, we may not see value in the same way; we may complain and moan about it; about vendor lock-in, license cost, slow pace, etc etc etc. I certainly did, for decades :). Longevity, ditto: https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/ https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/ https://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lsp-tech-chart-069290.pdf https://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lsp-tech-chart-069...

markus_zhang 5y ago

They are probably going to last really long considering the impact they made before FAANG took off. Many of their customers are governments and quasi-government companies (think bank and telecom) so I actually think they are going to last a lot longer than we want.

ThePadawan 5y ago
I wonder at what point anyone will be willing to work for them and at what salary, though. Surely there comes a point where even paying triple the standard rate, you can't get more engineers working on dusty old code while remaining profitable and their customers' best offer.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Golden time for retired contractors. The same you see for the COBOL generation.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

>>why anyone does business with them, but they are likely to be around for a long time The answer is partially in the question. For large enterprises where large part of IT is a strict cost centre - the "boring" areas of HR/Pay, Financials, CRM, ERM, SCM, etc - predictability, support, longevity, reliability are far more important than sexiness, new technologies, or even immediate cost of license compared to cost of change and uncertainty.

basch 5y ago
And most Oracle "customers" probably arent interacting with Oracle directly. They are buying a financial system or erp from a vendor who is Oracle under the hood. They might get to the product selection stage and be looking at 3 industry specific products built on Oracle vs NetSuite. Either way Oracle wins.
nicoburns 5y ago
> predictability, support, longevity, reliability You can get all of those with postgres too.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  I mean, yes and no. "No", for the purposes of many traditional non-IT large enterprises. CIO of large company sees value in having "one neck to choke" for their HR Application, Proxy Server, Web Server, App Server, Database Server, Enterprise Service Bus, Search Engine, Monitoring Software, etc. A simple licensing and support model with streamlined contract model as opposed to 27 bespoke contracts with "never heard of them" consulting/support companies for each level of the open-source stack which "nobody owns" (https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/northamerica/ https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/nort...). At ground level, we may not see value in the same way; we may complain and moan about it; about vendor lock-in, license cost, slow pace, etc etc etc. I certainly did, for decades :). Longevity, ditto: https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/ https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/ https://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lsp-tech-chart-069290.pdf https://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lsp-tech-chart-069...