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Great insights there. I would add that enterprise CIOs paying Oracle through the nose are not idiots, and would have analysed the tradeoffs. Of course there i

Great insights there. I would add that enterprise CIOs paying Oracle through the nose are not idiots, and would have analysed the tradeoffs. Of course there is no company that does not have a migration plan for its workloads but, like mainframe migrations, this stuff is not easy and it could very possibly not make sense.

mickeyp 4y ago
Indeed. It's easy to laugh at CIOs and CTOs, but many of them try their best with the options they have available. I'm reminded of this anecdote I had with a colleague a while back. He was railing against MS Exchange's rise back in the 90s, and how Novell Netware was better and that he was forced to switch their org to MS Exchange, back then, solely because "His CIO read it was the future in a magazine." And so it was. Today, Netware's dead.
- naasking 4y ago
  > solely because "His CIO read it was the future in a magazine." And so it was. Today, Netware's dead. Could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, and not something that would have happened without CIOs reading that magazine.
  - owl57 4y ago
    Could be. That would mean it was good judgement to read the magazine that the other CIOs were also reading.
    - naasking 4y ago
      I'm not sure sprinting towards a self-fulfilling prophecy should count as good judgment. It seems like there's a fallacy in there.
      - aserafini 4y ago
        It makes sense if the self-fulfilling prophecy is outside your control.
        pantulis 4y ago
        Yeah, it's called "marketing" :D
  - nradov 4y ago
    The magazine wasn't wrong. NetWare was a real mess architecturally. The core file and printer sharing features worked great. But as an application server for email, database, or anything else it was a dead end. No memory protection, no real multitasking, bizarre proprietary API, terrible developer tools. One of the major relational database vendors did actually port their product to NetWare but it was a flop in the market. Novell eventually tried to catch up by grafting their proprietary networking features onto Unix but that was too little, too late. The CIOs who started migrating off of NetWare early were the smart ones.
    - therealcamino 4y ago
      I agree completely. But man, it was pretty amazing as a file server for DOS machines. You could boot a roomful of diskless PCs over ethernet from a 386 server, and for most uses the speed felt like you had a local hard drive in each one.
    - hackandthink 4y ago
      Novell was no fun. I ported a C++ server and struggled with the only available C++ Compiler for Novell (Watcom). Debugging meant staring at core dumps. Novell bought SUSE too late.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Marketing to decision makers is true and tested method to make inferior product popular tho
cduzz 4y ago
For a large set of problem spaces you can replace "oracle" with "cisco" or "microsoft" or "AWS". These companies demand a premium over "rolling your own" or "integrating a pile of better at solving a specific problem" products. In some cases the premium is well earned, in others it's just rent-seeking monopolist behavior, depending on how mature the product space is.
- coredog64 4y ago
  Nitpick: Rent-seeking is an economic term that describes an actor that provides no value for end users. It is not a synonym for someone who rents you something. It’s confusing because it can apply to landlords who also seek to restrict supply, and people then conflate the former with the term. Of those companies listed, maybe you can finger Oracle for their shenanigans with Java.
  - cduzz 4y ago
    The far end of this continuum is CA Technologies where they buy products with an entrenched customer base and squeeze them for money while putting the product on "sustaining engineering" (aka hospice care). On the continuum of "innovative product solving hard problem" to "Rent seeing monopoly" AWS is still in the "build the mouse trap" phase while oracle's half way to CA.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    > Of those companies listed, maybe you can finger Oracle for their shenanigans with Java. Oracle licensing on the cloud can be byzantine. In part because their sales people don't seem to all have the same understanding. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/data-architecture-blog/constrained-vcpu-and-oracle-licensing-in-azure/ba-p/3041537 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/data-architecture-blo... (read the comments!) Of course, license true-ups in my experience are allowed the latitude of, "Whatever you can get them to agree to". I've heard a few times Oracle sales folks trying to pressure companies into buying licenses for all physical machine cores for the host underneath their VM's in the cloud. Which is, frankly, malarkey and not even supported by their own docs. (Apparently this is how it is licensed on-prem if you own a VMWare cluster or something, but they carve out an exemption specifically for cloud hosting in their docs - but they try anyways)
api 4y ago
It reminds me of people who pay through the nose for cloud. They've done the spreadsheets and DIYing servers and infrastructure and hiring the people required to administrate it often comes out as more expensive. It's much worse for companies that are not tech companies with lots of in-house IT experience. They often lack the institutional expertise to even hire the right people to manage a DIY infrastructure. So it makes perfect sense to outsource to AWS and pay what seem like very high costs. You're not really buying the compute. You're buying the management.

mickeyp 4y ago

Indeed. It's easy to laugh at CIOs and CTOs, but many of them try their best with the options they have available. I'm reminded of this anecdote I had with a colleague a while back. He was railing against MS Exchange's rise back in the 90s, and how Novell Netware was better and that he was forced to switch their org to MS Exchange, back then, solely because "His CIO read it was the future in a magazine." And so it was. Today, Netware's dead.

naasking 4y ago
> solely because "His CIO read it was the future in a magazine." And so it was. Today, Netware's dead. Could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, and not something that would have happened without CIOs reading that magazine.
- owl57 4y ago
  Could be. That would mean it was good judgement to read the magazine that the other CIOs were also reading.
  - naasking 4y ago
    I'm not sure sprinting towards a self-fulfilling prophecy should count as good judgment. It seems like there's a fallacy in there.
    - aserafini 4y ago
      It makes sense if the self-fulfilling prophecy is outside your control.
      - pantulis 4y ago
        Yeah, it's called "marketing" :D
- nradov 4y ago
  The magazine wasn't wrong. NetWare was a real mess architecturally. The core file and printer sharing features worked great. But as an application server for email, database, or anything else it was a dead end. No memory protection, no real multitasking, bizarre proprietary API, terrible developer tools. One of the major relational database vendors did actually port their product to NetWare but it was a flop in the market. Novell eventually tried to catch up by grafting their proprietary networking features onto Unix but that was too little, too late. The CIOs who started migrating off of NetWare early were the smart ones.
  - therealcamino 4y ago
    I agree completely. But man, it was pretty amazing as a file server for DOS machines. You could boot a roomful of diskless PCs over ethernet from a 386 server, and for most uses the speed felt like you had a local hard drive in each one.
  - hackandthink 4y ago
    Novell was no fun. I ported a C++ server and struggled with the only available C++ Compiler for Novell (Watcom). Debugging meant staring at core dumps. Novell bought SUSE too late.
ilyt 4y ago
Marketing to decision makers is true and tested method to make inferior product popular tho

cduzz 4y ago

For a large set of problem spaces you can replace "oracle" with "cisco" or "microsoft" or "AWS". These companies demand a premium over "rolling your own" or "integrating a pile of better at solving a specific problem" products. In some cases the premium is well earned, in others it's just rent-seeking monopolist behavior, depending on how mature the product space is.

coredog64 4y ago
Nitpick: Rent-seeking is an economic term that describes an actor that provides no value for end users. It is not a synonym for someone who rents you something. It’s confusing because it can apply to landlords who also seek to restrict supply, and people then conflate the former with the term. Of those companies listed, maybe you can finger Oracle for their shenanigans with Java.
- cduzz 4y ago
  The far end of this continuum is CA Technologies where they buy products with an entrenched customer base and squeeze them for money while putting the product on "sustaining engineering" (aka hospice care). On the continuum of "innovative product solving hard problem" to "Rent seeing monopoly" AWS is still in the "build the mouse trap" phase while oracle's half way to CA.
- RajT88 4y ago
  > Of those companies listed, maybe you can finger Oracle for their shenanigans with Java. Oracle licensing on the cloud can be byzantine. In part because their sales people don't seem to all have the same understanding. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/data-architecture-blog/constrained-vcpu-and-oracle-licensing-in-azure/ba-p/3041537 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/data-architecture-blo... (read the comments!) Of course, license true-ups in my experience are allowed the latitude of, "Whatever you can get them to agree to". I've heard a few times Oracle sales folks trying to pressure companies into buying licenses for all physical machine cores for the host underneath their VM's in the cloud. Which is, frankly, malarkey and not even supported by their own docs. (Apparently this is how it is licensed on-prem if you own a VMWare cluster or something, but they carve out an exemption specifically for cloud hosting in their docs - but they try anyways)

api 4y ago

It reminds me of people who pay through the nose for cloud. They've done the spreadsheets and DIYing servers and infrastructure and hiring the people required to administrate it often comes out as more expensive. It's much worse for companies that are not tech companies with lots of in-house IT experience. They often lack the institutional expertise to even hire the right people to manage a DIY infrastructure. So it makes perfect sense to outsource to AWS and pay what seem like very high costs. You're not really buying the compute. You're buying the management.