I don't think Sarah Lacy knows very much about enterprise software sales cycle, or the concerns of enterprise customers. When you have enterprise customers, th

I don't think Sarah Lacy knows very much about enterprise software sales cycle, or the concerns of enterprise customers. When you have enterprise customers, their tolerance for downtime is extremely small. When you become big enough, your IT infrastructure becomes a competitive advantage. Maybe more accurately, the C-level executives believe that their IT infrastructure is a competitive advantage, and they will continue to spend money to maintain the status quo. They believe they can't afford to outsource things like CRM, IT Service Management, etc. And enterprise software companies exploit this belief, and extract billions of dollars from them through software upgrades and service contracts. I worked for enterprise software companies, and I scratched my head wondering why companies kept spending so much money on mediocre software. And it's exactly the old adage from the 80s: "No one gets fired for buying IBM". When you buy Oracle/Siebel, no one will question the status quo. If you throw out Siebel and switch to Salesforce, and Salesforce suffers a 3-day outage much like EC2 did last year, then your head is on the chopping block. That's why CIOs like Oracle. Now the one thing that Oracle has to really worry about is new companies that never grew up on Oracle, that grow big, like Facebook, Google, etc. The new multi-billion-dollar companies will balk at the idea of spending millions of dollars a year on database licenses, but as long as the enterprise companies are still around, there's more than enough money to sustain Oracle for a long, long time.