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Oracle has had Larry Ellison as chairman/CTO, and someone else as CEO, for almost 10 years now - and they’ve done well (financially at least) over the period. T

Oracle has had Larry Ellison as chairman/CTO, and someone else as CEO, for almost 10 years now - and they’ve done well (financially at least) over the period. They even started out with two joint CEOs (Mark Hurd and Safra Catz), but were reduced to one by Mark Hurd’s sudden untimely death. Ellison isn’t majority owner, but he does own over a third of the stock.

b112 4y ago
Oracle, what a crazy company. Its only goal seems to be to buy things, and then destroy them. I interviewed there a decade ago. Response: someone told me I wasn't a culture fit. But this wasn't the normal "culture fit" response, oh no. You could tell it was a "you aren't willing to drink the coolaid" type of response. I feel I dodged a bullet.
- skissane 4y ago
  I worked for Oracle for almost 10 years. My memories of working there is of just a lot of totally normal everyday people doing the same things as at any other large corporation. Some of the business and technical decisions were disappointing, yet somehow they found a way to just keep on making boatloads of money anyway.
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    Oracle isn't exactly a shining example. If you ask anyone technical who professionally came of age in the last 25 years what they're known for, the answer will be "lawsuits". Your comment is a pretty good example of the kind of organizational dysfunction that results from unclear reporting and leadership vacuums. From the inside, lots of people are doing their job and doing their job well. From the outside, all this activity and all these highly-paid and highly-talented employees don't result in anything novel or useful. The company keeps chugging along, making boatloads of cash from its existing customers because old habits die hard, but gradually loses its capacity to adapt to market shifts. Then when a market shift happens, it goes out of business. Twitter's problem is that a market shift is already underway, and their financials are precarious. Companies like Oracle or IBM can limp along for decades as long as their customers stay in business. Google is in the middle - their business is probably more precarious now than it's been in 20 years. Twitter is at imminent risk of death in the next 1-3 years if they don't turn the ship around.
    - skissane 4y ago
      I’ve seen people choose Oracle Cloud because it was cheaper than AWS/GCP/Azure. Maybe Oracle is selling at a loss to gain more market share, but if you design things right, moving to another provider isn’t that hard. In practice, AWS seems to have much more vendor lock-in Oracle has so many acquired products, many businesses are paying for one and people don’t even notice. For example, NetSuite for accounting. Cerner runs hospitals. Lots of industry-specific software in utilities, insurance, manufacturing, etc Compared to (say) IBM, Oracle is much keener on killing legacy products
      - nyolfen 4y ago
        i use oracle cloud for its extraordinarily generous free tier but it is straight up the worst website for any cloud service i've ever encountered, it reminds me of going into a retail shop that is clearly a money laundering front. the dashboard page seems purposefully designed to prevent you from managing your assets and i had to contact a support agent to figure out how to attach a credit card to my account.
        skissane 4y ago
        I'm not talking about free usage, I'm talking about people spending serious money on cloud services. Cases I've heard about, Oracle sales were willing to engage in much more aggressive discounting on a large deal than AWS or GCP or Azure were, making going with Oracle pretty much a no-brainer from a cost viewpoint. I've heard similar stories about IBM as well. I suppose the second-tier players feel a need to fight for business that the first-tier players don't. No idea about their web UI (although it can't possibly be as bad as the UIs of some of their legacy on-premise products) – but serious usage one tends to use the APIs much more than the web UI.
- lazide 4y ago
  From the rumor mill, Oracle sales teams are amazingly amoral, even by enterprise standards. But very pleasant to be around if you have money.
  - skissane 4y ago
    I used to work very closely with Oracle sales teams in Australia-and I never saw anyone I worked with directly do anything “amoral”. I heard about a few things on the grapevine, but in a 100,000 person company things are going to happen, you can’t really generalise from the occasional incident.
    - lazide 4y ago
      The rumors were specifically what happened when no one was looking, and the customers were always happy with it. But who knows. All second hand.

b112 4y ago

Oracle, what a crazy company. Its only goal seems to be to buy things, and then destroy them. I interviewed there a decade ago. Response: someone told me I wasn't a culture fit. But this wasn't the normal "culture fit" response, oh no. You could tell it was a "you aren't willing to drink the coolaid" type of response. I feel I dodged a bullet.

skissane 4y ago
I worked for Oracle for almost 10 years. My memories of working there is of just a lot of totally normal everyday people doing the same things as at any other large corporation. Some of the business and technical decisions were disappointing, yet somehow they found a way to just keep on making boatloads of money anyway.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  Oracle isn't exactly a shining example. If you ask anyone technical who professionally came of age in the last 25 years what they're known for, the answer will be "lawsuits". Your comment is a pretty good example of the kind of organizational dysfunction that results from unclear reporting and leadership vacuums. From the inside, lots of people are doing their job and doing their job well. From the outside, all this activity and all these highly-paid and highly-talented employees don't result in anything novel or useful. The company keeps chugging along, making boatloads of cash from its existing customers because old habits die hard, but gradually loses its capacity to adapt to market shifts. Then when a market shift happens, it goes out of business. Twitter's problem is that a market shift is already underway, and their financials are precarious. Companies like Oracle or IBM can limp along for decades as long as their customers stay in business. Google is in the middle - their business is probably more precarious now than it's been in 20 years. Twitter is at imminent risk of death in the next 1-3 years if they don't turn the ship around.
  - skissane 4y ago
    I’ve seen people choose Oracle Cloud because it was cheaper than AWS/GCP/Azure. Maybe Oracle is selling at a loss to gain more market share, but if you design things right, moving to another provider isn’t that hard. In practice, AWS seems to have much more vendor lock-in Oracle has so many acquired products, many businesses are paying for one and people don’t even notice. For example, NetSuite for accounting. Cerner runs hospitals. Lots of industry-specific software in utilities, insurance, manufacturing, etc Compared to (say) IBM, Oracle is much keener on killing legacy products
    - nyolfen 4y ago
      i use oracle cloud for its extraordinarily generous free tier but it is straight up the worst website for any cloud service i've ever encountered, it reminds me of going into a retail shop that is clearly a money laundering front. the dashboard page seems purposefully designed to prevent you from managing your assets and i had to contact a support agent to figure out how to attach a credit card to my account.
      - skissane 4y ago
        I'm not talking about free usage, I'm talking about people spending serious money on cloud services. Cases I've heard about, Oracle sales were willing to engage in much more aggressive discounting on a large deal than AWS or GCP or Azure were, making going with Oracle pretty much a no-brainer from a cost viewpoint. I've heard similar stories about IBM as well. I suppose the second-tier players feel a need to fight for business that the first-tier players don't. No idea about their web UI (although it can't possibly be as bad as the UIs of some of their legacy on-premise products) – but serious usage one tends to use the APIs much more than the web UI.
lazide 4y ago
From the rumor mill, Oracle sales teams are amazingly amoral, even by enterprise standards. But very pleasant to be around if you have money.
- skissane 4y ago
  I used to work very closely with Oracle sales teams in Australia-and I never saw anyone I worked with directly do anything “amoral”. I heard about a few things on the grapevine, but in a 100,000 person company things are going to happen, you can’t really generalise from the occasional incident.
  - lazide 4y ago
    The rumors were specifically what happened when no one was looking, and the customers were always happy with it. But who knows. All second hand.