In the early 2000s, nearing the launch of The Sims Online, Oracle sent their sales team to Maxis. I was a newish employee and wasn't involved in the decision pr

In the early 2000s, nearing the launch of The Sims Online, Oracle sent their sales team to Maxis. I was a newish employee and wasn't involved in the decision process, but I overhead much of the conversation (my desk was just outside Will Wright's office[1]). Every time the Oracle rep said "if you invest in RAC..." (emphasis theirs) I absolutely cringed at the blatant attempt at NLP. They bought it, and it was a disaster. Turns out you can't just take a system designed without partitioning in mind and put it on a distributed database. Not that it mattered; the system saw a tiny fraction of its expected usage. The whole game was an absurd amount of money spent on nothing. To this day I have never used another Oracle product. [1] I don't think Will Wright was involved in that decision either; I think he was fully checked-out by then and in any case ops wasn't his bailiwick. The conversation just happened to take place in his office.