Meanwhile, a young programmer named Larry Ellison had formed a company called Software Development Laboratories, originally to do contract work, but quickly decided that selling packaged software was a far better proposition: doing the work once and reselling it multiple times was an excellent way to get rich. They just needed a product, and IBM effectively gave it to them; because the System R team was being treated as a research project, not a commercial venture, they happily wrote multiple papers explaining how System R worked, and published the SQL spec. Software Development Laboratories implemented it and called it Oracle, and in 1979 sold it to the CIA; a condition of the contract was that it run on IBM mainframes.
In other words, IBM not only created the conditions for the richest packaged software company ever to emerge (Microsoft), they basically gave an instruction manual to the second.
Most, if not all, of Oracle’s growth in the last couple decades has come from selling software licenses AND from buying up other companies, and in turn selling licenses for those products.
Oracle bought the company I worked for in 2008. They wanted to compete with SAP and figured our products, which were highly regarded at the time, were a quick way to get a foothold. Our customers rebelled. Ones who HAD licensed our stuff fled because Oracle immediately imposed their draconian licensing practices. Because that, in fact, is how and why Oracle exists: licensing revenue.
To keep that process going and the cash flowing, they MUST keep gobbling up external companies and products or else the whole licensing thing will stall.
If you look back on Oracle’s own history of 2008, they don’t even mention the company I worked for even though they spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring it. It is merely lumped in with the 20 or 30 other companies it bought that year. Every year since has been the same. The companies get bought, their products are absorbed and rebranded or abandoned, and remaining customers are heavily incentivized to dig deep to keep using what they know, or buy Oracle’s own version, or leave.
Not many years after buying my company, Oracle shrugged and quit having any interest in the particular line of business they’d spent hundreds of millions to enter. It wasn’t just my company but several others snapped up to compete with SAP and others, and Oracle simply gave up and walked away. So basically they gobbled up a bunch of good, working, valid products, snuffed out the companies which made them and then the products too. And walked away, no longer interested in that business.
Larry probably burns billions buying up stuff like that which they throw away a few years later. What the hell does he care? Oracle still mints money. Or they will buy someone who mints money, strip the products and shut down the company and then decide money is obsolete anyway.
I bear Oracle no ill will. I left the company before they actually closed on buying the place I worked. So they never hurt me in any way nor affected my employment. But I can see what they did to what had been a thriving line of business. They killed it. Stupid.
Yup, but that’s the nature of big corporations where the only value is get money to their shareholders, not actually have a successful product and be the leaders in that area.
You can argue all you want about Microsoft’s inherent anti-consumer practices, but at least they keep most of the companies’ they swallow product for a long, long time if not incorporating it into theirs and some are then kept intact.
What they do the same though is take out the competition by buying them or making them go out of business.
Their grip on dependency is the same as well. Migrating a huge corporation that uses their products (either Oracle or MS) is an increasingly harder proposition, especially in the cloud era.
One can argue that at least Microsoft offers the local cloud in a much more accesible way through their Operating Systems… but I do not know how much more cost effective is their new Azure platform for certain size and types of businesses.
Yeah, tell that to Caligari Corporation. They made the easiest to pick up and use 3d modeller on the market. Microsoft decided to buy them out around 07, released an update in 08 for free download, and then nuked the company, and all development/mention of TrueSpace. Microsoft is as bad at managing this stuff as everyone else.
Oracle is making its money mostly off the companies living in the 20th century.
Enterprise Level Database software is now cheap or free.
We have a large selection of languages to code.
It managers have put their testosterone aside, and made more careful purchasing decisions.
Oracle is overkill and overprice for most companies.
Unfortunately migrating the existing corporate infrastructure to one of those other database solutions is a hugely expensive and time consuming project for most enterprises of any size. It may actually make more sense to keep paying Oracle if it will cost you tens of years worth of licensing to migrate away.
An added benefit of the status quo is that your Oracle-based software and processes already work, and you don’t run the risk of getting axed when your “migrate away from Oracle” project fails and you cost the company millions.
So…less than what you were already paying for Oracle licenses then?
sometimes it’s comparably cheaper to maintain existing setup than pay for alternative – because there may be unforeseen costs involved that become visible in latter phase of deployment and inevitable later.
That is quite literally FUD.
You’ve got a choice… pay people you like and know. Or pay pay Oracle and probably not even get what you need.
Edited 2016-09-27 14:02 UTC