I mean Oracles image is absolutely terrible among everyone but a small subsection of large companies. Arguably it doesn't seem to matter, Oracle isn't going out of business any time soon, but I can't imaging that their brand isn't suffering to some extend.
It seems counterproductive, but the trick was this: Oracle gained ownership of our contracts with other companies. Now, you might say, how the hell are you going to keep our products running if everyone who knows anything about them has left and they're all falling apart?
The answer is: this is upside for Oracle, not downside. They're big enough that they can ream customers by forcing them to pay for overpriced consultants to fix the problems Oracle itself caused.
I'm not saying it's not working, because Oracle is clearly doing fine. It just seems rather short term, and really unethical.
Maybe. Some of them won't/can't switch.
The goal is you buy a services company for $X with Y customers spending $Z per year. Doesn't take long for Y * $Z to be much greater than $X and you just string the customers along until they leave.
When I sold computers at retail in high school in the 90s, I'd hang out near the return desk and deal with angry customers. Angry customers actually want to attract somebody's attention (biggest problem a salesperson has) and needs a problem solved.
In my case, the solution usually involved a better computer and a service contract. Literally 9/10 times, once you spoke to these folks respectfully and calmed them down, they were the best customers. In Oracle's case, they upsell all sorts of crap and end up in a position where they can set the agenda because with the money involved, things must work. The IT decision maker becomes dependent on them.
Imagine you're a decision maker, and you have the chance to either (a) stay on with Oracle or (b) go with some set of startups that provide everything Oracle does. Which is, to be clear, a whole fucking lot, even if it does them badly.
Best case scenario (which is hard to pull off), there are no hiccups and you end up saving your company millions or tens millions of dollars per year. You get some reward for it, but definitely not one ongoing or even close to commensurate with the value you just provided.
Most likely, you run into significant hiccups. Maybe one of the startups you chose was a bit optimistic for what necessary features they could deliver in time for the Oracle switchoff. Maybe it's unreliable and all the users hate it. Maybe it takes way more time than expected to retrain the staff to use all the new things. Maybe Oracle drags its feet about helping you stop being their customer. Individually these are all perhaps evitable, but you're likely to run into some issues. Then you have egg on your head. And even if Oracle was just as bad in all those things, because you were the one who rocked the boat, the blame is on you, instead of "well, that's just the state of life."
You might say, "well, why not do things piecemeal?" And you can try that. Indeed, you are ethically obligated to employees and shareholders to do that instead of introducing huge risk to everyone because of an understandable anti-Oracle vendetta. But the way Oracle structures its sales and legal strategies makes it much less financially beneficial to you to do that than to cut them off whole hog. So you scale down the risk, but the potential benefit scales down even more so. And of course, who knows if Oracle won't just acquire the company you switched to a year or so down the road. And then you're stuck where you were originally.
I think, practically, once Oracle has its claws in your company, you're stuck with the parasite. The only solution is to categorically cut off Oracle from consideration for any vendor-supplied solutions. If it acquires one of your vendors, you make it a priority to transition off of it as soon as possible. If there are no other options, you start a new company to fill that niche.
In my anecdotal experience (n=1), yes. At my workplace, every Oracle product we use besides Java (that I know of) is being replaced for new projects and re-engineering efforts. Oracle BPM is getting dropped for Activiti, Oracle Database is forbidden for any project that will be deployed to AWS (due to licensing costs) etc.
as Russian saying goes: "you can't run away from inside a submarine."
https://www.google.ru/?gws_rd=ssl#newwindow=1&q=%D0%BA%D1%83...
some say it is from a song, some - from a joke.
Oracle still invests heavily in the development of the JVM (graal and truffle aim to advance the state of art in JIT compilers)
So it's definitely not all bad (virtualbox is also used by many but unlike MySQL I don't follow the development)
The JVM stuff and virtualbox are both pretty good. I don't know how Oracle has refrained from mucking them up.
But if there's any product that you actually have to pay for, Oracle has screwed it up.
Meanwhile, everyone and their dog moves towards containers and similar isolation technologies.