Update on Oracle Layoffs
thelayoff.com
thelayoff.com
Oracle faces intense competition from Microsoft, and also from Open Source. The fact that Oracle has continued forward, seemingly unharmed, has so far struck me as something like a magic act.
Are these layoffs a sign of Oracle in long term decay? Or is this merely typical corporate reorganization that any large company goes through every few years?
If you have a really strong platform, technical superiority and you employ one of the best people in the world you must be in a deep shit if you screw up that much. Oracle positioned itself as an "Apple of enterprise software and services" but in a globalized world and the world of constant cost savings and outsourcing how can you justify buying a solution that only brings you revenue indirectly ? That's non sense. You can't only target fortune 100/500. You need to attract masses. Solaris was awesome. Sparc was awesome. But these are the things of the past. They should have attracted millions of Java developers to buy into their ecosystem. But they threw it away. They could have marketed Solaris as a better Linux and could have directly compete with AWS. They just needed to make Solaris bigger and popular. It was not that hard. They had better tech (eg zones vs docker) ages ago but they all threw it away.
Well, by that line of reasoning, all the mistakes belong to Sun MicroSystems, not Oracle. And you actually make the case for what Oracle is doing -- trying to be the opposite of Sun.
1) Amiga (Seriously 7 years ahead of everyone else)
2) BeOS (Unless you used it and saw it you still don't understand why it was awesome)
3) Digital Alpha Chips (I had a soft spot for old VAX what can I say)
4) SPARC was awesome but you have to remember it was awesome over Windows, Apple Server (Um anything was better then that spawn of Satan) and the various other UNIX systems.
Solaris lives on in spirit with ZFS
Solaris lives on in reality in illumos, OpenZFS, Delphix, and SmartOS.
Joyent's Cloud on a laptop ("CoaL"), Triton and Manta are really cool. Try them out sometime.
Oracle is nowdays the Microsoft of the past. They can't seem to find a way to compete.
[1] Large corporations that will through money around to avoid trouble.
Apparently people keep forgetting that OpenJDK is mostly developed by the same company and developers that they love to hate.
Additionally, so many companies depend on Java (including Oracle!) that if they suddenly laid off the entire developer workforce I suspect they'd all be hoovered up by other companies and put right back on their old duties, just in different offices.
Also it seems a lot of the JVM engineers are based in Russia, where presumably their costs are not that high.
We all know how critical to the daily business those languages have become.
Personally I think this kind of high-end only strategy is a really bad idea, as it cuts off your supply of new people who know about your technology and are developing new software for your platforms. I always thought it was a big reason why Linux did so well against proprietary Unix systems like HPUX, Solaris, AIX etc, and in turn why they did well against even more closed-off systems like mainframe products.
When it's hard for people to learn to use your product, due to expensive hardware and licensing fees and complex install processes, fewer people do it, which directly leads to increased costs to hire people in that arena. Compare that to Windows/Linux admins who can easily learn their craft on a cheap/free software and cheap hardware.
Microsoft is a good example of a company who generally gets that problem despite playing in the enterprise space. You can get 180-day licenses and VM images for most of their products for free (completely fine for training), and there's a load of cheap/free training materials.
Exactly:
http://www.dbms2.com/2015/12/31/oracle-as-the-new-ibm-has-a-...
Personal story - they're pushing exadata and exalytics. Products based on 10 year products based on 15+ year old ideas.
It was only in 2014 that they started to feel the pinch as it relates to numbers (they knew it was coming long time ago - e.g., hence HANA for SAP and massive investments by Ellison into NetSuite) - over last six months things have accelerated to the point where they will have to make drastic cuts very quickly. So, the floor is dropping so fast all of them (large enterprise software players) are panicking...
For example, look what we had at the same Oracle board, 11 months ago, it's a summary of Trip Chowdhry's (Industry analyst) predictions on how 2016 will play out - he was almost spot on: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/FFbUNu9
This trend will only accelerate in 2017 and it will take some major realignment effort for the companies at issue to survive. I'd give it up to 18 months for things to play out and I believe that we'll see a massive wave of mergers and large scale layoffs.
If your company is ever looking to move to the ERP space from a homegrown legacy system like we did, don't buy Infor. I'd rather deal with greenscreens for the next twenty years of my life than have to deal with Infor products and support for one more year. And I used to hate old, tired Big Iron.
They also are capitalizing on Java using premium licensing if you're building with Oracle Java for the enterprise and planning to make money from it.
my source is my own experience working with Solaris, which beyond ZFS and OracleDB, has very few things going for it - it made me feel like a bad Sysadmin, really. maybe i was, maybe it is a better OS than my experience taught me.
now they've decided to go all cloud, and are killing Solaris. Java will probably still continue being developed.
At a minimum, I feel like DTrace and Solaris Containers belong in that list too.
The pace of change on these things isn't high, so even if the costs go up it takes a long time for people to migrate off the platform.
Hardware is hard. My outsiders prospective is that Sun tried hard to make money at it by giving away the software. They failed.
Red Hat seems to do this better, they open source their software and charge for support. I think Sun would be here today if they operated more like Red Hat and offered a Nexenta style product with a commercial license and support than trying to do hardware.
Open Yes, and royalty free
Is this 50% of Oracle, that's being speculated, or just some specific division within Oracle? 50% of Oracle, does seem very high.
https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-docker-q-kubernetes-q-sma...