Maybe when they finally do go under Google will be able to buy Java and MySQL...
That is a bold statement. Google has ~1/3 of the world who have access to the internet as regular users. Apple is a hardware maker with a very desirable array of products. I won't say I am a fan of Oracle, and I agree with you on how the lifecycle of enterprise adoption works, but that is a very far fetched conclusion.
First, large companies need to adapt quicker; while this has always been the case, the pace is accelerating. As pointed out above, Oracle has done some shit to alienate a lot of people, and have been for a while.
New companies grow up to be "enterprise". While they ard gouging and alienating their current customers and potential employees, people are NOT building on Oracle. They aren't being locked in.
As old companies (or their management) retire Oracle will have adoption rates like cobol. I am not saying tomorrow, nor this year, but Oracle is going to make big changes or see their MRR fade out with the salesy slicks who brought them on board 2 decades ago.
Whilst Oracle has done absolutely nothing the last few years other than crappy, me-too products they do have a LOT of luck on their side. Why ? Because nobody is touching the EDW (enterprise data warehouse) space. There are no new startups. No disruptors. Nothing. All of the excitement and growth is happening in the analytics space where companies are just sucking all the data from the EDW into Hadoop. And then doing feature extraction, modelling, machine learning etc there rather than doing it in the database.
So nobody is really going after Oracle/Teradata/SAP etc core business any more. It's just kind of forgotten arguably like Windows or Office.
My company is still stuck using CVS because when a new project starts up, they want to use the people who are already locked into the old tech and so they end up going with what people already know. Even teams that started with git have downgraded to CVS once the managers starting looking for ways reuse resources.
I'm not saying all companies will end up doing that, but some certainly will (and already do). They may not be vocal about it, though, because they don't want to piss Oracle.
More realistically, it's department politics that are going to prevent any sort of migration.
Enterprise IT is broken enough that those multiple system replacement projects were going to happen anyway because of accumulated technical debt and broken development and maintenance processes, and replacing a backend DB as part of that replacement is a rounding error in expense. Sure, it takes a lot of time for the transition to be complete, but lots of those transitions off Oracle are already underway.
Past performance is no guarantee for the future. We zillions of PC manufacturers before we got the likes of HP and Dell, and twenty years later, we still have them. On the desktop OS/application front, the same happened with Microsoft becoming the main player.
The common theme, I think, is that things are chaotic while there is room for everyone to grow, but get more predictable once the entire pie has been divided (aside: that's an argument in favor of Uber's "land grab at any cost" strategy)
Oracle, Google, or Facebook may eventually disappear, but it won't happen at he time scale at which Altavista or MySpace did.
https://gigaom.com/report/sector-roadmap-cloud-analytic-data...
That said, IBM DB2 is very much in the same boat.
* DB2 rolls new features in at their top pricing tier, then trickles them down. So things you could only get in the top tier in 9.5 (for example) are now available in Workgroup edition in 11. Oracle keeps very old features (e.g. partitioning and encryption) as expensive add-ons.
* DB2 is still pushing out new features. PureScale has (for example) moved from parity with RAC (clustering in one datacentre) to well beyond it (metro clusting across a region).
* DB2 respects pretty much any VM technology for sub-capacity licensing. Oracle pretty much require you buy OVM.
Top-tier DB2 and a fully loaded Oracle DB are pretty similar pricing (depending on the specific deals you can obtain from your account manager), but DB2 keeps moving, and many of the features you might care about can be had in much cheaper editions.
The problems DB2 face are mindshare (easier to find DBAs for Oracle, many people still think of DB2 as a "mainframe thing"), and there's still quite a few "enterprise" apps that only support Oracle DBs.
Relentlessly squeezing existing customers that have no way out will only get you so far.
Direct licensing costs are not all that matters. The restrictions on architectural choices and the uncertainty created by these complex licensing structures could hurt them a lot more.
They also found a new way to apply that same model with 0365 and their continual effort to add new features that only cost a "few dollars more per user per month"
Squeezing locked in customers is the Enterprise Software way... all of them do it.
No doubt about that, but for basic infrastructure like DBMSs the customer of the future will be another tech company. Try extracting the same margins for a database system from, say, Airbnb or Uber as from a mid-sized bank founded in 1888.
Use to Stability, and Profitability not growth was important.
Stability, and Profitability were the goal, growth followed but was not in itself a goal
Now even if you are profitable, if you are not seeing growth then you failed. It is ridiculous.
The role of technology is to drive productivity growth, which is ultimately the only thing that improves living standards (or at least has the potential to do so).
A pizza sold in 1987 is just as useful as a pizza sold in 2017 measured by its nutritional value. But the same is not true of technologies from 1987.
These mega vendors drive co-dependency, not innovation.
Even at their most dominant, Microsoft kept adding things customers wanted. AD was a big leap forward for customers, when Microsoft could have rested on the domain model. SQL Server kept adding capabilities, Exchange, etc.
CAL's for example would never be possible with out Vendor Lockin, What kind of extortion scheme do you have to have to sell a server licence then charge for every thing that wants to connect to the server.....
Etc. etc. etc.
This particular price change is all about customers moving away from old RISC systems and IBM and towards x86. Amazon dramatically overprices Intel cores, so Oracle wants to capture that value. Cheap licensing for x86 is subsidy for AWS and Azure. They are spiking the pricing to push you into Oracle/Sun hardware or the Oracle cloud offerings. "Hardware and Software Engineered together" isn't limited to technology engineering!
The sunk cost fallacy! A better reason not to change is that a different system would cost significant sums of money retraining people and procedures
That assumes that people act rationally though, so I am not saying you are wrong that people think like this
But I don't think you realize the extent of Google's ubiquitousness. Innovation is a survival strategy, and between the companies you mentioned, Oracle comes last in that front.
If enough businesses pursue that option, then the cash cow of annual support dries up and Oracle is in a world of hurt.
They could just raise licensing costs. They've already won on API copyrights. Businesses would have to move everything off Oracle entirely with new API's to avoid legal risk. Such moves, esp if Oracle docs suck as much as claimed here, can cost a fortune with huge chance of breaking stuff. Oracle just has to keep cost of licensing lower than that of a move.
I'm not sure that's true; it's may be true that Oracle has more Enterprise penetration now, but enterprises with significant Oracle dependencies I've encountered are mostly migrating out (largely to Microsoft) -- including enterprises that also have substantial decades-old COBOL mainframe legacy that they aren't as actively working to retire.
The biggest obstacle to Oracle's future success isn't price or other databases. It's the analytics space i.e. Hadoop/Spark which is relegating big iron SQL databases to being dumb CRUD boxes. It's why both Oracle and Teradata moved into the space but have struggled to get any traction against Hortonworks or Cloudera.
Not sure how much traction is having vs Horton or Cloudera, but I'm sure a lot of companies that already buy Oracle would look into it if needed.
But those engineers retire, new ones without memory of Oracle's past take their place, and all will be forgotten.
Remember how Microsoft was the company many engineers hated when the Halloween Documents [1] came out? Yet, they have managed to patch up that relationship since 1998.
Forever and a day. Oracle sells to managers and executives and are very, very good at it.
Your opinion of the company as a developer or engineer has literally no relevance.
I agree, but the point is that they are getting worse. Their cloud shift is not panning out as well as they wanted, I think, and they are actually opening opportunities for competitors: if you have to make significant efforts to migrate your existing solutions, you might as well move somewhere nicer. And by basically threatening their own partner ecosystems (which won't be needed in the new oracle-cloud era), they're losing steam in sales and presales.
(Of course, it doesn't help that Safe Harbor first and Privacy Shield now have been shot down, so European businesses are not keen on moving to US-based clouds. The sort of businesses Oracle pines for, does care about these things.)
Oracle DBA here who hates their licensing, practices, etc. as much as the next guy, but I have to hand it to their query optimization. I've seen their optimizer get better with every major release, and yes, regression testing will always turn up a few problems but Oracle gives you the best tools to analyze and override the decisions that the optimizer is making when necessary (and I'm not just talking about basic hints here)
So, you changed code and didn't test it. Yup, definitely Oracle's fault.
That's not even really a CBO issue. But I hear your pain :-)
Sometimes you just aren't going to pick up this sort of thing in testing as you'll only know about it under full production load. Their CBO is pretty powerful, but by and large it's often difficult to know why it makes certain decisions. And that's even when you use their full suite of profiling tools!
no, it really is not.
| 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 |
-------------------------------------------------------
Gross Income | 26.83B| 27.68B| 28.74B| 28.55B| 27.93B|I've had two jobs in the past that have been in Oracle shops and from my experience those companies were so fully invested in a lot of the Oracle suite (think WebLogic, ESB, the database etc) it would be like turning a huge oil tanker around to pivot away from it.
And don't forget the reams of PL/SQL that often sits at the core of a lot of business logic
Another important factor is today's engineers are tomorrows architects.
Also in the enterprise space code changes are measured in dollars/euro/yan/... per hour, not engineer happiness.
You spend some money, get new and hopefully better code, and with some luck you will get a return on the investment, ie more money than you spent on doing it.
Unless you are doing it for fun. Or don't know what to do with all the money you have.
That better code had a cost of 1 000 euros, due to the amount of hours spent on it.
How much profit did those euros spent on developer salary brought to the business revenue?
I laugh at how the only thing discussed here is open source software and the cloud. People forget that there's a whole entire world of enterprise software and systems.
As someone else mentioned earlier, mid to large size companies don't replace systems like people do here with Javascript frameworks. It is really expensive and costly to replace systems that have been around for decades. The business logic tied up in some of these systems is so vast and complex that it is cheaper to keep them around than to replace them with something new.
So rewriting and keeping the same logic is very difficult and the business risk is very high due to all the unknowns: features, time, compliance, correctness, performance.
A long time. They are making tons of money.
Devs may not like them, but most devs don't care.
Devs are usually not the one's footing the bill.
Oracle makes a decent product, they will force big-corp ABC to pay for it.
I don't like them, but I don't think this is going to hurt their business.