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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you realize how the enterprise ecosystem works. There are legacy Cobol systems scattered all around the place. Corporations stick with their platforms for decades. This isn't the web development front where we change platform every couple of years. In corporations change is slow because there are significant sums of money invested in people and procedures. You just don't change that for the next flashy thing. And thus the future for Oracle is much more promising than it is for Google or Apple.

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> the future for Oracle is much more promising that[sic] it is for Google or Apple.

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.

The internet is pretty fickle though. I still remember when people switched from Altavista to Google and from MySpace to Facebook. It didn't take all that long and look at those old companies now.

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.

You are confusing consumers facing products( Altavista, MySpace ) with corporate facing customers. The corporations have invested 10s of million or more developing products based on Oracle products. Changing from Oracle to PostgresSQL is possibly many years of work and multiple projects for a large company.

I agree the companies are unlikely to rework the current code from Oracle to PostgreSQL (or some other database), but they'll definitely think twice when starting new stuff.

When managers start a new project, they don't want to think twice. They want to grab the ass of someone else in the company who's already done the same thing and leverage their expertise to reduce the cost of the project.

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.

It's always a cost/benefit evaluation. When the costs stay roughly constant, the outcome is usually to use the same stuff as for previous projects. But when the vendor significantly increases the costs, like Oracle does in the recent past, that may have significant impact. It may be easier/cheaper to switch to a different database, for example.

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.

Or less with some tools: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Oracle_to_Postgres_Conversi...

> Changing from Oracle to PostgresSQL is possibly many years of work and multiple projects for a large company

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.

And potentially a lot of fuck ups along the way. Don't forget that the average CRUD developper in a corporation is usually not a PhD from MIT.

Speaking as an enterprise CRUD developer wage-slave, if you need a PhD from MIT to figure out how to migrate from Oracle to a sane database like Postgres or SQL Server, you probably should work in a different field or at least a different project.

More realistically, it's department politics that are going to prevent any sort of migration.

"The internet is pretty fickle though. I still remember when people switched from Altavista to Google and from MySpace to Facebook. It didn't take all that long and look at those old companies now."

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.

re: EDW - Snowflake Computing? AWS RedShift? Google BigQuery?

https://gigaom.com/report/sector-roadmap-cloud-analytic-data...

Amazon Redshift?

At a prior employer, the CIO was so pissed off about Oracle licensing that he seriously considered freezing Oracle versions (as a prelude to migration off the platform) and buying third party support from Rimini Street.

If enough businesses pursue that option, then the cash cow of annual support dries up and Oracle is in a world of hurt.

"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.

True, but I think you may be underestimating the need for a public company to grow in order to survive in its current form.

Relentlessly squeezing existing customers that have no way out will only get you so far.

Worked for Microsoft for Decades,

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.

>Squeezing locked in customers is the Enterprise Software way

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.

I bet the mid-sized bank founded in 1888 will still be around well after 80% of these tech companies failed...

Being around isn't the same as growth though, and being around doesn't necessarily mean to run your own IT infrastructure either.

I find this modern fixation on growth MBA's have forced upon the business world to be facinating

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.

I don't disagree in general, but Oracle is a tech company and technology has a particular function in our society that wasn't invented by MBAs.

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.

I'd argue for the Oracle growth drivers, things are much better than 1987, but only marginally better than 1999.

These mega vendors drive co-dependency, not innovation.

Oracle's lockin doesn't just come from their database. There are also behemoth business/logistics/financial applications that exist only as PL/SQL packages and a bit of Java UI. Moving off Oracle Applications is a lot harder than switching databases.

> Worked for Microsoft for Decades,

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.

All designed around Vendor Lockin, then putting the screws to business with various and complex licensing

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.....

CALs - you mean like literally every successful SaaS solution on the market today? CALs are alive and well and aren't EVER going to die. Salesforce.com? CAL. Openair? CAL. Workday? CAL.

Etc. etc. etc.

I do enterprise consulting, all these licensing costs are usually a small footnote in overall project costs.

I don't think that says a whole lot about Oracle's growth opportunities as everyone moves to the cloud.

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.

You are totally correct about how change is slow in enterprise, and this favors Oracle tremendously.

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.

Google's lack of a rich enterprise cultural workforce consisting of account managers paired with a culture of sales and services for profits makes a great deal of enterprises nervous since this is how they're structured for business for several decades. This is where Google's partners that are more versed in such traditional, engineer-hostile come in, but then you wind up where massive companies start to rely upon maybe 1000-person companies that will be crushed by the onslaught of horrifically mundane, non-scalable problems endemic to a customerbase consisting of non-technical people and sub-par engineering talent as standard. These companies know that they can't use these smaller companies and are not run by stupid people (usually), so they have really little choice among technology vendors that make most of the HN crowd cringe.

So Oracle's future is based on those large enterprises, while the more nimble, those that will be large enterprises down the road, steer away from Oracle? Maybe Oracle realised that they won't be winning the smaller one's over and now decided to squeeze the larger ones even more.

Nope. Once you're big enough to start worrying about public company financial processes, your new CFO is going to buy Oracle Financials.

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!

Or they realize that your small nimble companies will "grow up" and hire experienced managers who will put in place rules that require mature vendors and Oracle gets another generation of company. Happens a lot, sadly. Idealism gets beaten and the people who don't like Oracle jump ship to new and exciting nimble companies.

> corporations change is slow because there are significant sums of money invested in people and procedures.

That said, IBM DB2 is very much in the same boat.

DB2 is a bit of a different kettle of fish for a few reasons:

* 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.

>significant sums of money invested in people and procedures

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

Don't forget the risk of an expensive screw-up when switching to a new system. Unless there are clear business advantages, switching to a new system from an old, archaic but battle-tested system doesn't look enticing for most companies.

> And thus the future for Oracle is much more promising than it is for Google or Apple.

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.

I think you overestimate how often most companies changes their web fronts.

And that's just disappointing since they're a far far worse company.

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