Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Customers | Hacker News Reader

Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Customers

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101 pointsraleighm85 comments

Fourteen years ago (!), I reflected on why software vendors are able to get away with bad behavior[1] -- until they can't, of course. That two of the three database companies I mention are in the dustbin of history should be telling -- and I stand by my most basic conclusion that proprietary software companies cannot outrun open source equivalents in perpetuity. May the long run arrive sooner rather than later!

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...

I don't think this is true with SaaS.

You still run it in AWS, Azure, Google.

To an extent though, it is! All of those vendors (some more than others) are pretty serious about Kubernetes, and they're a tiny fraction of the list[1].

I keep hearing that AWS Lambda has won serverless (Functions as a Service), but as a fellow K8S-bettor who abhors vendor lock-in and follows the news from CNCF friends, I'm not sold on that.

Azure has Brigade, Pivotal (Cloud Foundry) has Riff to compete with that, and I'd guess there are other solutions in the same vein that I haven't heard of; well both of these solutions at least are portable to anywhere you run your Kubernetes clusters.

As long as you don't leverage the other vendor SaaS APIs too heavily and keep as much of your control plane inside of Kubernetes as possible, you can always take the solutions you build there with you anywhere.

Those are open-source solutions built on SaaS platforms, and the fact that things like those exist... is pretty much the only reason I'd consider those platforms? Even potentially say that I'd prefer them over AWS (except that we're an AWS centered shop, where you can also run Kubernetes if it's your fancy, and that we do all of those lock-in things...)

[1]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LxSqBzjOxfGx3cmtZ4Eb...

The 12 open source serverless projects that can be installed on Kubernetes:

https://landscape.cncf.io/grouping=landscape&landscape=insta...

I'm asking because I dont know, but have you been involved in cases where the OS was free but the db was 40 grand/cpu? Is the os free as an add on from the db vendor?

I can't believe it was that long ago. It feels like yesterday.

I posted the blogs.oracle.com link to your post -- it's very satisfying that it's still up there.

It's perfectly possible to have proprietary software -- for a while. But much like patents expire, the advantage of being first to market also expires. If you want to keep your proprietary stack relevant, then at some point you have to open it up. To keep earning income in the software industry you have to keep innovating, and you have to provide the best support.

Sometimes it's best to start open source.

Open source is a business tool. It's not always the right tool, but in the long run it always is just because if you don't make your software open, then your competition will.

So where is the open source PL/SQL development environment, with graphical debugger, data modelling tools and distributed transactions support?

I don't need an IDE. A debugger would be nice, and I have my techniques for debugging PostgreSQL (which has PL PG SQL). Distributed is something being worked, I think. PG serves my needs and is a solid platform.

Any thoughts on business models for Databases going forward? Some interesting recent developments make DBs a challenging vertical to bootstrap in

a. Proprietary is a non starter, since increasingly large customers will insist on the source being available.

b. Integration / Consulting is no longer viable since the cloud providers will likely offer a hosted / managed solution around a new OSS.

c. Licensing is difficult to enforce if you are giving your code away for free.

Will DBs join file systems and debuggers as pieces of the stack where the only way to build one is to be inside a megaco or as a side project? Am struggling a bit to understand how to monetize infrastructure software going forward. (I have ignored the option of raising $X M to build something and be acquired before shipping to a large customer base).

Disagree on B. There's always opportunity for consulting and integration. Not everyone wants to be in the cloud and not everyone can be in the cloud.

And you know DBs always need tuning.

Heh, that's largely Spolsky's "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements."

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Oracle's email marketing uses similar tactics to scammers. Several people at my company got emails that went something like:

"Hi I'm ___ and I'm the new account rep for the services you have with us...."

We don't have any services with them, so this certainly raised an eyebrow. Did someone open an account with them in our name? Did someone at my company subscribe to their services without me knowing?

Discovering this was actually a sales phishing tactic certainly cemented us never wanting to do business with their cloud services.

You are required to register an account with them to access JDK downloads, sql developer, their help forums etc. Its really quite a pita. It may be these accounts they're targeting?

bugmenot has plenty of oracle logins you can use to get access to the downloads

Why wouldn't you just get this from your distro's repos? Openjdk and the like are already there.

This sounds a lot like pure-commission "outside sales pretending to be inside sales" teams who are tasked with casting as wide a net as possible to cold-call anyone they can to try to warm them up for a real rep.

Hi, I'm the new account rep for the services you have with us. You have 0 services with us? I'm the account rep for all of them! Perhaps you'd like to expand your service suite?

Oracle always does high pressure high priced sales. It does not catch up with them generally. They push their customers hard and there has always been backlash but then Oracle adjusts slightly so it is still high pressure, high priced, but not too high.

I sort of respect them from a sales perspective, they push it to the margin on the sales front. From a pure sales perspective, few are as good as Oracle for extracting value from their customers. I am not that ballsy personally and it isn't my style but I am not anywhere as financially as successful as Oracle.

Oracle has the best technical sales people for a reason.

Even if that were true, which is highly debatable, what does that statement have to do with Oracle's high pressure sales tactics, and what does it have to do with them destroying the Solaris and SPARC market?

ORCL did not participate in the tech rally of the last couple years. I think their tactics have caught up with them.

The thing is that not only do they demand a high price for licenses and support deals: when the shit hits the fan and you NEED the support deal, you discover that the one you have is worthless and they only want to extort more money from you.

Quite a few companies have blacklisted Oracle over the past decade. Big ones.

I wonder if Oracle has a looming problem developing new customers. I can't imagine any startups are banging on their door for a database when Postgres is good enough for most cases. As these startups become the corporates of the future are Oracle going to struggle?

its a big problem.

I worked as a Sales Engineer for them years ago when they rolled out their sales cloud and marketing cloud offering (shortly after the eloqua acquisition). The majority of all deals are upsold or cross-sold into existing accounts. They also created a promotion that allowed customers to early terminate their on-premise licenses and roll the credit (that would have otherwise been surrendered) into the corresponding cloud product.

I'm a longtime ORCL investor, and sold it all a couple years ago because of this. Any company where customers use it because they have to rather than they want to is a company with little long term prospects.

Does anybody remember when a default install of Oracle RDBMS also installed ask.com? It was at that point that I realised that a significant part of Oracle Corporation no longer cared about how disreputable they appeared. I can't even imagine that they got all that much money from ask.com, on the scale of their total revenue.

Even though I've got no love for Oracle business, there are a few facts: The Oracle software with the bundled Ask.com toolbar was the Java client installation. And the decision to bundle the toolbar was made by Sun microsystems (before they were bought). They probably signed a contract for a few years which is why Oracle couldn't get rid of it earlier.

I read a similar article in 1995 about how MySQL was going to put Oracle out of business.

Oracle now owns MySQL.

I live in Austin, Texas and definitely do not work for Oracle. However they have plans to hire 10,000 people here. For reference, that number represents 40% of Facebook’s headcount. Apple, another old-guard company (Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were great friends), is doing something similar.

For all of Oracle’s badness, there is a certain Trump-like authenticity to them. They kind of know their bad, and they just keep on keeping on. Facebook, meanwhile, had to shove it down our throats how awesome and beautiful and world-connecting they were.

Yeah, this is the same criticism of Oracle I've been hearing for years. I was under the naive impression that Amazon RDS [0] was going to be an Oracle-killer.

Has anyone here actually used it to transition away from Oracle? Because, as I understood it, Oracle makes it exceedingly difficult to transition out of its ecosystem.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle/

It's like AOL. The old customers stay until they die, and the new customers-to-be stop showing up.

> Oracle now owns MySQL.

Well, yeah. And no (thanks to MariaDB). Similar story with Solaris/ZFS.

> (...) in Austin, Texas (...) [Oracle] have plans to hire 10,000 people (...) Apple (...) is doing something similar.

That's interesting. I wonder if this will be about "more cloud" for both companies.

Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software" and more secret sauce will hide behind SaaS paywalls in the near future.

I think the AGPL was rather prescient here; unfortunately it's not proven successful in the way GPL was. So if and when the big players move everything "home" there's little left on the outside.

Not saying it will happen - both Apple, Google and Microsoft are sharing more than before. As of now.

>Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software"

I think this is definitely true. So much stuff has move to "the cloud" or web services, and honestly, open-source software was a lot more interesting and fun, and seemed to be on more of an upward trajectory, back in the early/mid 2000s. Now Linux on the desktop seems to be something that'll never be reality for regular people and the main open-source thing that seems to be hot is stuff like Docker and Kubernetes, stuff used in enterprise scenarios, while on the desktop everyone's just given up and decided to live with Windows 10 and its spyware or Macbooks and their overly-thin keyboards and buggy OS.

Reducing platform dependence seems to have removed a great deal of the barrier of consumer adoption of desktop Linux. I see more people all the time trying to figure out how to get it running on their MBPs, trying to understand differences in desktop environments, and how to dual-boot. Browsers on Linux support DRM for viewing popular services like Netflix, and native graphics stack development is improving more rapidly all the time.

VFIO with LookingGlass has been great for people who work on Linux and game on Windows, and I think that paves the way for a very interesting future. Perhaps one day we'll see a Windows Gaming container that just does a useful thing without trying to steal the show.

Also, FOSS acceptance is so commonplace now that we no longer notice its pervasiveness. Try to find a software or service that doesn't have an open source clause or a succeeding software company that totally eschews it. It might not be front and center in the marketing, but open source is as essential an ingredient in today's development as public access to books is to a more equally literate society.

> Maybe we've seen "peak Free Software" and more secret sauce will hide behind SaaS paywalls in the near future.

Not only SaaS paywalls, thanks to non-copyleft licenses, more appreciated by companies, we are back to the shareware days.

Now you get the source with the light version, instead of a limited 30 days trial. However many goodies are only on the commercial version.

Likewise, even if Linux has won on the server and seems to be winning on IoT, there are now several contenders on the embedded space with BSD licenses (Mbed, Arduino, RTOS, Nuttx, TinyOS, ...).

In any case, it is understandable as it is easier to create a business model in such scenarios.

It is not just that aggressive selling. For years and large databases, Oracle database was better then MySQL for years. It was expensive, but came with better tools, had better performance on large data (including when queries were badly written as many of them are), reporting and what not. None of it matters for smaller projects, but it did mattered for larger projects and in particular for large projects under time pressure. I have worked with all three, MySQL/Oracle/Mssql and imo, "MySQL is going to put Oracle out of business" was largely wishful thinking.

Once you take "open source is better then proprietary software" as an axiom, then it is easy to ignore weaknesses of whatever open source alternative is there now or claim them irrelevant.

> None of it matters for smaller projects, but it did mattered for larger projects and in particular for large projects under time pressure.

In my very limited experience with Oracle, it sucked for a small project for two reasons. The client library took multiple seconds to load. And the connection string I had to pass was almost impossible to figure out.

I think there was a joke I read once about the Oracle database that it will do anything in a roughly constant amount of time, but it's a large constant.

> Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were great friends

Whoa whoa whao, this is the opposite of what I believe to be true, I have little to believe they were really friends, in fact when Oracle bought Sun Apple stopped integrating ZFS because Jobs didn't want to be associated or beholden to Larry Ellison...

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-ap...

There were absolutely friends -- to the point that Larry would say "my best friend Steve" almost as if it were one word. This left me with two questions, both essentially mean-spirited: (1) Could "only" be substituted for "best"? And (2) Did Steve ever say "my best friend Larry"?

So you are only person that did not read Steve Jobs biography yet?

I was also trying to skip it because everyone seems to be reading it. After couple pages it sucked me in and I was reading it until last page really interested, so Walter Isaacson wrote it well.

Spoiler: there was quite some pages about Larry Ellison and what was going on between Steve Jobs and him.

Yes they were friends.

Steve Jobs was even Larry Ellison's wedding photographer:

https://inshorts.com/en/news/steve-jobs-was-the-photographer...

https://petapixel.com/2010/10/08/steve-jobs-the-wedding-phot...

> they have plans to hire 10,000 people here

That's a lot of lawyers.

Could this be a plan to shut down one place, open up the same jobs in another and shed people who have worked there for a while and have inflated salaries?

Mirror:

https://archive.li/P2au0

Nothing new at all, they've been doing this for 20+ years. Interesting to see the Halliburton mention though, I worked there in IT for 12 years and there was an embedded Oracle install in most of our major software products.

I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres. For free, it provides a cleaner data structure, DDL transactions, better performance, closer to SQL standards... Of course Oracle does sales better.

> I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres

Compatibility with established Oracle apps, and a whole lot of database-peripheral stuff (much of which has better alternatives, but those are often newer, and we're back to legacy compatibility.)

Some of this (more on the DB than peripheral part) you can mitigate by buying Postgres Plus, which is a proprietary enterprise version with, among other things, extensions for Oracle compatibility, and it's still vastly cheaper than Oracle. But no one (well, except maybe MS, who can leverage Windows and .NET to sell SQL Server) is close to Oracle when it comes to selling RDBMS software to enterprises.

Plus, they have a lot of vertical market apps (POS systems for a start) that only work with their database, which is where the shakedown begins.

Partitioning for one. Postgres is getting closer but Oracle blows it out of the water and has had the feature for many years.

Oracle also does clustering out of the box, again for years.

Those are the big ones off the top of my head but I'm sure there are more.

These features are very expensive and full of pitfalls but they exist and Postgres isn't really even close to feature parity. I say this as a huge fan of Postgres.

I don't know why you got downvoted, because it's a valid question. But apart from what mulmen mentioned regarding partitioning and clustering out of the box, I have my opinion.

Having worked in large finance institutions, there's (unfortunately) the mentality that if your software is backed by a large organisation (Microsoft, Oracle) then it is somehow more credible.

There is also someone to sue if things go badly wrong.

That's the old saw, but has anyone every successfully sued over an Oracle problem?

- PL/SQL

- Graphical development environment for stored procedures, data modelling, database management

- Distributed transactions and cluster management tooling

- Their Java, .NET, C++ drivers (yes actual C++, not plain C) quality, including IDE tooling

- Integration with other enterprise stacks that speak Oracle

Actually, none of these matter:

- PL/SQL is a horrible programming language. It consistently scores bad on e.g. stack overflow. I know about 4 non-oracle-DBA people who say something positive about it, and just about anybody else hates it with a passion. PL/SQL is a reason for lock-in when you have a few million lines of it, but that's about it.

- Graphical thing - nobody cares. An SQL database needs reasonable textual tools for the pros to do SQL editing. I would love an IPython for Oracle. But what you describe is tooling in the hand-holding, for dummies world. And I don't mean that negatively, we all started there and most people don't want to be IT-er just to solve their problem. But dummies is also a market segment where oracle is easily worst in class. I don't know why, but every oracle GUI seems inspired by that GoT Iron throne which cuts whoever tries to touch it.

- I worked with their Java and their C/C++ OCI driver. Both had crippling bugs, and caused serious migration issues or data corruption when upgrading oracle or even patching windows. The guys admitted some of them should have been documented in their migration guide, even if Oracle was internally aware of them. Yeah, thanks a lot.

- Integration with other stacks: Integration in the Microsoft world with mssql is a lot better if you want a good integrated stack. Integration within the oracle stack, there you might be right. And that stack is huge. But it is also very low-quality and hated by most of its users (oracle financials is an example where I never heard an end user tell anything remotely positive)

There are good reasons for using oracle. mulmen's post here above lists a few technical ones. It is very hard to make oracle lose data after successfull commit. There is also the management fallacy that oracle=enterprise class and open source=toy, and you can use that very well to sell your program by making it require oracle. So yeah, oracle has good sides. But please not these.

You might not care, millions of Oracle customers, me included do.

The only database that tops Oracle in this regard is Microsoft SQL Server.

PL/SQL is so bad that the beloved PostgreSQL copied it.

Many of us prefer living in the Xerox PARC world, not AT&T.

If I miss playing around with awk, sed, perl, sqlplus, troff, tex, graphviz, ... I know where to find them.

All software has bugs, I just found out more in PostgreSQL than Oracle or SQL Server together, specially in EF bindings.

The thing I don't like about PL/SQL is mainly the lack of orthogonality to its features. It feels like it was assembled by different groups of people, in different silos, at different times - without an overall vision or even someone who understands it in its entirety.

PL/SQL is a horrible programming language.

PL/SQL is a wonderful programming language, regardless of how it is rated by clueless developers on some arbitrary web site on the internet. What kind of an argument is that anyway?!?

I have a bit opposite experience having worked with both. Oracle has tons of features and docs out of the box which aid you get going. Postgresql has good amount but they just don't compare.

Though to get access to all of the Oracle's features you need a spent a lot on licensing which evens the odds quite a lot.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just not some kind of stockholm syndrome.

You're an enterprise class CxO and negotiating with Oracle is playing with the big boys. All CxOs around you sing praise for Oracle. You can reasonably well get Oracle to drop their prices with 40% at a new sale, so now you feel like an ace in negotiating. Things are looking great.

Then you have to pay. And again. And again. Meanwhile, the support is bad, the quality is low, and people start to grumble.

It turns out that 60% of a lot of money is still a lot of money, and you're in a position where you have to defend what you've bought to your peers. Oracle is very helpfull here, it has an enterprise aura that rivals Steve Jobs' reality distortion field. Oracle makes sure the other CxOs you meet are very pro Oracle and very enterprisy. So you either drown or learn to sing the qualities of oracle.

At that point, you're ready to be one of those peer CxOs that will lure the next generation of CxOs into oracle's traps.

Add to all this that at the end of the 1990's, oracle was the best database, no discussion. It coasted along on that reputation until now. Postgres is mostly there today, but this is 20 years later

PostgreSQL, however good, has nothing even remotely comparable to Oracle ASM and real application cluster.

Not even Citus comes close.

I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres.

Clustering: synchronous multimaster replication.

I can't read most of the article because of the paywall, but I'm glad Oracle's greed is catching up to it. Besides its database and Java (which is still really Sun), every of their products I've been forced to use have been overpriced, poorly supported crap.

Also, their cloud pricing must be really bad. My employer has been 100% Oracle database for decades, but it's now officially banned from all cloud projects due to licensing cost.

I've seen similar. No more Oracle licenses at any price.

We used to use PostgreSql. But our CIO was able to negotiate very inexpensive Oracle licenses. Now we have a bunch of crappy databases that are a pain to upgrade. But we are saving a lot of money.

Are you really saving money, if you wouldn't have spent it otherwise?

I mean, how can you know that even the worst postgresql installation wouldn't require only 10% of what you're paying now in contractors/support?

I think he meant that sarcastically. PostgreSQL is free, aside from support costs, while Oracle has a license fee. But they're "saving" money because they negotiated a "cheaper" license fee.

This like like how it's more economical for me to buy a top-end $100k Mercedes if I can negotiate a $10k savings off of MSRP, rather than a low-end $17k Toyota where I can only negotiate $500 off of the MSRP. See, with the Mercedes S-class, I'm saving $10k!!! I wouldn't save $10k with the Toyota... \s

We went from free and great to cheap and crappy.

But the CIO got to show off his negotiating skills.

That's page 37, section 2 of the Oracle sales playbook.

He was able to negotiate a better price than free? Or were you paying for Postgre pro and a support contract?

I bet in a couple of years the next CIO will discover that the TCO is quite a bit higher then expected.

Heh, that's the trap. Your CIO bluffed them into a price this time. You can be sure you will be in for an unpleasant surprise next time you go to renew.

Same here. After what honestly seemed like a mob-style shakedown for licensing fees last year (they honestly used the threat of litigation to force us to buy their cloud offerings), my employer is in the process of migrating 20+ years of Oracle-backed apps to the .NET ecosystem.

Paging Bryan Cantrill. Paging Bryan Cantrill!

Oldie but goldie, by bmc: https://blogs.oracle.com/bmc/the-economics-of-software

EDIT: Oops, bcantrill already commented.

My old colleagues at a previous employer used to get hounded by Oracle sales reps. Now they're moving to Microsoft SQL Server. I wish they would've moved to Postgres, but still, getting rid of Oracle is huge progress

Why is this even a story?

When has agressive sales tactics gone well for a company?

This is a story because Oracle needs to change their practices. Yesterday.

I for one am glad someone brought it up and that it's being discussed. It's overdue by about two decades.

Interesting timing. Just today we got a cold call from an Oracle sales rep. ;-)

Fortunately, our awesome Purchasing person got rid of them quickly.

Paywall

Just press the 'Reader view' button. The whole article is 3.5 paragraphs

Oracle s just a sucky company. Plus there is now excellent open source data bases and even better cloud options.

Why link to an article behind a paywall ?

Cause reporters need to eat too?

Nothing against it in the guidelines.

The FAQ[1] says:

> Are paywalls ok?

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

Is there a workaround in this case?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

If you had continued to read on: "In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."

Anyway, I was not 100% correct, I didn't know about the workaround requirement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com