Hacker News Reader

Comment by jake_the_third | Hacker News Reader

> Perhaps because they market to business leaders who could stand to lose a lot if Oracle unleashed the legal hounds?

I think so. But that doesn't seem like it's going to remain a viable business model for too long. Those who are forced by their bosses to work with Oracle today, are going to be the bosses of tomorrow. I personally know a company where anything oracle is explicitly blacklisted because of this reason.

Eventually, Oracle is going to run out of their oblivious- executive-type customers. (inc. govs)

View on HN

Oracle isn’t just good at convincing oblivious executive types- once they are at an organization they start spreading “oracleness” everywhere. When a huge portion of the orgs DBAs, developers, and IT managers get their training and expertise from Oracle they become advocates too. Oracle gets REALLY hard to get out when an orgs DBAs refuse to provide access to non Oracle tooling (yes, this happens.)

Also, I probably throw enough hate at Oracle to make up for 100 average consumers

> Those who are forced by their bosses to work with Oracle today, are going to be the bosses of tomorrow.

Yes, but if it’s still the same company, they’re likely subject to a lot of vendor lock-in. It can be very hard, technically speaking, to move away from a large Oracle investment. Lots of code to rewrite.

Oregon won a lawsuit against Oracle a couple of years ago after the disaster of trying to implement their state ACA marketplace. The damages were paid in free Oracle licenses. This seemed so wrong to me.

>Eventually, Oracle is going to run out of their oblivious- executive-type customers

Perhaps some are oblivious, but not in general. At some point, when one gets busy enough, convenience and reliability trump bargains.

I know I can replace the backlight on my macbook, but I'm still going to the Apple Store. I know I can save 15¢/gallon at a gas station a mile away, but is it really worth the time and energy to do it at that price? That's why I buy Oracle and just about everything else.

> convenience and reliability

Modern cloud hosting usually provides all of the above you need. Is a PostgreSQL DB in Azure really any less reliable or convenient than an Oracle DB? Perhaps if you’re already heavily invested in and comfortable with Oracle, but I don’t think so otherwise.

Oracle still runs circles around postgres for high availability, backups and management tools. However most big companies are slowly migrating all their small Oracle instances to pg. I happen to work in one of those companies who's had enough with Oracle's outrageous pricing schemes and audit threats.

What do you mean by audit threats? I’ve never had the misfortune of working with Oracle software besides Java.

"Buy our new cloud offering or we run a license audit now as our contract permits" You have to find a way to give good cloud numbers for Larry!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com