Even then Oracle tools were horrible for developers and still are. The only reason they had that many databases was Oracle's business is licensing, massive, expensive licenses, and their sales pushed them sold through upper management. Those days are almost over, developers choose the tech, the cloud is here. Without Tom [1], Oracle was basically not even a great developer community, all documentation was bad and the Java interfaces on the tools / management studio were horrendous. Oracle is fast but for most things on the web caching comes into play heavily and other databases are good enough. Oracle is good for large datasets/reporting, cursors are extremely fast when Oracle is tuned, the problem is it is like vehicle that needs tuning and optimization all the time or it drives bad. The cost and upkeep make Oracle mostly overkill and too painful.
Ellison laughed at the cloud like Ballmer laughed at the iPhone. That was a major error. But ultimately Ellison is an engineer that forgot to make sure developers like to use the product. That will ultimately be their fatal flaw as now the developers choose the tools not what is sold in above them.
All other platforms are developer centric and cloud first now. Oracle the all seeing one says the end is nigh for Oracle the database. No new projects will be using it without force. Too bad Oracle also owns MySQL, Java etc. I really wish someone else had bought Sun.