Yeah literally nothing about Oracle is useful or innovative. It’s like the WalMart of tech companies; just kind of exists and has rested on its laurels for a decade+.
Oracle is the antithesis of Walmart. They provide insanely expensive options to corporations who are already locked in to their products.
One of the saddest days was when Oracle bought Sun and effectively killed all their open source projects overnight, like OpenOffice and MySQL. Yes, those things are still technically around, but they're not getting any serious development, and all the core developers of those projects have forked them into new open source projects.
[0]https://money.com/walmart-stores-closing-small-towns
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-...
[2]https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-in...
A lot of small businesses are bad. Bad hours, bad selection of products, bad customer service, bad prices.
They’re often held up in some idyllic form, but it’s clear from the behavior of their own customers that Walmart provides these customers more value.
The local grocery store is the worst excuse for a grocery store I've ever seen. There are only a handful of fresh vegetable options, including $1/lb bananas and $5/head iceberg lettuce. Everything is overpriced and there are very few healthy food options. Apparently a lot of people due to transportation limitations can ONLY shop at this store (or Dollar General), which is expensive and mostly has unhealthy options. There are talks of a Walmart coming in, and I have no doubt it would be a huge quality of life improvements for folks in the town.
It’s not very good for employees if your small business customers don’t like you and as a result you have to close.
A local car dealership may be great for its employees by ripping off customers and generally being a terrible experience, but I won’t have much sympathy when direct to consumer sales come and wipe them out.
Small businesses need to offer something of value to customers that’s real and differentiated as opposed to a narrative of their own self interest. In short - they have to be competitive. There’s no reason they can’t do this while also being good to employees.
A lot of the complaints I see come across as sour grapes and trying to legislate their existence rather than just being better and caring about what customers want.
At its best capitalism is a force for aligning value and interests between provider and customer. On net this leads to more efficient distribution and better outcomes for the most people.
At its worst it’s rent seeking and leveraging local power over people without choice. Small businesses often fall on that side of the spectrum to me.
It just so happens that in business, much of that inefficiency is the number of employees required per unit of economic activity. Ultimately all employees are an unwanted cost to the consumer. Small businesses have fewer options to avoid that cost, so they account for more employment.
Forgot about that and Walmart is an easy target for a lot of things :)
Innovation in process engineering and operations isn't really discussed much here, but it's almost assuredly had a much greater impact on keeping inflation at bay (helping the median American's salary stretch a little farther) than anything Amazon has ever done.
I remember reading articles 10-15 years ago about how the minute someone scanned an item at the cash register, Walmart's inventory systems, which knew what product was on what shelf and in what quantity, would automatically order refills from the supplier.
They have always been highly innovative and tech savvy when it comes to the supply chain, at least for physical retail.
I wish this were the case, but anyone thats tried to do online grocery shopping at walmart knows that a lot of stuff shows out of stock, but is actually there in real life.
I would be more in the mood to praise Oracle for this development, had they not shown how far they could go to hurt Java's community/ecosystem just to squeeze a penny out of it.