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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

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dmix·

I'd be skeptical just because it's Oracle. Not exactly a sprightly company to bet on for novel technology.

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Unfair. Oracle excels at some things, like extortion, blackmailing and litigation.

Just think about what they could accomplish if they had more engineers than lawyers.

Imagine all the patents they could hold to extort over!

What if the engineers then made a lawyer AI?

The dark engineers would do more dark engineering.

They probably did for a hot minute when they acquired Sun.

Had me in the first part!

On the other hand, if Oracle can't squeeze a profit out of AI, I'm skeptical anybody else can.

How do you mean? Have they succeeded at squeezing any profit out of anything thats not Oracle DB?

Fusion ERP and NetSuite.

profit may be TBD, but they squeeze revenues out of everything and squeeze cost centers to oblivion

I meant they've always had a reputation for being ruthless business people. Charging license fees based on the amount of memory in the host machine instead of the VM running Oracle, and things like that. They nickle and dime everything.

https://investor.oracle.com/investor-news/news-details/2025/...

They don't break it out into products in the results, but it looks like hardware, software, cloud, and support were all profitable.

I agree with this, and I'd go even a bit further and describe them as predatory. They seem to have absolute contempt for their customers, and look for every possible opportunity to bleed them dry.

But then again, I'm probably guilty of anthropomorphizing the lawnmower. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s

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