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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

The second I heard about this lawsuit I said to myself "this was a WebCenter project" and I was damn right. Let anyone here who has used WebCenter (formerly Fatwire) share their tales of woe. I'm usually pretty forgiving of buggy software or design mistakes (to err is human) but WebCenter is the most unbelievable clusterfuck of software I've ever seen by an order of magnitude. It's unbelievable that anyone has ever paid a dime for the right to slap their face in agony while attempting to deploy this pile of garbage. If only the state of Oregon had asked me first...

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> If only the state of Oregon had asked me first...

The main skill of enterprise sales teams sometimes seems to bein making sure no-one who can ask pointed questions is in the rooms where decisions are made.

Typically, in Oracle speak, Webcenter typically refers to Webcenter Content or Webcenter portal, which are products that existed (under a different name?) prior to the Fatwire acquisition. The fatwire product was specially rebranded to 'Webcenter Sites'. From what I understand, from talking to Oracle VARs and consultants, the Sites suite isn't as common as the other two.

Browsing through the PDF, they make references to Webcenter Portal and Webcenter Content, but not Webcenter Sites.

Source: I implemented and supported the largest (in terms of assets and users) (allegedly, according to Oracle) installation of Fatwire as of a year ago. I work on a Portal/Content project now.

HAHAHAHAH.

I got to Fatwire in your comment, and I laughed my ass off. Maybe I know of people who used it for a CMS, and boy does that continue to be a nightmare.

Let's say this. Someone evaluated all off the shelf CMS options for a large educational org, and somehow the org settled on the only CMS where sales engineers and businessmen have the gall to tell them "well, it is really more of a caching system than a CMS" many months into this project. My oh my did the turd get stinkier and stinker after I heard those tales.

Thanks for clarifying. It all makes sense now.

Oh yeah, and this org, after more than a million wasted, this uses Fatwire. Or whatever they call themselves now.

Well ... I think it's nice to see Oregon state their case so plainly - "Oracle lied to the state of Oregon".

I've see plenty of Oracle disasters, but I think if you're going to rank horrible Oracle products, you should add Application Express to WebCenter and FatWire.

And PeopleSoft (yes, I know that Oracle bought PeopleSoft. They're perfect for each other. I want nothing to do with either, ever again).

I knew one PeopleSoft project that was in the implementation phase for over a decade - it was a college that was still running part of its payroll system on a HP3000 - the new PeopleSoft system had some issue implementing the complex pay rules for classified staff.

I worked at a large web portal that decided to go with Fatwire.

In the end, they dumped it after spending about US$ 10 million (licenses, fees, our time) and wrote a new CMS.

Wow, don't hold back on your thoughts. :-)

I've long suspected that Oracle made and sold solutions that fit this description.

Not made, acquired. WebCenter was acquired. Siebel was acquired. WebLogic was acquired. Java was acquired. The only product they've ever built was their flagship RDBMS which was unbeatable for so long and still fills a niche no one else can really compete with.

> The only product they've ever built was their flagship RDBMS

Which relied on cloning IBM's SQL implementation back in the day. Odd to see them now arguing APIs should be proprietary...

> still fills a niche no one else can really compete with.

Not really true. DB2 will do everything Oracle DB does, and more (12c is only now adding the multitenant capabilities that DB2 has had for a long time). IBM don't do as good a job of marketing it, though.

Yes, their RDMBS is expensive, but at least it's good.

Even still, it still has some stupid things going on, like what's a VARCHAR2? And having to use an outer query to get ROWNUM to work when there's an ORDER BY clause.

VARCHAR was so great it needed a sequel. I can't wait for VARCHAR3.

To not pass judgement is to be unfamiliar with Fatwire. I assure you, his assessment is very fitting.

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