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Oracle’s Cloudy Future

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Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#91

Post by flinty »

jdcarter wrote: post #16

What a lot of these analysts overlook is why Oracle is trying to take on Amazon, despite being years late to the party. I believe it's a defensive move: Oracle is seeing long-time customers deploy new applications in AWS, and that customer starts to realize, "hey, that went pretty well, why not move more of my stuff to AWS?" Their Oracle sales rep comes calling, and suddenly a once-reliable customer needs fewer Oracl…

Good points. I think the author of the article makes similar points to yours towards the end of the article.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#92

Post by toomuchtodo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #82
kens wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to pass the buck to IBM if things go wrong was actually the theme of IBM's ads in 2001. In a typical ad, the CEO is getting blamed because the system is down / can't be upgraded. CEO: "And whose job is it to make sure all this stuff works the way it's supposed to?" Assistant: "That would be yours." Tagline: "And that's when it hits you, you are so ready for IBM.” (Of course I have to admit they were succes…

Honest ads describing the business value directly. I like that. We could use more of that these days.

Feels strikingly similar to patio11s blog post:

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro...

Someone is delivering business value; whomever that is is the one who is getting paid.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#93

Post by TeMPOraL »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #92
TeMPOraL wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest ads describing the business value directly. I like that. We could use more of that these days.

Feels strikingly similar to patio11s blog post: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pro... Someone is delivering business value; whomever that is is the one who is getting paid.

Thanks for linking to that post, it's great!

> Someone is delivering business value; whomever that is is the one who is getting paid.

I was going to respond to this by pointing out some common exceptions, but patio11 actually covered this issue in his post too:

"Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.)"

EDIT:

"Their [Salesforce's] motto and sales point is “No Software”, which conveys to their actual customers “You know those programmers you have working on your internal systems? If you used Salesforce, you could fire half of them and pocket part of the difference in your bonus.” (There’s nothing wrong with this, by the way. You’re in the business of unemploying people. If you think that is unfair, go back to school and study something that doesn’t matter.)"

Holy shit. That hits hard.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#94

Post by [deleted] »

ako wrote: post #17
gizmodo59 wrote: post #11

A genuine question: If you have worked with any fortune 500/1000 companies (Lets pick non software based companies) either directly or if they are your customers, how many of them use Oracle database or SQL Server? Some of the reasons why this trend WILL continue: 1. Critical software like databases needs support. To the point where there should be someone who can come on premise to fix things. 2. We need to use X be…

Because it's in the upper right gartner quadrant.

[deleted]

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#95

Post by geoka9 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #81
ubercode5 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. However one additional thing to keep in mind in the COTS vs FOSS is if there is some bug that affects the company and requires attention. The company doesn't generally have the engineers on staff to actually change that software, and there's no guarantee that the associated FOSS community will prioritize the bug. With a COTS solution, you can pick up the phone and call the support team. Generally my company…

Indeed. It seems that the most sustainable business model for Open Source so far is a combination of FOSS product + paid support / consulting company. It has some potential conflict of interest (e.g. deliberately not improving some aspects of the product that brings in support calls), but being a successful open-source product often depends on outside contributions which themselves depend on reputation, and that may…

> It has some potential conflict of interest (e.g. deliberately not improving some aspects of the product that brings in support calls)

You could say the same about proprietary software, no?

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#96

Post by TeMPOraL »

geoka9 wrote: post #95
TeMPOraL wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. It seems that the most sustainable business model for Open Source so far is a combination of FOSS product + paid support / consulting company. It has some potential conflict of interest (e.g. deliberately not improving some aspects of the product that brings in support calls), but being a successful open-source product often depends on outside contributions which themselves depend on reputation, and that may…

> It has some potential conflict of interest (e.g. deliberately not improving some aspects of the product that brings in support calls) You could say the same about proprietary software, no?

Yes. I was stating they exist, not comparing to propertiary software.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#98

Post by SEJeff »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #80
SEJeff wrote: post #19

Quote Larry Ellison in 2008: What the hell is cloud computing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FacYAI6DY0 "The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion driven than women's fashion."

He's not wrong. He brings up several good examples and how "cloud computing" is basically meaningless. He says they're gonna change the marketing to be "cloud computing" friendly since both gmail and salesforce are considered "cloud computing". In that world Oracle DBs are also cloud computing.

Oh I don't disagree. Just found it amusing the change of attitude.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#99

Post by erpellan »

I sat next to someone who worked for a well-known company on a plane on the way back from re:invent last year. They were ripping out Oracle and switching to AWS with extreme prejudice after one too many 'guilty-until-proven-innocent' license audits.

The days of being able to treat their customers like dirt with impunity are well and truly over.

Re: Oracle’s Cloudy Future

#100

Post by makomk »

latj wrote: post #69
oblio wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, thing is, Open Source is changing that proposition. As long as you're prepared to be conservative in your choices, something like Debian + Apache + OSS programming language will likely be around 20-40 years from now. When is the last time an OSS programming language that took off actually died? For example, even though it's not as popular Perl 5 is still used professionally in many environments and as far as I…

A lot of large U.S. organizations wont use software they cant buy support for. So, you can use RedHat and buy support. When you create software, your developers are going to use all kinds of tools, libraries, etc. and depending on the policies of the organization they are going to want to manage that risk. For example, if you're a bank and the devs who make your mobile app use some random authentication library that…

Part of the reason that Postgres is popular is that there are multiple companies selling support for it, several of which are also major contributors. So there's actual competition to keep prices somewhat under control.
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