Oracle sorely wanted case alleging improper inflation of cloud sales to disappear. But the judge said no

Oracle has failed to block a legal case that alleges it inflated cloud revenue with dubious sales practices, but has succeeded in reducing its scope. In April 2020, the tech monolith attempted to have a revised version of a class-action suit against it thrown out, saying it contained the same "fatal flaws" as an earlier action …

[Doctor Syntax]

So shareholders at time T are aggrieved at behaviour of management appointed, at least notionally, by shareholders at T - 1 and demand compensation from shareholders at T + 1. If it succeeds the shareholders at time T + 1, who had no responsibility are still being harmed by the old management. What should they do? Sue the shareholders at time T + 2.

In what way, is that reasonable behaviour? By all means sue the management but a company is the collective property of its shareholders. Suits by shareholders are, at best, suits against themselves and at worst suits against another set of shareholders. They really should be deemed contrary to public policy.

[ecofeco]

Not all shareholders are equal and contrary to popular misconception, outside of the board of directors, they have very little power these days.

To effect any meaningful change and address malfeasance, they HAVE to sue these days.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no.

Dude, I experienced these shenanigans firsthand during an Oracle audit right around that time. Poke and prod in every conceivable corner, find some obscure (in our case) missing licenses, and then in not-so-subtle terms let us know it could all go away if we just moved to Oracle cloud - or just bought the licenses to move.

If your point is that bad people do bad things and you can only cure that the instant it happens, then I guess you're right, the lawsuit should go away. But at the time Oracle was getting hammered in the market for not having a compelling cloud offering that could draw customers like AWS, GCS and Azure, and their answer was to use audits to coerce existing customers to sign up - even if they had no intention of using the service. This was done for one reason, to convince the market that Oracle would be relevant in Cloud. If you bought shares in Oracle after you saw their cloud numbers rising, not understanding the unsustainable strategy they used to make those number rise, you were being deceived. IMNSHO you should have a right to some redress for the manipulation that created the illusion Oracle actually had an attractive cloud offering - an offering that had a direct impact on the share price.

[ecofeco]

Re: Uh, no.

Exactly. It was straight up fraudulent representation.

[Lorribot]

Oracle......Licensing....dodgy pratices.....missreporting,....massaging the results

Seems like like an everyday story of normality at Oracle to me.