Kinder, gentler Oracle says it's changed, and now wants you to succeed Oracle has declared it has changed its culture and is now "totally focused on our customers' success." The 800-pound gorilla of the database biz was founded in 1977 and in the 46 years since has earned a reputation as the industry's most vigorous auditor of software licenses – a stance that has created its own industry, …
Enthusiastic? Not really. But yes, I noticed that they've been using Linux in Azure for some time and added the WSL. That's not exactly embracing it, just providing some features that their technical customers want, but I'm not sure what else you would want them to do relating to Linux*.
* The Windows versus Linux fight became kind of pointless in the 2000s. Use whichever you prefer, or both. Nobody cares. Microsoft doesn't care, because they're pretty confident they don't face a threat to their desktop market share from it. Their embracing of Linux or lack of doing so would make basically no difference.
"Microsoft doesn't care, because they're pretty confident they don't face a threat to their desktop market share from it."
Irrelevant as MS wants to own server market too. Which part of "we have to have a monopoly" you chose to ignore?
That's the reason for old EEE -treatment of Linux. And smuggling proper and paid MS-acolyte Pöttering ("registry is good", "*my* systemd should handle everything" ... that's the proof) into Linux ecosystem. Intentional sabotage.
(EEE = Embrace, extend, extinguish, if you didn't know: Standard MS method which has been used several times).
" Use whichever you prefer, or both. Nobody cares"
BS. Microsoft *does* care. A lot. Every linux server is lost profit for them. You actually believe a greedy corporation like MS would *not* care about lost profit? If you do, you have serious disconnection from reality.
This is the outdated view I have come to expect. Microsoft did want a monopoly in servers, and I'm sure they'd happily take one now. They're not going to get one. They know that. They've stopped treating that goal like it's possible, and they stopped quite a long time ago now.
Similarly, blaming Microsoft for things you don't like and they had nothing to do with. Systemd is not a Microsoft product. It was designed by employees of Red Hat, and it was adopted and promoted by Red Hat. You know, one of Microsoft's competitors in the server space you think they're focused on. But since you have a negative opinion on it, you'll jump to the conclusion that it must have been their idea and somehow they've duped all the distros into using it. Poettering went to work at Microsoft only twelve years after developing that and all the other core developers didn't go to work there at all; what a long game they play.
"Microsoft *does* care. A lot. Every linux server is lost profit for them. You actually believe a greedy corporation like MS would *not* care about lost profit? If you do, you have serious disconnection from reality."
Well, they do appear to make a lot of money on all those Linux servers they sell to people through Azure. They've got the Windows server option up there as well and they charge more for that, but they figured out before even launching that service that people liked Linux servers and were going to use them, so they ended up providing their services for those as well. So basically, they don't care too much because they'd much rather you run Linux on Azure than avoid them because it's not an option. The ship has sailed away from their server monopolistic ambitions and they know it. You, however, appear not to.
It is quite good, at the bottom.
There are some Very Bad(TM) things a relational database can do and Oracle avoids them all. Therefore it's a good product: Data is Everything(TM) in proper databases.
It's also fast, not a bad thing, but that's significant only if you have a lot of transactions per second.
User friendly it's not and error messages are mostly misleading, but technically correct: 'numeric error in input' is absolutely correct, but at the same time absolutely useless. Probably the source for Microsoft 'help' for button x: "this button does x".
Licencing and pricing is absolutely bonkers. Has been a long time.
There is only one kind and gentle oracle
The one at Delphi? It's easy to be kind and gentle when you are living in a haze of psychoactive chemicals..
(And, judging by recent evidence found in the jars used in the worship of Bes, the Egyptian ones were not much better..at least their version included sedatives!)
"Customer Success Services" sounds suspiciously like Microsoft's "Enterprise Strategy Consultants", of which I was one. AKA the "designated hostage" who spent the next 3 years or so explaining why the client cannot convert those packaged services into licenses. Or giving them deployment plans for Sharepoint circa 2003, only to be met at one Telco with "I can build that in Access". Or a health department in the teens faced with a CRM shaped problem and a Dynamics proposal, and an embedded contractor convincing them "I can build that in access". Seems to be a theme here.
《Or it’s “Kinder”, like the eggs. Once you’ve bought the product there’s a (nasty in this case) surprise inside.》
Yep. This sounds more like Larry's style:
"Spring Surprise" - chocolate wrapped around two stainless steel bolts that "spring out and plunge straight through both cheeks". [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunchy_Frog]
Really scary to think that "Crunchy Frogs" as per the link are probably a thing somewhere in the 48 contiguous.
...the [Customer Success Services.] org "ensures that customers get the most value from their Oracle purchases, from planning to activation to implementation to support to anything else they need to succeed.
"We think this unique approach, which customers already tell us they love, ultimately drives overall customer satisfaction. And that results in higher renewal rates, expansion rates, and references."
Firstly, no, you're not the first company to have customer success teams. Lots of other companies do this (some do it very well)
Secondly: Who'd have thought that helping your customer (rather than firing lawyers at them every five minutes) would incentivise customers to buy & use more of your product, or to act as a good reference sites to help you sell to new customers?
The saying "The beatings will continue until morale improves" is a joke, not an instruction.
If you'd like for us to use your database then having Oracle Instant Client is critical. Two and a half years into the Apple Silicon refresh, essentially all tools and libraries have been ported. Except for OCI!
"Customers are choosing to run on Oracle infrastructure for all their requirements – be they new services like AI training, or services we're known for, like database and Java,"
Just who the heck are these people who buy new services? Are they masochists? Have they heard of Oracle, did they not experience enough pain already?
The world just got a little less understandable.
Senior manglement, of course
You never get fired/lose your bonus/lose your share allocation/golden parachute for buying IBM/Oracle/Microsoft
Delete as appropriate.
Oh - and fire a few more techies. Useless, good, for nothing layabouts! They don't sell *anything*
(Yes - I've had a 'senior sales executive' scream at me that I should be grateful and do whatever he asks because 'he pays our wages'. Strangely enough, when the economy took a downturn and he *actually* had to work to sell stuff (and pay for his vastly overpriced company car - he'd pushed hard for one that he wasn't entitled to by his grade and got it because he was willing to pay the substantial difference). Sadly (!) it turned out that his opinion of his selling abilities wasn't matched by his *actual* selling abilities.
Where his colleagues put in the extra hours and schmoozing to actually get to know the customers (and work with us to help them talk to customers) and still get orders from them, he simply attended the site and expected them to order in the quantities that they used to.
They didn't. He very quickly found out what happens to arrogant sales types who have a vastly overinflated veiw of their abilities.
The final irony - when he came to hand his car back, he discovered that he was in hock for the rest of the contract term cost over and above what the company was prepared to pay for his grade. I'd like to think he learnt a valuable lesson but, knowing his personality, I very much doubt it. He's probably a senior manager somewhere (he had the right psychopathic tendancies for it) that's absolutely dependent on his staff yet treats them like garbage.
"CEO Safra Catz said Oracle has changed its spots."
He lies. Oracle is mucking everything and anything just to make 10 cents more profit and you need a new CEO for that to change .... and I won't believe it even then until I see it. I'm not sure if I believe it even then: I've been watching the company since Oracle 5 ... and that was *long* time ago.
Corporate greed basically eats my work opportunities away as no-one sane buys Oracle anymore and therefore there aren't much jobs for Oracle -guys: Not many new installs and the existing ones escape to the cloud (not Oracle). Leaving veterans unemployed, like carriage makers hundred years ago.
That's a shame as it *is* a good database, some idiot CEO (Ellison, after 2002, for example) just let the marketing play with it, just to make more profit.
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