The entrapment model
The entrapment model of doing business got a huge lift from 'cloud'. By persuading customers—G³ executives*, for the most part—that they could sack lots of expensive skilled people and rake in the savings as their IT systems morphed into magical excellence in the 'cloud', grazing peacefully alongside unicorns, the big providers extended the 'ecosystem' approach they had previously been using to entrap the public, and managed to imprison many large enterprises on their systems, with data and process held hostage by largely unnecessary proprietary dependencies and the fact that those enterprises no longer had the skills to fend for themselves (it's the PUNJI† business model). Prices rise; performance falls; and the G³ types do what they always do: polish up the CV and stay one step ahead of their last disaster.
The surprise is that Oracle weren't better at this, sooner. Once, they had a world-beating RDBMS. (Yes, I remember the days when Oracle had an actually good product that was actually, if you were an enterprise, worth the money.) Then it became just another very expensive RDBMS, increasingly barnacled with poorly integrated bought/borrowed/copied applications and suites. Now it is a horrible jungle of eywateringly expensive processes and data, encrusted with crap, barely able to float, clumsy, inefficient, riddled with duplication, overlap and blind spots, with vast swamps of marketing bullshit stinking the place up. For at least 15 years Oracle has been all about squeezing hapless victims who can't escape, often forcing shabby and shoddily-integrated rubbish upon them, while desperately seeking any remaining G³ naifs still clueless enough to look their salesgorgons in the eye. You'd have thought that 'cloud' was absolutely made for a slowly dying behemoth like Oracle, fitting directly into its own PUNJI model.
So I would suggest it speaks to a very special level of strategic incompetence that Oracle were so slow to embrace an entirely new method of entrapping customers into paying through the nose for rubbish they didn't need. Most unlike them. (The probable explanation is the steady trickle-down of Ellison's self-destructive arrogance, which has been poisoning the Oracle water for a very long time..)
Anyway, it's good that Oracle's cloud is failing. Pretty much anything that hastens the demise of this pathology of a business is to be welcomed.
* Greedy Gullible Gobshytes
† PUNJI :: Patently Unwitting Nincompoops Jump In. Note this is distinct from the outsourcers' approach, whereby they infiltrate clients until the latter become no more than life support mechanisms for the outsourcers they thought would help them save money (In MBA jargon, the TAPEWORM‡ model).
‡ TAPEWORM :: Targeted At Parasitising Enterprises With Outsourcers' Revenue Maximisation
Biting the hand that feeds IT
