Re: Why????
Cloud is the future for tech growth. This holds your applications and data to ransom if you don't continue to pay for hosting. No more of the "buy a licensed copy of software and run it into the ground for the next 10 years, aka sweating thew assets". So to maintain growth and impress investors (growth and shareholder returns are more important than customer, product and other such frivolities after all).
So Cloud is dominated by Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Oracle needs to be seen as a tier 1 cloud suppliers to keep it's business afloat, hence anything that Oracle has that connects to the internet once in a while is counted as cloud revenue. Now they need big companies choosing Oracle Cloud over the three main players. They don't necessarily need to make money out of them, they need the publicity out of it, Oracle know how to extract the money at a later date with subtle licencing changes and unannounced audits.
For Oracle they win a big cloud contract, they become 'super hip' by having some part of a contemporary youth phenomenon that includes both likes and shares and they can think about data mining the hell out of it if they want to really impress wall street - somehow AI and ML (yes, not one but both) will be mentioned at some point to really ice the cake (everyone lost interest in Big Data way to soon).
Oh an Trump, well he needs to fall back on his Straight Talking, No Compromise, Super Smart Businessman persona that he makes deals happen and they are in the interests of the US people for a small event in November. The issue is the US population is too smart to fall for that a second time.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
