Oracle lives and dies from aggressive salespeople promising the world to large customers with long term contracts. The buyers get their needs met, and Oracle forces the developers (eventually) to build whatever was promised. The clients can configure what they want, and at some point after the initial buyer leaves, support gets cut to the minimum.
This is true for many large enterprise software companies.
This contrasts to the hands on attention from a startup. But you never know if the startup provider will be there in 3 years, or if they'll scale their engineering team.
This is why startups tend to sell to startups, and large companies tend to buy from other large companies. (Of course there are 100s of exceptions)
We can only speculate what's going on at Oracle. Some options come to mind: 1) the JCP is moving too slowly to keep up with the changing IT landscape 2) Oracle no longer sees benefit in standard APIs with competing implementations and interoperability. Maybe it's eyeing enviously Salesforces cloud lockin...
> Oracle's overall revenue was down, largely because of its shrinking "on premises" software sales
> So how did Oracle increase profit on revenue that shrank overall by about 1 percent? The company slashed the operating cost of performing software updates, license support, developing and supporting new hardware, and services—in other words, through layoffs
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/oracle...
So top management is in "cut all the corners, don't care about the future, we need our bonuses now" mode, that's it.