Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowtree | Hacker News Reader

ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software.

Once something gets bought by them, you know it is done. Slowly, but surely.

They perform a function akin to the maggots that destroy cadavers in nature. Part of the overall ecosystem.

ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat.

Aurea does the same in mid-tier by the way.

The circle of life...

View on HN

> ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software.

I think that's a more apt description of CA, BMC, or Symantec. Places where tired old software goes to die a quiet death. What Oracle does is worse: kill software that still has plenty of life in it. I've seen them do it by acquisition, and I've seen them do it by stealing code or ideas from partners (personally, twice). So they're not so much a graveyard as a slaughterhouse for software.

I didn't know this when I joined CA. It took me 6 months to realize what I fell into - and I quit the next week. It felt like working in a hospice - most depressing few months of my professional life.

Oh and don't forget to tell the truth in your next job interview: "CA is a tremendously successful company and excellent employer, unfortunately, the role was not the right fit for me".

> ORA stopped being a tech co a while ago, now it is a finance play. Use cash to buy a business for its locked in customers, gut it to squeeze max money out of it until last customer is gone. Rinse, repeat.

Yup. Precisely what happened to Stellent, a company that used to produce great document filters. After ORA buyout, employees fled like there was a plague epidemic and prices spiked at such a level that you'd either cut your veins or consider migrating to another technology.

> ORA is the elephant's graveyard of software.

Well, except that some of the elephants were still alive and perfectly fine, and ora worms started eating them before they were dead.

Working on UCM Oracle for a consulting gig once was what I consider the low point of my career. I do believe that's the stellent product post-acquisition, right?

CenturyLink does this too - they're a tech holding company who buys and sells companies (Level3, Tier3, Savvis, Cyxtera, Electricbox, etc) in order to reap M&A tax benefits while squeezing the engineers.

Of course, these businesses don't make enough money to cover the massive shareholder draw, so it's all a stage play to convince Wells Fargo to loan them enough to pay those dividends.

It's an untenable and irrational position in the long run, but markets can remain irrational longer than individuals can remain solvent. And many businesses are in this same situation, needing bank loans to pay never-reducing dividends.

> order to reap M&A tax benefits while squeezing the engineers.

This is true also of companies that are taken over by private equity firms, although that is probably common knowledge by now. e.g. every single one in my team at Rackspace has left for a different role (all at different companies, all at different times) after being acquired by PE firm.

Sometimes I wonder how the engineers can't see this coming. Sure there are cost savings to be made by streamlining product offerings, cutting the "recreational budget" etc (i.e. money for office parties). But the biggest cost center for tech companies are its employees (probably that and real estate).

What's the M&A tax benefit? Do you mean tax-deductible interest payments on loans used to finance the purchase, as used by private equity?

ORA just kills software with no market success. All companies do that. If you like solaris, you had an opportunity to make your vote using your wallet.

I am actually surprised they invested into Solaris for so long, considering its long time half dead status on the market.

Sure, if you ignore the massive effort that was being invested in revamping Solaris to be more FOSS friendly and engage with the community prior to oracle's sun takeover..

I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different.

Sun really needed to FOSS license Solaris before Linux hit critical mass. That would have been amazing. Linux is pretty good for what it is, but imagine if it had been Solaris that won instead of Linux, and thus running on most of the servers of the world and potentially iOS and Android as well. It might have even made some desktop inroads, given it would have launched out of the FOSS gate with a more developed desktop than Linux at the time. Such a huge missed opportunity.

I doubt Apple or NeXT would have ported their platform to Solaris (from BSD/Mach). it seems to me that BSD would have been Linux if Linux hadn't happened.

Actually, NeXT did just that. OPENSTEP ran on Mach, Solaris, HPUX, and (amazingly) Windows NT. It didn't make a difference for NeXT's market share.

NeXT was acquired by Apple. 6 months later... Jobs was in charge, and history unfolded.

Oh of course you're right (/facepalm).

But does/did Solaris have anything worthwhile to offer over BSD/Mach.

> I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different.

Sun was in bad financial situation at that point, there is a high chance all these engineers would be laid off 8 years earlier if takeover hadn't happened.

> I suspect if the takeover hadn't happened, the FOSS systems landscape would look a whole lot different. Like what, I don't know, but definitely different.

It's possible IBM would have been a significantly better steward. Of course, it would have been hard to be a worse one.

> it would have been hard to be a worse one.

That's a bit unfair. IBM would have probably canned hardware (and hence Solaris) much earlier than Oracle did, because they already had their own offering in that space and they were as invested as Oracle in Linux (ok, they don't have their own RedHat clone, but they are definitely big on supporting Linux).

IBM was buying Sun because of Java, and planning to chuck the hardware out one way or another. Oracle bought Sun because of the hardware and basically kept everything else going, albeit in a reduced fashion where there was overlap (MySQL) or they were not interested in the niche (OpenOffice).

I think Oracle had some decent ideas and didn't execute well on them, partly because of cultural issues. I don't think IBM would have done better, certainly not on the hardware/Solaris side. They would have probably done a bit better with Java/OpenOffice but that's about it. Solaris was doomed by the Linux boom, there is very little anyone could have done about that by the time the acquisition became inevitable.

I do know in the mid-2000s IBM was one of the biggest resellers of Sun's hardware, possibly doing more volume than Sun did directly.

They were interested in OpenOffice ... just not sustainably, as it turned out.

Same as OpenText, Consolation, etc.

Is Oracle the new Computer Associates?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com