Hacker News Reader

Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

Great. I worked for a governmental agency and they started migrating away from oracle. It was a gargantuan task but it was supposed to save them a whole lot of money. Oracle is a greedy company whose innovation pace has dropped significantly. Their success lies in locked in clients who have to overpay for their services.

View on HN

Many of Oracle's locked in customers come from startups that Oracle purchased.

Oracle goes around looking at the lock-in potential and acquires based on that, then they ride that startup product's reputation for as long as possible until they just leave it to rot. They also try to bundle in existing Oracle products (e.g. Oracle DB) almost giving it away to get your foot in the door then dumping on you.

Unfortunately a lot of companies find themselves in a business relationship with Oracle, even after never having purchase an Oracle branded product.

This right here is what happened to my dad. By accident he started working in the wine industry as a IT project manager and developer. They used a product from JD Edwards for large scale wine production. Oracle bought them. The Oracle product they had was way more expensive. For awhile they let them use the JD Edwards product that worked well. They wine and dined him we got to go to Oracle park luxury box for game etc.. but eventually they told him you got to use the Oracle one now for like 10x the cost... Software was junk anyways so he just ended up building stuff in house. Saved the company millions in licensing fees.

so maybe I can get Oracle to buy my startup if I use Oracle products?

Their management of java is excellent so I wouldn’t say that they are not innovative. They also do top-notch research, with GraalVM for example.