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Comment by eftpotrm | Hacker News Reader

I forget where, but I once read an article suggesting that one of the big problems Microsoft has faced in the past 10 years is that, after the DoJ suit and the ruling of it as an abusive monopoly by Judge Jackson, they missed out on a lot of good new developers simply because they didn't want to work for that sort of company.

I don't think my opinions of Larry Ellison had been high for some time, but recent actions and publishing this sort of press release hardly raises them. Perhaps this will be the final downfall of Oracle; that their reputation in the tech community so precedes them that they run out of willing labour and / or partners?

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While I agree with your general assessment I disagree with your conclusion.

See, Oracle is not (and never was) a technology company. They are a huge marketing and sales organisation that happens to dabble in technology products.

The carnage of Sun top engineers after the takeover should tell us something.

That said, I think it's a dumb, childish and immature move.

2 Minutes of LOL and gufaw! As a believer in kharma (in the metaphorical sense) I think that will come back and bite.Messrs. Hurd and Ellison.

Do you really think Larry cares about what some uppity yankee hipster thinks about his company? These days, a lot (most?) of Oracle software is built in India, Eastern Europe, etc. Developers in those countries don't care about this sort of things, they care about the cold hard cash Oracle have in their coffers, which they get by selling products over geeks' heads (i.e. to their bosses' boss).

Wage inflation in developing countries is much more of a problem for Larry than "boardroom etiquette".

yankee?

Yes, as a Brit I was quite surprised about that ;-)

As for the other side, there's not just the issue of who builds for them but who builds with them. If the industry perception of Oracle becomes establised that they're awkward, litigious and have an attitude problem, who's going to buy the licenses and build products against their platform?

[ I'm sure in Larry's eyes "uppity yankee hipsters" and "uppity brit hipsters" are equivalent ;) ]

I don't think they have a reputation for being awkward with their own customers/partners/etc; they're unashamedly merciless with competitors, and this is well known. In the enterprise sector the two categories often overlap, but then again in those circles being a shark is actually considered a good thing anyway.

At the moment their target is squarely HP, like SAP before them, and this is what it means. It's actually mildly amusing, if you've followed the whole saga with Apotheker living on a plane etc.

Was it not Oracle who sued an alternative support provider out of existence on very spurious grounds? That's hardly a customer-friendly action; I can't imagine the support organisation's customers were very well disposed to Oracle after this.

I'm sure they are targeting (who they think are) their competitors. I see and hear good things about their technology. I don't doubt the management culture of some organisations would count it as to their credit that they act 'forcefully'.

But still, there surely has to come a tipping point beyond which aggressive nastiness and cockiness works against, not for them. It's not relevant for me on several grounds but this is one more black mark against Oracle's culture for me that would discourage me from working with them and make me wonder what it'd take for them to do something similar to me.

Support is where Oracle makes the real money, so they're very aggressive there, but I think you're referring to the TomorrowNow case. They were bought by SAP to basically snatch Oracle customers, and "it looks like that TomorrowNow was probably cheating like mad. Instead of going to Oracle's support site and downloading only the patches and bug fixes its customers were entitled to, it downloaded all the Oracle software it could get its hands on. Oracle says TomorrowNow had a whole bank of servers skimming its computers automatically for Oracle software." (see http://www.computerworlduk.com/in-depth/it-business/3246680/... )

The "enterprise" world is full of sharks, Oracle is just one of many.

It's slang for a person from the US. Wikipedia has a page on it if you're interested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American. To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner. To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner. To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander. To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter. And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

Here in Texas, it means someone from the Northern US. It sounds really funny in that context. :)

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