Overpromise, underdeliver, and overcharge. It's the Oracle Way.

In my experience, Oracle only ever built one product that was good, and you can replace it with PostgreSQL for significantly less money and gain greater flexibility to boot.

I think the source of Oracle's execution woes lies in part with their Fusion Middleware. It's garbage. Even though JEE has become somewhat outdated, it's still viable. That isn't the issue. The problem is the horrible memory management, continually stuck threads, and their poor messaging implementation. It makes solutions built on the platform prone to constant failure and requiring lots and lots of hardware - which of course increases licensing costs back to Oracle.

I've given up trying to figure out why people keep buying their stuff.