Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

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Oracle is still the company that does database for everyone with money to spend, and the percentage of companies (and governments, and NGOs) that discover a meaningful percentage of their very purpose is "moving data around" only grows over time. Their market is essentially constrained to "entities that use computers and want to sort data," which may as well be unconstrained. And in spite of all the ways they can be criticized, they still compete at the top of their game; many cheaper or free alternatives are going to ask you to trade a lot of labor (and added risk of data loss and destruction).

In contrast, of the list of companies you highlighted,

- Apple makes hardware, which is lower margin

- Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free) and unlike Oracle is struggling to define why they should be the best choice (ads in the OS?!).

- Meta doesn't actually have a monetization strategy beyond ads that is revenue-positive, and the reliability of ads turns out to be dicey (Google built their nest-egg on ads earlier than Facebook, and even Google has been thrashing about to find tent-poles besides ads; they see the risk). In spite of that, Zuck is currently above Ellison in the Fortune 2025 rankings.

- AI is ghost money (behind the scenes, a lot of companies paying themselves essentially)

- SpaceX is in a tiny market ultimately (each launch costs a fortune; a handful of customers want to put things in space)

- Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking.

- Amazon is... Actually wildly successful and Bezos is #3 on the Forbes ranking. I think the only reason Bezos might not be higher is he spends his money.

No, it's often the quiet ones nobody talks about that are the real leaders. Lions don't have to roar to be noticed.

> "Microsoft is under stiff competition (they are selling a product, an operating system, that is a commodity competing with free)"

Microsoft's Annual revenue from Azure is $75 billion. Office Server is $40 billion. Office Consumer is $6 billion. LinkedIn is $15Bn. Dynamics is $5Bn. Gaming/XBox is $15Bn. Search/Advertising is $14Bn. Devices at $5Bn. Intelligent Cloud at $87Bn. Windows $21Bn. They are a HUGE company with a lot of multi-billion dollar product streams and a lot of business lockin around basically any company on the planet which isn't a new web app startup.

Oracle sell an RDBMS. Competing with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and the last 15 years of NoSQL. Oracle is what Amazon Retail made a multi-year move away from ending in 2019, and were very happy about it, popping champagne in their announcement video[1]. Oracle license Java which has seen a mass migration to free OpenJDK and Amazon Corretto and all the other free forks. Oracle make a cloud service that you wouldn't touch unless you had a team of Fortune 100 lawyers pressing enter for you because you know Oracle saleslawyersharks are watching on the other side.

Why does anyone other than the government give them money? What for? Okay yes they're "the best" at something or other for a Fortune 100 with serious needs, nothing else comes close, ... but 4-5x their valuation in the last 5 years??

> "Tesla suffers strong competition. In spite of the above, Musk is currently the top of the Forbes ranking. Amazon is... Actually wildly successful"

Yeah, Tesla is hype-valued and Amazon does a lot of things in a lot of big markets, of course they're valuable. Oracle does some obscure boring IBM style thing that is never hyped and there is never any positive sentiment about it on the tech internet.

[1] https://www.supportrevolution.com/resources/why-amazon-left-...

It took Amazon like 10 years to get off Oracle didnt it? Amazon is a tech company where tech is the product and so has lots of internal expertise.

It is like banks trying to get off mainframes, they just cant do it organizationally and there are loads of failed attempts both public and private. I imagine most companies using Oracle are like that.

Oracle had $57 billion in revenue in 2025, up 8% from last year. You do make the excellent observation that it's not as high or spiky as other tech companies. It is, however, consistent, and they've been at it much longer than most on the list (founded 1977).

That last fact probably matters most regarding Ellison's fortune. Their "boring IBM style thing" continues to grow, slowly, and continues to make him money (a lot of it, given his continually-owned large stake); even if the velocity isn't as high as other billionaires, he started a lot earlier than they did.

> Why does anyone other than the government give them money?

I asked a similar question of a relative who was all-in on Microsoft in the '90s. His response was simple: "reliability and expectation of business-oriented service." When a company's been around since 1977, there's more trust they'll be around 10 years out. Oracle is many things, but it's not a company with a notorious "killed by" list of abandoned critical projects that other companies were relying upon to prop their revenue streams. And, if you spend enough money with them, they tend to put someone on helping you solve your problems to keep your business; this is something the alternatives do as well, but Oracle's seen a lot more business problems and has a big portfolio of past solutions that worked.

I got to be a fly on the wall at one of the FAANGs transitioning off an Oracle DB, and the process took about 3x longer than scoped. The reason? Conservative decisionmaking: all the money flowed through the Oracle DBs, and you cannot screw with the money flow. This goes beyond the need for a business to make revenue; failing to properly track your money flow can put you out of compliance with financial laws and make people go to jail. They trusted their in-house databases for tracking user PII, for keeping the core services running, for doing internal infrastructure monitoring and employee recordkeeping... It took convincing to get every stakeholder to trust it with the money.

Companies buy in with Oracle because they have some confidence they won't go to jail for doing so.

> Oracle sell an RDBMS

Businesses Oracle is in:

- Databases (several)

- Cloud

- Software for planning everything related to manufacturing and logistics (ERP, supply chain management)

- Software for customer relationship management (CRM)

- Software for healthcare, managing hospitals and clinics

- Software for managing every aspect of running a bank

- Point of sale equipment

- Software for running utility companies

- Software for everything people related inside companies (payroll, HR, hiring, etc)

- Competing with Red Hat on commercial Linux

- Programming languages (several)

- Software for managing inventories

And a gazillion other things.

The government has so much money, what need does Oracle have of anybody else's?

Furthermore, what money the government doesn't itself have, it can pressure others into spending, on occasion. e.g. that Bytedance/Oracle deal

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