However, by blatantly damaging the product, more and more users moved (and continue to move) to better alternatives. Thus damaging the company's reputation.
However, MySQL is hardly a competitor to Oracle. Oracle 11g is meant for use at completely different type of company. I don't get it.
Time to donate to Apache. Sound familiar?
I believe that in 80-90+% of the cases where Oracle is deployed, it is only still being used because business executives are out of touch and don't want to admit that the massive investments they committed their companies to are no longer required.
My experience with Oracle's query optimization was that it was non-intuitive to configure to work correctly especially with the way that the optimizer statistics config works.
MySQL will do quite useful query optimization (for joins) if you have appropriate indexes. So I think that in 80% of cases that is what matters in both Oracle and MySQL -- creating appropriate indexes.
Honestly I don't think you know what MySQL is capable of.
Then you're simply not an enterprise level developer. Oracle is, to this day, one of the most powerful databases out there. Granted, they have absolutely awful interface tools (which is why most people are reduced to using a buggy 3rd party app to do common DB work on Oracle), but the Database itself is world class. MySQL isn't really a competitor. It competes better with things like SQLight.
Which is pretty silly, because MySQL doesn't really hold a candle to Oracle's RDBMS.
There is another metric where MySQL shines: Ease of installation. On any server I come across, I can install and startup a new MySQL/MariaDB instance by just asking for `apt-get install mysql`, or whichever package manager my distribution is using. You can't install Oracle in a single command like that. I'm not aware of any distributions that carry Oracle in their repositories, making it a pain to update and manage.