
Oracle Reveals Funding of Dark Money Group Fighting Big Tech - haroldkicks
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-25/oracle-reveals-it-s-funding-dark-money-group-fighting-big-tech
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soared
This headline is not really genuine. The group is definitely fighting big
tech, but purely for the benefit of Oracle. They aren't fighting for users,
but simply against Google and Amazon, who are Oracle's biggest competitors.

Having worked at Oracle, the hatred for Google is very deep. We worked with G
only when we had easy money to make, and they did the same. We would get in
trouble for using any G product, and could only use G sheets/docs if a client
had created it themselves and sent it to us.

~~~
animalnewbie
To be fair, using gsuite is only for hn hipsters. Anybody reasonable uses MS
office. And please don't even tell me Google is open. There is no company on
Earth which has more lockdown than Google.

When I was an intern at Microsoft in 2008 summers, they already had fully
functional web based office which was a decade ahead of what was at Google at
that time. Google is good only at pr and that's what they use their oss and
surrounding efforts for

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cosmodisk
Not sure why you got downvoted so much, however I agree with the notion that
entire Gsuite is a toy for kids to play. Try doing something similar and
immediately start looking around thinking: where's my Excel?

~~~
tluyben2
Depends on what you are doing right? Most people use spreadsheets for lists
and simple sum() type of things; sheets works fine for that and is convenient.
Same for the other gsuite stuff.

Those sweeping statements never work; hordes of young people or ‘new computer
users’ (people in poorer countries who can now afford tablets and low end
laptops etc) never touched MS Office and won’t be thinking ‘where is my
Excel?’ only for that reason and just complete their work in sheets.

These are often people doing production work and not kids who are playing.

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C1sc0cat
Depends I have seen young supposedly "digital natives" use lesser tools like
the google tools and create a complete Charlie Foxtrots

Normally they have zero idea about professional project work the concept of a
version controlled document is something they have never heard off

And we are talking Major Brands and Major agencies here

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adgasf
Google Docs solves the 95% case of version-control simply by bringing everyone
to the head of master at all times.

~~~
lrem
And further 3% by having a linear revision history. With some luck it will
even render diffs correctly.

Disclaimer: I work at Google and hate docs. But acknowledge the thing works ok
for its intended user.

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smitty1e
"And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

But we've proved it again and again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

You never get rid of the Dane."

[https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.htm...](https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html)

Kipling may need a Warhol overhaul; it seems these days that everybody gets to
be the monastery for 15 minutes just to see if they are well-architected.

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longtimegoogler
My opinion is that this type of "dark financing" is more common than many
might suspect.

I believe this tactic, used by some tech companies to attack competitors, is
fairly effective. I imagine it is mostly employed by those like Oracle that
aren't winning in the market.

~~~
Ididntdothis
I am not a fan but I wouldn't call Oracle "not winning". It has been a very
profitable company for a very long time. I am not so sure if the current star
companies will last that long.

~~~
thedance
I mean, sure, but looking at the last five years they are getting destroyed by
clouds. Amazon, Google, and long-time nemesis Microsoft are all dramatically
outperforming Oracle. Nobody wants Oracle's cloud products. The companies that
are doing worse than Oracle are other dinosaurs like IBM and Dell. Even VMWare
is beating them.

~~~
njarboe
VMWare is majority owned by Dell.

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neonate
[https://archive.md/iiz0s](https://archive.md/iiz0s)

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jshevek
"Oracle donated between $25,000 and $99,999 last year to the internet
project..."

The upper bound is barely enough for two modest full time salaries? This is
not much money. I wonder how much the project gets altogether, ie what
proportion this is of the total income.

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asdfasgasdgasdg
I doubt that this is the only such surrogate they are funding but you're right
that this amount is pretty de minimus.

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shmerl
Oracle, always on the dark side. Who would have guessed...

