
Oracle’s Aggressive Sales Tactics Are Backfiring with Customers - raleighm
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/oracles-aggressive-sales-tactics-are-backfiring-with-customers
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bcantrill
Fourteen years ago (!), I reflected on why software vendors are able to get
away with bad behavior[1] -- until they can't, of course. That two of the
three database companies I mention are in the dustbin of history should be
telling -- and I stand by my most basic conclusion that proprietary software
companies cannot outrun open source equivalents in perpetuity. May the long
run arrive sooner rather than later!

[1] [http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-
soft...](http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-software/)

~~~
dman
Any thoughts on business models for Databases going forward? Some interesting
recent developments make DBs a challenging vertical to bootstrap in

a. Proprietary is a non starter, since increasingly large customers will
insist on the source being available.

b. Integration / Consulting is no longer viable since the cloud providers will
likely offer a hosted / managed solution around a new OSS.

c. Licensing is difficult to enforce if you are giving your code away for
free.

Will DBs join file systems and debuggers as pieces of the stack where the only
way to build one is to be inside a megaco or as a side project? Am struggling
a bit to understand how to monetize infrastructure software going forward. (I
have ignored the option of raising $X M to build something and be acquired
before shipping to a large customer base).

~~~
MoBattah
Disagree on B. There's always opportunity for consulting and integration. Not
everyone wants to be in the cloud and not everyone can be in the cloud.

And you know DBs always need tuning.

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tensor
Oracle's email marketing uses similar tactics to scammers. Several people at
my company got emails that went something like:

"Hi I'm ___ and I'm the new account rep for the services you have with us...."

We don't have any services with them, so this certainly raised an eyebrow. Did
someone open an account with them in our name? Did someone at my company
subscribe to their services without me knowing?

Discovering this was actually a sales phishing tactic certainly cemented us
never wanting to do business with their cloud services.

~~~
le-mark
You are required to register an account with them to access JDK downloads, sql
developer, their help forums etc. Its really quite a pita. It may be these
accounts they're targeting?

~~~
taakd
Why wouldn't you just get this from your distro's repos? Openjdk and the like
are already there.

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bhouston
Oracle always does high pressure high priced sales. It does not catch up with
them generally. They push their customers hard and there has always been
backlash but then Oracle adjusts slightly so it is still high pressure, high
priced, but not too high.

I sort of respect them from a sales perspective, they push it to the margin on
the sales front. From a pure sales perspective, few are as good as Oracle for
extracting value from their customers. I am not that ballsy personally and it
isn't my style but I am not anywhere as financially as successful as Oracle.

~~~
suyash
Oracle has the best technical sales people for a reason.

~~~
Annatar
Even if that were true, which is highly debatable, what does that statement
have to do with Oracle's high pressure sales tactics, and what does it have to
do with them destroying the Solaris and SPARC market?

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bborud
The thing is that not only do they demand a high price for licenses and
support deals: when the shit hits the fan and you NEED the support deal, you
discover that the one you have is worthless and they only want to extort more
money from you.

Quite a few companies have blacklisted Oracle over the past decade. Big ones.

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tonyedgecombe
I wonder if Oracle has a looming problem developing new customers. I can't
imagine any startups are banging on their door for a database when Postgres is
good enough for most cases. As these startups become the corporates of the
future are Oracle going to struggle?

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polartx
its a big problem.

I worked as a Sales Engineer for them years ago when they rolled out their
sales cloud and marketing cloud offering (shortly after the eloqua
acquisition). The majority of all deals are upsold or cross-sold into existing
accounts. They also created a promotion that allowed customers to early
terminate their on-premise licenses and roll the credit (that would have
otherwise been surrendered) into the corresponding cloud product.

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skookumchuck
I'm a longtime ORCL investor, and sold it all a couple years ago because of
this. Any company where customers use it because they have to rather than they
want to is a company with little long term prospects.

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Area12
Does anybody remember when a default install of Oracle RDBMS also installed
ask.com? It was at that point that I realised that a significant part of
Oracle Corporation no longer cared about how disreputable they appeared. I
can't even imagine that they got all that much money from ask.com, on the
scale of their total revenue.

~~~
bzzzt
Even though I've got no love for Oracle business, there are a few facts: The
Oracle software with the bundled Ask.com toolbar was the Java client
installation. And the decision to bundle the toolbar was made by Sun
microsystems (before they were bought). They probably signed a contract for a
few years which is why Oracle couldn't get rid of it earlier.

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Bucephalus355
I read a similar article in 1995 about how MySQL was going to put Oracle out
of business.

Oracle now owns MySQL.

I live in Austin, Texas and definitely do not work for Oracle. However they
have plans to hire 10,000 people here. For reference, that number represents
40% of Facebook’s headcount. Apple, another old-guard company (Steve Jobs and
Larry Ellison were great friends), is doing something similar.

For all of Oracle’s badness, there is a certain Trump-like authenticity to
them. They kind of know their bad, and they just keep on keeping on. Facebook,
meanwhile, had to shove it down our throats how awesome and beautiful and
world-connecting they were.

~~~
dijit
> Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were great friends

Whoa whoa whao, this is the opposite of what I believe to be true, I have
little to believe they were really friends, in fact when Oracle bought Sun
Apple stopped integrating ZFS because Jobs didn't want to be associated or
beholden to Larry Ellison...

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-
ap...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/zfs-the-other-new-apple-file-
system-that-almost-was-until-it-wasnt/)

~~~
bcantrill
There were absolutely friends -- to the point that Larry would say "my best
friend Steve" almost as if it were one word. This left me with two questions,
both essentially mean-spirited: (1) Could "only" be substituted for "best"?
And (2) Did Steve ever say "my best friend Larry"?

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msla
Mirror:

[https://archive.li/P2au0](https://archive.li/P2au0)

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mrbill
Nothing new at all, they've been doing this for 20+ years. Interesting to see
the Halliburton mention though, I worked there in IT for 12 years and there
was an embedded Oracle install in most of our major software products.

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tajen
I still don’t understand what Oracle does better than Postgres. For free, it
provides a cleaner data structure, DDL transactions, better performance,
closer to SQL standards... Of course Oracle does sales better.

~~~
hyperman1
Sometimes I wonder if it's just not some kind of stockholm syndrome.

You're an enterprise class CxO and negotiating with Oracle is playing with the
big boys. All CxOs around you sing praise for Oracle. You can reasonably well
get Oracle to drop their prices with 40% at a new sale, so now you feel like
an ace in negotiating. Things are looking great.

Then you have to pay. And again. And again. Meanwhile, the support is bad, the
quality is low, and people start to grumble.

It turns out that 60% of a lot of money is still a lot of money, and you're in
a position where you have to defend what you've bought to your peers. Oracle
is very helpfull here, it has an enterprise aura that rivals Steve Jobs'
reality distortion field. Oracle makes sure the other CxOs you meet are very
pro Oracle and very enterprisy. So you either drown or learn to sing the
qualities of oracle.

At that point, you're ready to be one of those peer CxOs that will lure the
next generation of CxOs into oracle's traps.

Add to all this that at the end of the 1990's, oracle was the best database,
no discussion. It coasted along on that reputation until now. Postgres is
mostly there today, but this is 20 years later

~~~
Annatar
PostgreSQL, however good, has nothing even remotely comparable to Oracle ASM
and real application cluster.

Not even Citus comes close.

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kinsomo
I can't read most of the article because of the paywall, but I'm glad Oracle's
greed is catching up to it. Besides its database and Java (which is still
really Sun), every of their products I've been forced to use have been
overpriced, poorly supported crap.

Also, their cloud pricing must be _really_ bad. My employer has been 100%
Oracle database _for decades_ , but it's now officially banned from all cloud
projects due to licensing cost.

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corpMaverick
We used to use PostgreSql. But our CIO was able to negotiate very inexpensive
Oracle licenses. Now we have a bunch of crappy databases that are a pain to
upgrade. But we are saving a lot of money.

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dijit
Are you really saving money, if you wouldn't have spent it otherwise?

I mean, how can you know that even the worst postgresql installation wouldn't
require only 10% of what you're paying now in contractors/support?

~~~
corpMaverick
We went from free and great to cheap and crappy.

But the CIO got to show off his negotiating skills.

~~~
gowld
That's page 37, section 2 of the Oracle sales playbook.

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cryptonector
Paging Bryan Cantrill. Paging Bryan Cantrill!

Oldie but goldie, by bmc: [https://blogs.oracle.com/bmc/the-economics-of-
software](https://blogs.oracle.com/bmc/the-economics-of-software)

EDIT: Oops, bcantrill already commented.

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samgranieri
My old colleagues at a previous employer used to get hounded by Oracle sales
reps. Now they're moving to Microsoft SQL Server. I wish they would've moved
to Postgres, but still, getting rid of Oracle is huge progress

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wildfire
Why is this even a story?

When has agressive sales tactics gone well for a company?

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Annatar
This is a story because Oracle needs to change their practices. Yesterday.

I for one am glad someone brought it up and that it's being discussed. It's
overdue by about two decades.

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krylon
Interesting timing. Just today we got a cold call from an Oracle sales rep.
;-)

Fortunately, our awesome Purchasing person got rid of them quickly.

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robert_foss
Paywall

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ProAm
Just press the 'Reader view' button. The whole article is 3.5 paragraphs

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jacksmith21006
Oracle s just a sucky company. Plus there is now excellent open source data
bases and even better cloud options.

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dangerboysteve
Why link to an article behind a paywall ?

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praneshp
Nothing against it in the guidelines.

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comex
The FAQ[1] says:

> Are paywalls ok?

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

Is there a workaround in this case?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

~~~
praneshp
If you had continued to read on: "In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an
article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about
paywalls. Those are off topic."

Anyway, I was not 100% correct, I didn't know about the workaround
requirement.

