
Update on Oracle Layoffs - jen20
https://www.thelayoff.com/t/KTCW4qz
======
lkrubner
Is Oracle doing well? Ten years ago I thought they were going to suffer as
Open Source projects got better and better. That has not happened, or at
least, that didn't happen nearly as fast as I thought it would.

Oracle faces intense competition from Microsoft, and also from Open Source.
The fact that Oracle has continued forward, seemingly unharmed, has so far
struck me as something like a magic act.

Are these layoffs a sign of Oracle in long term decay? Or is this merely
typical corporate reorganization that any large company goes through every few
years?

~~~
raesene6
For me Oracle has gone into the arena of companies like IBM and CA, where they
pretty much only deal in enterprise IT scenarios and have no interest in
small/end-user computing. Those companies can continue to make money on
support and upgrades for a really long time as the pace of IT change in core
enterprise systems is glacial.

Personally I think this kind of high-end only strategy is a really bad idea,
as it cuts off your supply of new people who know about your technology and
are developing new software for your platforms. I always thought it was a big
reason why Linux did so well against proprietary Unix systems like HPUX,
Solaris, AIX etc, and in turn why they did well against even more closed-off
systems like mainframe products.

When it's hard for people to learn to use your product, due to expensive
hardware and licensing fees and complex install processes, fewer people do it,
which directly leads to increased costs to hire people in that arena. Compare
that to Windows/Linux admins who can easily learn their craft on a cheap/free
software and cheap hardware.

Microsoft is a good example of a company who generally gets that problem
despite playing in the enterprise space. You can get 180-day licenses and VM
images for most of their products for free (completely fine for training), and
there's a load of cheap/free training materials.

~~~
emmelaich
> Oracle has gone into the arena of companies like IBM and CA ...

Exactly:

[http://www.dbms2.com/2015/12/31/oracle-as-the-new-ibm-
has-a-...](http://www.dbms2.com/2015/12/31/oracle-as-the-new-ibm-has-a-long-
decline-started/)

Personal story - they're pushing exadata and exalytics. Products based on 10
year products based on 15+ year old ideas.

------
WhiteSource1
Looks like lots of trouble in the whole ERP space. SAP isn't seeing people
moving to HANA. Panaya is struggling. And Oracle EBS market share is
declining.

~~~
orly_bookz
I don't know if all ERP software is like what I've seen but what I've seen is
a hot mess.

If your company is ever looking to move to the ERP space from a homegrown
legacy system like we did, don't buy Infor. I'd rather deal with greenscreens
for the next twenty years of my life than have to deal with Infor products and
support for one more year. And I used to _hate_ old, tired Big Iron.

~~~
WhiteSource1
Don't know anything about Infor but these are huge complex systems that people
don't want to change because there is a huge risk of changes. So now they are
falling behind, running up huge amounts of technical debt, and staying on old
systems. I know with SAP most people have never heard of HANA and most of the
companies that migrated did so because they were on very very old versions.
Oracle EBS is pushing this migration to the cloud that is making a bit of
traction with SMBs but not going anywhere in the enterprise and changes are
difficult.

------
rwmj
Can someone explain why Oracle bought Sun and then screwed it all up? Was it a
deliberate plan? Did they make money from it - and how?

~~~
godmodus
they capitalized on Solaris (read SunOS) for many years, making sure the
online documentation is obtuse and the best option for companies is to buy
pricey support contracts. or send their DevOps to training courses, at a
premium. They really made sure their online community/footprint was kept to a
minimum - googlging issues and errors often led nowhere and left no choice but
to call upon the support gods who'd login and fix things. the support folk
were nice people - but it left you non the wiser about your issue.

They also are capitalizing on Java using premium licensing if you're building
with Oracle Java for the enterprise and planning to make money from it.

my source is my own experience working with Solaris, which beyond ZFS and
OracleDB, has very few things going for it - it made me feel like a bad
Sysadmin, really. maybe i was, maybe it is a better OS than my experience
taught me.

now they've decided to go all cloud, and are killing Solaris. Java will
probably still continue being developed.

~~~
vostok
> my source is my own experience working with Solaris, which beyond ZFS and
> OracleDB, has very few things going for it

At a minimum, I feel like DTrace and Solaris Containers belong in that list
too.

~~~
godmodus
i'm perhaps a bit biased towards FreeBSD/jails which was a more pleasant to
work with. But ill agree, containers and Dtrace are just excellent.

------
Tempest1981
I had almost forgotten about the SPARC CPUs. Looks like they're approaching 4
GHz, using TSMCs fab.

~~~
cmurf
And is open, not proprietary and royalty free.

~~~
tossedaway334
while there is an openSPARC core (that is around 10 years old), SPARC in
general is not "open, not proprietary and royalty free."

~~~
cmurf
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC)

Open Yes, and royalty free

------
winteriscoming
>> Still Unclear: The extent of near-term terminations. The fifty percent
figure actually seems a bit high to us at present

Is this 50% of Oracle, that's being speculated, or just some specific division
within Oracle? 50% of Oracle, does seem very high.

~~~
dlgeek
Based solely on the article, it appears to be Oracle's Systems division which
seems to own SPARC and Solaris - not sure what else without googling.

------
SQL2219
[https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Solaris.html](https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-Solaris.html)

~~~
Annatar
They are all dismally small, including Linux at ~1.4%:

[https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-docker-q-kubernetes-q-
sma...](https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-docker-q-kubernetes-q-smartos-q-
solaris-q-linux-q-ubuntu-q-delphix.html)

------
SQL2219
[https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-oracle.html](https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-oracle.html)

------
xer0x
Is this a joke? I didn't realize Oracle continued working on all these SUN
products.

