> I made the same arguments then, and I will stand by this evaluation now.
To whom? This particular business? 999 out of 1000 businesses (each of whose needs you evaluated and found only one of whom really needed Oracle and therefore excluded)?
What was the argument? That they could do it cheaper by hiring (possibly then non-existent) Postgres DBAs and using Postgres instead of Oracle DBAs and spending exorbitant amounts of money on Oracle?
To us, technical people, that argument might sound perfectly reasonable, but to a non-tech executive it might sound cuckoo-bananas crazy.
> It's not that WebLogic, Oracle et al have no purpose, it's just that the people buying these things tend to have no idea what they're doing.
This strikes me as a dismissive stereotype. As you admit, it's not as if they made a choice that failed to function at all. Social proof is a thing. They merely paid a very high price.
Where were all the people who did have an idea of what to do, those 20 years ago? Busy trying to educate them, or separate them from their money? How about you?
Me? 20 years ago I was busy building ROLAP engines that ran cross-RDBMS, because the customer had already decided to blow a million bucks on Teradata et al before I even got there.
I'm not quite sure what your point is. It's all understandable because nontechnical people were making technical decisions? That doesn't make it ok.
And yes, quite a lot of those overpriced appserver installs failed to function. Let me tell you about the time I wrote the backend for Sprite's Sublymonal campaign; their IBM-operated datacenter couldn't provision WebSphere capacity in time (lead time > 2 months), so I ran the thing off a couple VPS nodes (IIRC rackspace), hiding the whole project from their IT staff.
My point is also that making sweeping, moralizing statements like "doesn't make it ok" (nor the repeated forays into other enterpise software topics) isn't helpful in general, and it certainly isn't helpful in furthering understanding or intellectual curiosity on the specific topic, as it relates to Oracle and a single, generalist (arguably "full-stack") engineer performing a sustaining and development role.
To whom? This particular business? 999 out of 1000 businesses (each of whose needs you evaluated and found only one of whom really needed Oracle and therefore excluded)?
What was the argument? That they could do it cheaper by hiring (possibly then non-existent) Postgres DBAs and using Postgres instead of Oracle DBAs and spending exorbitant amounts of money on Oracle?
To us, technical people, that argument might sound perfectly reasonable, but to a non-tech executive it might sound cuckoo-bananas crazy.
> It's not that WebLogic, Oracle et al have no purpose, it's just that the people buying these things tend to have no idea what they're doing.
This strikes me as a dismissive stereotype. As you admit, it's not as if they made a choice that failed to function at all. Social proof is a thing. They merely paid a very high price.
Where were all the people who did have an idea of what to do, those 20 years ago? Busy trying to educate them, or separate them from their money? How about you?