mcc
What's funny about Oracle is like, most tech companies, people probably feel *skeevy* about, but also most tech cos have done 1 thing you Like. Lots of people love their Apple products. You might be annoyed at Google right now but there was probably a time they made you happy in some way. Microsoft? People do like XBoxes. OpenAI has fans!
But NOBODY interacts with Oracle on purpose. Even coders don't *pick* Oracle. There's no brake on you just *resenting* Larry Ellison.
mcc
Most humans go their entire lives without ever having a reason to have a distinct thought about Oracle. But if someone did decide to start developing outright hatred, for Oracle, there would be no cognitive dissonance cost to this. Even if there's an Oracle product you like it's probably something they purchased from another company, and you could always identify at least one way in which they made it worse
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
Caleb Berger
@mcc "don't make the mistake of humanizing Larry Ellison"
Tony Yarusso
@mcc Oracle is fine until you have to get anywhere within six degrees of separation of the general galactic orbit of the sales and licensing department… Look, we’re already PAYING YOU money for your stupid products - can you maybe NOT make the *process* of GIVING YOU MONEY as phenomenally irritating as possible?
David Chisnall
@mcc I always thought of Oracle as the lawful evil tech company. At least prior to the Sun acquisition, their evil was directed almost exclusively at people who had signed a contract with them, whereas most other big tech companies manage to do a lot more collateral damage.
It's easy to dislike Oracle and never have to touch their products. The same is somewhat true of Apple. It's far less true of the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.
наб
@mcc even the ars technica writers fell into the classic trap of anthropomorphising larry ellison :/
mcc
@valthonis I remember a time you could make a legitimate compelling case that the Oracle database products were more reliable than the open-source or Microsoft alternatives.
I also remember attending rallies for the Ralph Nader campaign*.
* No, I didn't vote for him, and anyway I wasn't 18
The Duke of Fall :d6:
@mcc I was force-fed Oracle early in my career via a founder who thought they knew best, even if it meant overpaying for a self-hosted pain-in-the-arse DBMS.
I have spent the 15 years since avoiding anything they touch like it's radioactive. 'Cause it kinda is.
ocdtrekkie
@mcc I wanted to argue with this. Like I like both MySQL and Virtualbox. But I also liked both of them before Oracle had anything to do with them... and I certainly couldn't pin anything Oracle did that actually made them *better* in any way.
I feel like something something their ERP platforms at a certain scale have to make *someone* happy? Right? Somehow?
Duncan Bayne
@mcc I once had a client who used an Oracle education product; it had ~ 14k _tables_ in the schema.
Billy O'Neal
@mcc @PeterSommerlad obligatory @lmanul https://goomics.net/62/
Neil Kandalgaonkar
@mcc I also thought this was true and then I met a techie who thought Oracle Cloud was legit
Lee from Colorado
@mcc Back in the day, I did a lot of consulting and software implementation. Oracle was great. Because no one could make it work. And once the company had spent all that money on Oracle and failed with the initial project, our consulting fees seemed like a drop in the bucket. All those projects took long enough that most of them were cancelled before we had to do the final delivery (which almost always was a huge relief for our team).
Oracle was great. Precisely because it didn't work...
mcc
@glyph @jalefkowit Google gave me a pretty good cloud computer for free… then they took it away
Now I don't use cloud computers unless I'm paying for them. If I'm paying $N for the cloud computer then I believe in the future I will continue to pay $N for it and I know exactly what N is. If I'm paying $0 for the cloud computer then I believe in the future I will be paying $X but I don't know what X is
Glyph
@mcc @jalefkowit oracle gave me a really good cloud computer for free :-(
Glyph
@mcc @jalefkowit this one comes with a stronger commitment that it will be $0 than I have received from other providers that it would remain $N. My previous provider, who shall remain nameless, started at $5/mo and through a series of end-of-life shell-game maneuvers eventually expected me to pay $75/mo for an equivalent service. So I tend to think of these things as price-over-time, and remain able to pivot off to a new provider with continuous local backups and ephemeral containers
Glyph
@mcc @jalefkowit this commitment is hardly ironclad and I assume it may go away at some point, but I estimate using it for the last few years has saved me at least $500 by this point https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier_topic-Always_Free_Resources.htm
Strypey
@mcc
> But NOBODY interacts with Oracle on purpose.
*Nobody* expects the Oracle inquisition! Amongst their weaponry, are such diverse elements as;
Fear, surprise, ruthless inefficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to Larry Ellison, and a nice brown uniform...
Gilly Gunson
@mcc I remember the Oracle onboarding I did in 2010 included some business ethics training that specifically listed lap dances as an example of a disallowed business expense. Ever since then I've wondered what the story behind that was.
Jonathan Yu
@mcc A wise man, @bcantrill, once told us all not to anthropomorphize the lawnmower, though. I think he was right. Oracle is Oracle, they are very transparent about their model and their approach, and I find that kind of honesty refreshing
Cybarbie
@mcc Honestly can't say why ORCL has such a valuation, up again 6%. It can't just be their inferior database products and nobody runs Virtualbox except for free. Have they managed to monetize their (shithouse by todays standards) programming language java?
clacke
@nf3xn Oracle Cloud, I guess?
Cybarbie
@mcc In the future people will be able to make undetectable AI hunter-killer drones from consumer hardware that can find assholes like Plastic Larry and melt them with its flamethrower.
Karl Auerbach
@mcc My first interaction with Oracle happened around 1980. I was at Interactive Systems (the first commercial Unix company, in Santa Monica). We had a Unix layer on top of VAX/VMS and Oracle sent a sales team to us to make sure that their database worked on that foundation. However, the Oracle people insisted that we modify and tune our OS code to make Oracle run better and faster than their competition. They wanted us to cheat for them.
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