https://archive.ph/SeXVX
Where does Oracle make its money from? I'm close to having lived half my life and I have never met or probably seen anyone who is a direct customer of Oracle.
They are mainly the database company, but for the last 25 years or so, their money came from Sun Microsystems' intellectual property, namely Java.
Someone can correct me because I'm probably wrong but I thought they had a Salesforce-like product before Salesforce became the dominant software.
Oracle makes all of their money on pro services contracts for niche proprietary software in industries you'd never even imagine. Things like "the software folks use at hotel front desks" or "the kiosks libraries use to manage print queues" or "the things schools use to process payroll." It's all ancient software with weird licensing agreements built on the back of massive pro services agreements. Tons of people use or interact with Oracle products every day and you'd never know it. They're insidious like that and they own or manage tons of other companies or at least the pro services for those companies and so they're basically impossible to avoid interacting with if you work in niche enterprise software.
Not even necessarily that niche. If your IT org is led by people who are particularly not-that-bright, they may insist on running Oracle-supported Java in lieu of OpenJDK, in which case you have to deal with seat-based licensing. The WebLogic Java EE platform is still a thing at some companies who are too chickenshit to jump ship to JBOSS/Wildfly or just move to Spring+Tomcat in general. Oracle DB is a thing at many, many major enterprises, and the price tag isn't that much worse than Micro$oft SQL Server Datacenter Edition, if you're at that tier. Oracle DB is absolute dogshit, but a lot of guillotine bait types seem to be fond of forcing it on their IT departments.
A lot of existing corporate contracts they have. Large companies like banks use them, and they have little incentive to migrate off it.
Understood. Btw don't try to anthromorphise Larry Ellison.
I made a variation on this joke last thread but I have since improved it and it is only slightly damaged by him looking less like Tim Allen in this picture: Tim the Ghoulman Taylor.
