Oracle made a $300B bet on OpenAI. It's paying the price

Posted by pera 2 days ago

Comments

Comment by taylodl 2 days ago

Oracle has bigger problems than OpenAI. They've been selling large enterprise contracts for the past 10 years and they're coming up for renewal. A lot of those enterprises don't feel they got a good value. If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years, then that could have a severe impact to Oracle. Their other issue is a lot of those enterprises are looking at migrating to PostgreSQL so they can migrate off of Oracle's RDBMS. Many have already deployed PostgreSQL for their department-level applications, so they can get the experience they need before tackling their enterprise-level applications.

Comment by thedougd 2 days ago

In my organization we've worked hard for several years to insulate ourselves from Oracle.

We've implemented aggressive desktop monitoring and blocked downloads from Oracle to avoid the Java subscription. Where it's needed, an OpenJDK distribution is used.

Where we must still use Oracle database, in some small, bespoke legacy use cases (heavy PL/SQL), we've moved to RDS with license included to avoid the direct relationship with Oracle. I get it, a big RAC customer will have a harder time, but they'll also likely have alternatives (e.g. SAP implementation to HANA).

I know of at least one vendor (Hyland) who's dropping Oracle support and providing a migration path to MS SQL. Shame not a FOSS database, but still a trend away from Oracle.

Comment by panarky 2 days ago

I watched from the sidelines with grim interest as my organization tried to decide between Oracle and SAP.

The team defined requirements, ran an RFP and demo process and did site visits to clients of each company. The SAP reference clients weren't exactly thrilled with SAP, the product was too complex and too expensive, but it was rock solid and SAP was a reliable partner. The Oracle reference clients had the usual complaints about features and flexibility, but their real beefs were that Oracle was a predatory and untrustworthy partner.

Oracle made claims in their RFP response that were proven false in the demos and site visits, confirming the claims from reference clients about the company's ethics. In contrast, SAP's RFP responses were validated by the team's due diligence.

So management decided to go with SAP. In response, a senior Oracle person tracked down all of the company's board members and made outrageous claims of incompetence against the company's executives, and alluded ominously about bad faith and conflicts of interest.

Oracle was completely hostile and off the rails when they figured out they lost the deal. I will never, ever do business with Oracle.

Unfortunately, while the SAP application seemed solid, the organization went with their HANA database which was astronomically expensive, and had a bad habit of returning different and provably incorrect results to the same deterministic SQL query every time it ran, and then the entire database would crash for all users.

Comment by thedougd 2 days ago

It's wild dealing with Oracle. They are an adversary to their customers. They'll repeatedly try and setup meetings where they begin off-topic asking questions about how many cores/sockets you're deployed on (Answer: Fewer than we're paying for). When we declined their Java subscription (after thorough preparation on our part), they repeatedly threatened us with audits and ominous threats of download monitoring.

If anyone has to deal with this, I highly recommend Palisade Compliance for consulting. Ex-Oracle people who do not sell licenses, only consult on compliance and represent you during an audit.

Comment by ethbr1 2 days ago

> If anyone has to deal with this, I highly recommend Palisade Compliance for consulting. Ex-Oracle people who do not sell licenses, only consult on compliance and represent you during an audit.

Oof. That's a new standard for shitty company: when ex-employees build a business around protecting customers from their former employer.

Comment by scrubs 1 day ago

Nvidia is adversarial too, and a giant pain to deal with. But then since the 1980s there's been a slow pendulum move to suppliers having more actual and self-perceived power over customers. I'm a big proponent of respectfully letting the supplier know when needed I tell them they don't me if I am satisfied or whether its worth the $ spent on them. Always have options. Without options there's no choice. Internal suppliers (in a corp) periodically need to be told the same thing. Mishandling one's customer power in the relationship is an error i don't like to make.

Comment by jiggawatts 2 days ago

You’re going to have to elaborate on that last bit! SAP HANA is used by enormous organisations as the core database for their entire operations, so pervasive data corruption bugs would be rather… concerning.

Comment by panarky 2 days ago

This was in the early days of HANA, I'm sure they've fixed the defects by now, but it was shocking to pay nose-bleed prices for every 64gb shard, and then have basic SQL return provably incorrect results. It was a catastrophe, and after spending heavily on consultants to work around the defects, the organization eventually switched to SQL Server.

Comment by jiggawatts 1 day ago

> return provably incorrect results.

Again, you're burying the lede here.

It's like the Linux fanboi stating without evidence that Windows will just accept any user name without a password, and then refusing to elaborate on that claim. Like... wat?

SAP HANA may have its faults, but I've never heard of pervasive data corruption as one of them.

Comment by spwa4 1 day ago

> It's like the Linux fanboi stating without evidence that Windows will just accept any user name without a password, and then refusing to elaborate on that claim. Like... wat?

Did you enter the correct NSAKEY username?

Comment by senectus1 1 day ago

yup same thing here. their bullshit legal antics has made us allergic to oracle

Comment by otterley 2 days ago

Aren’t contract expiration dates distributed over time? Why would now be a particularly vulnerable time? Granted, we’re coming up on the end of the calendar year, but 2025 doesn’t feel particularly special.

Comment by foobarian 2 days ago

Also, how does one come upon these kinds of bits of industry lore? Asking for a daytrader friend. Ahem

Comment by cj 2 days ago

I've found the only stocks where I can personally be successful stock picking are companies I have some sort of unique relationship or experience with that is uncommon or unavailable to sophisticated investors or analysts.

E.g. you're an IT admin at Big Co overseeing software contracts. You can often get interesting insights by looking at things like how aggressive their sales reps are with end of quarter discounts (how desperate are they to meet numbers that quarter?). Or if you see a company completely dropping the ball within your org, but on CNBC you constantly hear how great the company is by pundits and analysts -- maybe you know something the pundits don't.

Often times the consensus view of a stock trails reality by a few weeks to a month - there's a lot of non-public but also non-confidential information that isn't readily available to analysts, but exposed to employees of customers/vendors/partners/end-users.

TLDR: when stock picking or day trading, pick companies within the niche of the world where you're a SME.

Comment by smallnix 2 days ago

TL;DR: inside trading /s

Comment by master_crab 2 days ago

Insider trading isn’t because he has non-public information. It’s based on trust/fiduciary responsibilities. It would be a hard sell to claim he betrayed anyone’s trust by trading on the performance he saw as a customer.

Comment by prepend 2 days ago

That’s not insider trading. It’s using nonpublic information, legally.

The example that my business school professor gave was that if you’re riding in an elevator with two executives and they talk about how they’re going to miss numbers and trade it’s not insider. If one of them tells you specifically, it is.

Comment by koolba 2 days ago

> The example that my business school professor gave was that if you’re riding in an elevator with two executives and they talk about how they’re going to miss numbers and trade it’s not insider. If one of them tells you specifically, it is.

That's why I always shout my inside information within earshot of my financial adviser but never actually place any trades myself.

Comment by stronglikedan 2 days ago

I also have to wonder how many customers actually signed a 10 year contract (which is extremely long for software of all things), unless I'm misunderstanding the comment.

Comment by financetechbro 2 days ago

Yeah 10yr long contracts aren’t the norm. Typically 3-5 years if it’s not on annual basis

Comment by apimade 2 days ago

They are for large infrastructure projects, especially at large organisations.

It takes companies 3-5 years for migration of these products, all of which are not CapEx funded and so get minimal resourcing without prioritisation by leadership.

Comment by ethbr1 2 days ago

Also, for anything with a 3-5 year implementation period, a longer contract aligns incentives.

The vendor isn't incentivized to fuck you over on renewal pricing as soon as the implementation is complete.

And because of the size of the contract, the customer has more leverage at renewal time.

Comment by taylodl 1 day ago

Not for Oracle's "everything but the kitchen sink" unlimited enterprise licenses for large (Fortune 200) organizations that, like a buffet, encourage you to "eat more" to get a "better value." Which works great until you true-up after 10 years and your annual license fee skyrockets. Which is of course Oracle's plan. But, what I've been seeing happen instead, and this is purely anecdotal, is these companies are getting tired of paying tens of millions of dollars per year to Oracle as CIOs are under ever-increasing pressure to cut costs. So they're wary of allowing themselves to fall further into Oracle's clutches and in fact they're looking at how to get themselves out of this situation.

TL;DR - these 10 year enterprise deals with Oracle allowed companies to save money in the short run and get predictable annual licensing fees. It also bought them time to get more of their application portfolio off of Oracle so when it comes time to re-up they'll negotiate those fees down.

Comment by OccamsMirror 2 days ago

Can confirm. There is zero good will towards Oracle in my organization, and AWS have positioned themselves in a way to push the enterprise team to using PostgreSQL on RDS, and helping development teams make the move with training and proservices. Oracle's greed is finally coming back to haunt them.

Comment by cameldrv 2 days ago

"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc?t=2300

Comment by Malic 1 day ago

Evergreen :)

Comment by adabyron 2 days ago

But how hard is it for your companies to migrate?

Is it worth the risk/work to move everything over? For a lot of enterprises, their needs to be a huge cost savings or risk reduction. Risk usually being the most important factor the bigger the company.

Comment by hylaride 2 days ago

I know of one largish bank moving away from Oracle middleware and RDMS. It's happening in pieces starting with low hanging fruit and for awhile the two will run in parallel (with the new data stores starting off as a comparison check to reconcile any bugs that crop up). Some early wins were account transaction logs that can go into better suited DBs, etc.

My understanding is that they were relatively lucky in that most of the hard parts are in the middleware layer and rarely the DB itself - the bank has been around since the 1800s, so has a huge mishmash of technologies that go from old IBM mainframes up to more modern cloud infra. So they're already kind of used to using middleware logic to stitch together various data sources.

The funny thing is that my contact there said the primary impetus is that they see the writing on the wall for a lot of their "legacy" Sun hardware, and figure if they're going to have to redo a lot of it, they may as well re-architect the rest. There'll still be oracle DBs running in the bank for a looong time, but there'll be less and less of it.

Comment by zamadatix 2 days ago

If it's the same for others as it was for us recently then very difficult... but the cost savings were so massive in terms of margin the risk was worth it. What taylodl mentioned about growing institutional knowledge and experience with Postgres in other apps first rang true as well. We are not 100% Oracle free, but we have migrated much away already.

In the larger discussion, I also wonder what their new contract rate is for these solutions. Even if 0% were migrating off, if 0% were migrating on then the net rate would still be decently negative because of natural business/app attrition.

Comment by lateforwork 2 days ago

> If 10% to 20% of those enterprises fail to renew for another 10 years

Think about how hard it would be for you to switch from iPhone to Android. Now multiply that by 10000. That's how hard it is to switch enterprise software.

Comment by collingreen 2 days ago

Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it

Comment by chasd00 2 days ago

> Now imagine you save $10M a year doing it

only after the move is complete and assuming it's as successful as you think it would be. What usually happens is the migration takes on a life of its own and is a multi-year if not multi-decade project. It sucks up so much money and effort that a business could be using to actually build their business vs migration to a different database. Meanwhile, the account execs of the old system know you're moving off of it so say good bye to any kind of contract discounts or special treatment during emergencies.

There's entire graveyards of failed enterprise system migrations. The most likely outcome is eventually a compromise has to be made and now you have two systems to maintain and license, the legacy one, and the new one. With the promise of eventually getting off the old one but it never happens.

I'm on a project with a client that has 24 ERPs across their enterprise around the globe from acquisitions. Half of them are ERPs that were meant to replace another one but the transition was never completed. A big part of this project is integrating all of their sales pipelines, analytics, and history into, yet another, enterprise system.

Comment by collingreen 2 days ago

That's absolutely true. Is also true for most projects in general though so pretty standard.

Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e 2 days ago

It’s rarely that clean. Sure, there is the immediate sticker price, but you have to factor in the migration costs as well. Depending on how deep the integration goes, it could take years of effort. All of which is going to take political capital to get people to migrate perfectly working systems without any operational gain. Plus you have the old guard who actively fight you-maybe they have spent their career in Oracle and that is all they know.

Even if you do move mountains and make it happen, suddenly any outages after the transition become your fault. “This never happened on the old system.”

Comment by mystifyingpoi 2 days ago

True words. I've seen this technique used to force people to think realistically. It goes like this (example):

- Is it possible for a 3 person team to manage 1000 distinct Kubernetes clusters?

- No way in hell!

- What if we hypothetically pay you $2M salary each?

- Well, let me think about it, we could figure this out...

Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e 2 days ago

How is that realistic? If you offer me insane money, I will of course bluster that I can do the impossible. When I inevitably fail, I still have a pocket full of cash.

Comment by chasd00 2 days ago

It's not realistic, money doesn't make hard things easy. Paying someone more doesn't make them more capable, at best it an incentive to work longer/harder. That doesn't make them more capable either, it just makes them work more. If someone asked me to swim the English Channel I'd say no because i can't do it. If someone offered me $2M to do it i would still say no. Let's say i said "yes, i'll figure something out.", well i would still drown or need to be rescued even after being paid $2m.

Comment by tracerbulletx 2 days ago

Just write Kubernetes for Kubernetes to manage the kubernetes. duh

That's a joke. but unironically you could manage 1000 Kubernetes clusters with automation. why not?

Comment by mystifyingpoi 1 day ago

You are right, that's exactly my point. I was in such situation multiple times. People will say "it's impossible" but they actually mean "it's impossible given my motivation connected to money, time I could be given, freedom to experiment without boss looking at the calendar, and probably a bunch of other things". When the same people are given sudden motivation kick (even as a hypothetical) they start to actually think. Maybe they'll figure out that it's impossible anyway and won't do it for a $100M. Myself, I'd immediately start to think how to do it.

Comment by Lapsa 1 day ago

use ChatGPT for Kubernetes

Comment by sharpy 2 days ago

Once upon a time, our team was paying Oracle $6 million a year in DB licenses alone. We ended up building our own bespoke storage solution.

Comment by crackez 2 days ago

That's about how much it cost my company to move the flagship off of z/OS. That kept the language (Cobol) and DB2 intact (moved to DB2LUW); just a new build target basically.

It took like 5 or 6 years and that $10M represents the cost of only 10 months of operations on Z.

Comment by Invictus0 2 days ago

Now imagine the switch is going to cost you $100M in downtime and change consultants, if it succeeds at all, and your new provider will up the price in a few years time anyway.

Comment by PunchyHamster 2 days ago

Then just don't migrate to MS SQL but to Postgres

Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e 2 days ago

Big enterprise businesses want support contracts for someone to blame. Yes, you can find Postgres support, but switching to a different devil is the far more common option.

Comment by Invictus0 2 days ago

"just"

Comment by mystifyingpoi 2 days ago

It's not really going to benefit ME anything. It will benefit my employer this amount. I might get an extra bonus for successful migration, but it's peanuts compared to the savings.

So in such situation, I'd be tempted to actively oppose this initiative.

Comment by prepend 2 days ago

Now imagine you risk breaking $100M in order to save $10M.

Comment by pfortuny 2 days ago

Imagine you think you save… You only save after you have paid…

Comment by jt2190 2 days ago

Why would any Enterprise Software vendor leave $10M on the table?

Comment by arjie 2 days ago

Just not that straightforward in practice. You have all of these product lines that people are building that you're hoping will grow the business. They all depend on your backend stuff that's just an implementation detail. You have to somehow convince everyone across the org to stall their product development to perform a "migrate to Postgres" thing? It's not going to be easy.

There was a recent big company that posted on Twitter about "shutting down our last Oracle server" and that was the last thing in a multi-year process or something like that.

Coordination is sometimes harder than the technology itself.

Comment by jt2190 2 days ago

The assertion was that switching vendors would save $10M. I asked why the new vendor would forego $10M that the old vendor was able to collect. Are you saying that the new vendor has to offer this discount otherwise there’s no incentive to migrate? (I agree that migrating is very difficult politically.)

Comment by arjie 2 days ago

So you did, I did not pick up that you meant peer vendors which is pretty obvious on re-reading. I believed you were saying that Enterprise Vendors (who are often Oracle customers) would jump to save $10m. But that wasn't what your question was.

Comment by esafak 2 days ago

Because vendors are not fungible in the eyes of the buyer.

Comment by boringg 2 days ago

Lack of capability, mismanagement, misinformation to name a few

Comment by anal_reactor 2 days ago

Once technologies mature enough, they converge to roughly the same set of features. Case in point: I was an avid Windows user, but then decided to switch to Linux. While it was problematic, it was much less so than I had anticipated.

Imagine switching between Firefox and Chrome. Between Ford and Toyota. Between Seagate and Western Digital. Between USB-C and Lightning.

Comment by mbesto 2 days ago

Oracle's growth and value is in SaaS apps (NetSuite) and their cloud offering, not DB licensing. The economic impact of enterprises moving off Oracle DB is massively overstated here.

Comment by kev009 2 days ago

Probably nobody here is an Oracle fan but the miss on sentiment like this is you could have written the same comment minus OpenAI 10 and maybe even 20 years ago.

Comment by jl6 2 days ago

Definitely true, but a lot of Oracle sites are that way because of decisions made decades ago. Opportunities to re-architect are rare. But when those opportunities do come along, nobody is choosing Oracle RDBMS for their future state.

What I do see is orgs choosing other Oracle apps like ERP which sneak the Oracle RDBMS in as part of the bundle.

Anyone using Oracle purely as a database is going to migrate to PostgreSQL eventually, but there are a lot of orgs where the database is just one part of a wider Oracle ecosystem with world-class vendor lock-in features.

Comment by kev009 2 days ago

They have some funny accounting like Google and Microsoft where everything is "cloud" but the revenue streams are certainly diversified from straight Oracle DB such that PostgreSQL equivalence or superiority does not affect the viability of the company or the stock price. Communities like this often over index technical and personal opinion with reality.

I worked at a midsize that was core internet infra, where we had an in house OS and ODM hardware and FOSS DBAs. The one Oracle DB and Oracle HW was slipped in the door through finance for ERP as you say. Although I suspect that would be cloud hosted these days.

Comment by justapassenger 2 days ago

Oracle has been selling large enterprise contracts for many decades and those enterprises were looking to migrate off Oracle since then too (I've been working on a project like that almost 20 years ago, at my first real job).

Comment by bdangubic 2 days ago

I read very similar comments … 10-15 years ago

Comment by websiteapi 2 days ago

Sources for any of these claims?

Comment by moralestapia 2 days ago

>In business since 1977.

>Market cap of half a trillion.

>Somehow they're "in trouble".

Mega LMAO.

Comment by SvenL 2 days ago

There are enough examples which one might mention here: Nokia, MySpace, Yahoo, Kodac, AOL, Blockbuster, toys‘r‘us … all ones big. Yes, oracle might not vanish, but it definitely needs some change.

Comment by moralestapia 2 days ago

???

None of those were in business since 1977 (w/ the exception of Nokia, which I would argue is still a successful company today. I wouldn't put it on that list).

None of those were ever valued (even close to) half a trillion, even adjusting for inflation.

Comment by SvenL 2 days ago

Your first point is correct, they are not that old. And while Nokia is still a company, it does not have the market power it once had. And that's what I meant with it might not vanish - Oracle will still be a company. Still, I think age is not really a good metric for success.

Your second point is right on the spot! Its valued. By what? By others, right? Somebody says a company has a value, which might not reflect its worth. As mentioned by some other commenters, Oracle has a lot of competition. Good competition. That's why I wrote it needs to change in order to stay competitive.

Comment by moralestapia 2 days ago

>Its valued. By what? By others, right? Somebody says a company has a value, which might not reflect its worth.

Is this news to anyone in here?

Comment by rachr 2 days ago

It seems fitting. They destroyed Sun, destroyed Java, destroyed any developer or customer goodwill...and now they are destroying themselves.

Comment by orochimaaru 2 days ago

Java is one thing they did right. Most enterprises are looking to move away from Oracle. I think there will be niche cases where rewrites don’t make sense. But for one of the big telecom providers I work for - the decision was made in 2020 to move off of Oracle. It’s not a flash cut but we’ve significantly reduced reliance. There are some critical apps that are still on it, but those are capped in maintenance mode until their replacements are ready.

Comment by vips7L 2 days ago

Java is in the best shape it's ever been in. Jdk development and performance are through the roof and the developer experiences gets better with every release.

Comment by davey48016 2 days ago

Java's in great shape now, but the period between when Oracle bought Sun (~2010) and about 2017 wasn't great, and there was a lot of concern about Java's future. I think most people who moved away from Java then haven't looked back.

Comment by vips7L 2 days ago

I believe that is mostly due to Sun's stagnation and lack of funding. Oracle released Java 7 in 2011 and Java 8 in 2014, which is arguably the start of modernizing Java.

Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e 2 days ago

I assumed it was Kotlin and/or Android. Oracle otherwise seemed fine to treat Java like IE6. It was only as alternatives (rise of Go, Rust, Clojure, etc) increasingly made the language look bad that really started to push development.

Comment by vips7L 2 days ago

I don't think Oracle/OpenJdk really cares about Kotlin. It's usage is still minuscule compared to Java the language, and you're still using Java the platform by using it. I'm not sure they're really concerned about Rust either because it doesn't fill the same use cases. Go might be a concern, but who knows. I personally find Go the language to be worse then Java the language.

Comment by jeffbee 2 days ago

The idea that Java has been destroyed is pretty wild. I don't see how that belief could survive contact with the real world.

Comment by bigmutant 2 days ago

Pretty common attitude from folks who have never worked in one of the BigTech companies where Java rules (Amazon being a prime example). Since they never encounter Java in the "SF-style Startup" world, they assume that it must be dead. Meanwhile hundreds-of-thousands of Engineers deal with hundreds-of-millions (billions?) of lines of Java every day

Comment by collingreen 2 days ago

My assumption is the poster wants to imply Oracle destroyed the good will and interest for people to start new Java projects after the licensing changes and subsequent shakedown. Java clearly still runs all over the place and will for a while (although plenty of people trying to keep java but get away from oracle).

Comment by manphone 2 days ago

The Java goodwill is mostly gone and I see zero new orgs trying it so while Java is still alive and well the mindshare has definitely been squandered given the capability that Java has.

Comment by jeffbee 2 days ago

Java is one of the giants and there are tons of existing and new projects that use it. Hotspot is the choice for high performance programs. Approaching its performance even with C++ requires a dedicated team of experts. Look at QuestDB, or Netflix, as current examples of projects choosing Java.

The languages that get a lot of airtime on HN like Rust, Go, and OCaml are way down in a tier of languages that get a lot of blog posts but enjoy relatively little traction in reality.

Comment by haberman 2 days ago

> Hotspot is the choice for high performance programs. Approaching its performance even with C++ requires a dedicated team of experts.

It's very surprising to hear you say this, as it's so contrary to my experience.

From the smallest programs (Computer Language Benchmarks Game) to pretty big programs (web browsers), from low-level programs (OS kernels) to high-level programs (GUI Applications), from short-lived programs (command-line utilities) to long-lived programs (database servers), it's hard to think of a single segment where even average Java programs will out-perform average C, C++, or Rust programs.

I hadn't heard of QuestDB before, but it sounds like it's written in zero-GC Java using manual memory management. That's pretty unusual for Java, and would require a team of experts to pull off, I'd think. It also sounds like it drops to C++ and Rust for performance-critical tasks.

Comment by jeffbee 2 days ago

It's a statement of my experience in the performance achieved in practice by real developers who lack dedicated language support teams. And even the ones who enjoy dedicated language support teams. I could point to gRPC. gRPC-Java is slapping gRPC-C++ sideways. Why is that? Because when a codebase is increasingly complex, the C-style lifetime management becomes too difficult for developers to ponder, and they revert to relying on the slower features of the language platform, like reference counting smart pointers.

I think hybrid implementations, where a project enjoys the beneficial aspects of the language runtime at large, but delegates small, critical functions to other languages, makes sense. That keeps the C, C++, or Rust stuff contained to boundaries that are ponderable and doesn't let those language platforms dictate the overall architecture of the program.

Comment by ahefner 2 days ago

If gRPC overhead is critical to your system, you've probably already lost the plot on performance in your overall architecture.

You make a fair point about smart pointers, and median "modern C++" practices with STL data structures are unimpressive performance-wise compared to tuned custom data structures, but I can't imagine that idiomatic Java with GC overhead on top is any better.

Comment by dangus 2 days ago

The languages that get a lot of airtime on HN are the ones the young people will just use by default.

Hotspot is the current choice for high performance programs, but is Rust lower performance in some way or are the only downsides related to its younger age?

It’s perhaps useful look at what languages brand new projects are being started with rather than just looking at what languages large established companies like Netflix are choosing.

Comment by kakacik 2 days ago

Depends where you are, in startup world definitely yes. Elsewhere, not so much.

Companies couldn't care less about the underlying platform or language, they want reliability, stability and tons of easy to find people who can work with it from Day1. Java delivers all that, and will keep delivering for upcoming decades. Big businesses and big money love this (or hate the least out of IT stacks).

Comment by jeffbee 2 days ago

Rust is not inherently slower but then again neither are C and C++, but in practice all of those tend to be less efficient than realistic Java systems. Rust is displacing C in contexts where Rust's less than amazing performance are not noticeable in contrast to C's also-not-amazing level of performance. And I also think there is a cognitive bias under which a developer will reach for Rust to supplant a legacy C program, because that developer reflexively dislikes managed language runtimes.

Comment by ecshafer 2 days ago

The fact of the matter is that you read through a lot of these start up blogs on how they scaled X technology to some amazing number like 1000 users a day or whatever. But your average Java Spring app on Postgres is doing some far heavier workloads.

Comment by TuxSH 2 days ago

Go is a bad example since it's ubiquitous in the Kubernetes world, in particular with k8s "operators" (for a variety of reasons)

Comment by stronglikedan 2 days ago

new orgs chase the shiny new things. nothing new there

Comment by dangus 2 days ago

And then those new orgs become established orgs and some old orgs decline.

It’s not even really a “chase,” it’s a question of “if I’m building something new, what am I choosing?”

Eventually that momentum can turn into the old thing being worth actively removing.

Comment by snarf21 2 days ago

To be fair, Oracle acquired Java (via Sun) specifically so they could sue Google for billions. They may not have killed Java but it wasn't altruism.

Comment by swarnie 2 days ago

I still have Java on just over 1k enterprise devices, its dead?

Comment by vkou 2 days ago

Java's not gone anywhere, but it's been years since I've interviewed anyone who has made it their language of choice. Developer sentiment for it isn't exactly great.

A decade ago, a good ~80% of applicants chose to use it or C#.

I personally don't have any issues with working with it, but nobody's learning it outside of work.

On the other hand, it is quite easy to learn, so there's that going for it.

Comment by voakbasda 2 days ago

More like a zombie. It is still shuffling along, but the life left it long ago.

Comment by swarnie 2 days ago

I'm going to take this as the HN effect, if something isn't doing 500% a year its dead.

Comment by wiseowise 2 days ago

Destroyed Java? What are you even on, lol? Oracle resurrected Java.

Comment by 2 days ago

Comment by koolba 2 days ago

If I'm reading the chart correctly, the current stock price of ORCL is 15% below the price before they announced the OpenAI deal in September. 40% down from the peak is one thing, but I see the net v.s. before the craziness as a better indicator of what's going on.

Comment by wrathofmonads 2 days ago

Oracle’s massive bet on OpenAI might be financially risky, but its investments in AI farms could accelerate Java’s evolution for AI. While Python dominates training, inference is where the money is. Projects like OpenJDK Babylon hint at a future where the JVM becomes a serious player in AI inference.

https://openjdk.org/projects/babylon/articles/auto-diff

Comment by deepriverfish 2 days ago

I've never heard good things about Oracle, I don't understand how people keep using their products.

Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e 2 days ago

It is legacy decisions going back decades. Thirty years ago, you did not have a wealth of database alternatives. You picked Oracle and built the business around it. More and more business processes accumulate around the data store, all using some proprietary Oracle extensions. Eventually, the thought of disentangling the dependency is so daunting you are locked in forever until an existential risk materializes.

Comment by prepend 2 days ago

In 1998 I worked for a small nasdaq company that had a successful software as a service product that was growing quickly.

We used Clarion and MSSQL7 on windows because it was cheap. Since we started making real money, some figured we could finally afford Oracle and Sun (back when they were different).

I was a junior so my job was to evaluate the migration of one of our sql servers to oracle to test it out. I talks with the Oracle team who helps people plan purchases. They took my transaction level (~100M/year) and size (1-2GB/year) and came back with $1M for the system. This replaced a functioning $10k server. And we had maybe a dozen that would have to eventually move.

When I told them the current server was $10k, they revised their estimate to $100k. I recommended we not move.

I left the company a little while later and I think they ended up buying lots of Oracle.

Companies have money and don’t mind spending on useless stuff.

Comment by rurp 2 days ago

A few years ago I had the head of a devops team at a large company say that the project I was working on should switch from postgres to a "real" enterprise database like oracle. This happened while we were having zero issues with postgres, it was a perfect fit for our case, and it wasn't even relevant to the conversation. He just saw that's what we were using and reflexively thought that of course we should use Oracle.

It blew my mind at the time. Oracle is so widely hated among developers, entirely justifiably, that this guy's take really shocked me. I've literally never heard another glowing recommendation for that company before or since.

Comment by grandiego 2 days ago

In my experience, it is from technical management in medium/big companies you'll listen some good things about Oracle as a database product (regardless of its actual merits), like stability, scalability, compliance checks, and other "enterprisy" features (like database encryption). Also, it is offered as a default database option for many enterprise applications from their vendors. While many people points to Postgresql as "the alternative", in many places outside USA its commercial support is not available, or too limited. Other commercial alternatives (like MSSQL) have the (more or less) the same bad reputation regarding licensing costs.

Comment by on_the_train 2 days ago

My old boss literally said they don't trust other databases. I tried to push for postgres. But they insisted only oracle is professional. Our software only worked with an oracle backend. I no longer work there.

Comment by ElectricalUnion 2 days ago

Isn't the whole "thing" about JPA (and all other ORMs ever) that you're supposed to "use it" instead of directly doing well optimized native queries on your database so that you can jump ship if the database provider turns out to be shit?

Comment by on_the_train 2 days ago

Nah everything we did was hand crafted for their specific db.

It was particularly bad because it was a very small family business with equally small customers. And they all had to buy oracle licenses first, which made us insanely expensive without making money lol.

Fun in hindsight

Comment by redox99 2 days ago

Oracle Cloud has really good price and many locations. That's why I use it.

Comment by ElectricalUnion 2 days ago

On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, on my region, "Oracle Database - Base Database Service" (single node database) costs the same as a much more powerful cluster of managed "Database with PostgreSQL", or a managed cluster of "MySQL HeatWave".

Under most circumstances, you should still pick non-oracle-DB on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Comment by redox99 2 days ago

I just use instances, nothing proprietary from them

Comment by knallfrosch 2 days ago

Then it's probably business requirements.

Single-sign on, in-person support, certificated software, offering training courses to onboard people, undeletable logs, help with upgrading major versions..

All from a single vendor so you can pick up the phone, yell "fix it" and go on with your day.

Comment by cyanydeez 2 days ago

>go on with your day

Unless they decide to ~~extort~~audit you.

Comment by snarfy 2 days ago

government contracts

Comment by cmiles8 2 days ago

Oracle bet the farm on AI, and that’s starting to look like a really bad idea. Commentary about delaying new data center buildouts for AI is freaking out the markets today that the bubble burst is starting. Credit default swap values are also now heavily leaning towards a bunch of AI investments going bust.

Comment by cyanydeez 2 days ago

Well, lets be fair here. Oracle is a predatory company that extorts its customers for the highest price. Adopters of AI in the enterprise are going to be building such shitty and shoddy products using AI that they'll need huge support contracts just to keep these poorly made AI products alive.

Adding AI to the oracle infrastructure cancer will certainly a boon to it's business model. Sure it might kill 10-20% of it's customers, but if it can become a pure AI parasitic play and spread it's seed, it's going to grow.

People dont realize that capitalism is size agnostic: As long as you can sell 1 boner pill for $1 million, you only need one customer rather than say 1 million pills for 1$. And, isn't it easier to keep one customer happier if they pay your bills?

Comment by PeterStuer 2 days ago

EU contracts for SAP over Oracle would be so much easier if SAP would wean themselves of US cloud dependency.

Comment by lousken 2 days ago

is sap that much better as a product?

Comment by PeterStuer 19 hours ago

Not at all. But in terms of EU sovereignty it could be.

Comment by antoniuschan99 2 days ago

Will be interesting. Also the Paramount Skydance takeover bid is still pending. Paramount is ~15 billion market cap and the deal for Warner is ~77 billion.

Comment by chickensong 2 days ago

This particular flavor of schadenfreude is scrumptious.

Comment by jauntywundrkind 2 days ago

I wonder if Oracle is going to be the only ARM less hyperscaler, after pulling out of their Ampere investment.

Comment by 1970-01-01 2 days ago

Tip: Ask your AI to design their DCs so that they can be easily converted into low income apartments. When you hear the bubble popping sound, it just means you're ready to pivot into the rental business.

Comment by paulpauper 2 days ago

This is such fake news. Oracle was paid $300 billion by Open Ai to develop server infrastructure, not that it's betting $300 billion on Open AI. The headline gets it 180 degrees backwards. That is why Oracle stock surged so much a few months ago. Oracle stock is still up 15% this year.

Comment by robocat 2 days ago

Debt markets are indicating that the OpenAI contracts are high risk. Debt markets analyse the risks carefully and mostly ignore fake news. Oracle is borrowing and betting billions, and the markets are saying that their bets are risky.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstocks/oracle-stock-slump...

Comment by tim333 1 day ago

1.44% to insure the bonds for five years looks quite modestly risky. You read Ed Zitron or many skeptics here and you get the impression that it's all definitely going to crash within five years, not a 1.44% chance.

Comment by Lapsa 1 day ago

and it's up infinite% since the inception!