Trump’s approval rating is around 30%, yet that doesn’t diminish his presidential powers. Most leaders would see such historically low numbers as a signal to adjust course - but not Trump. His worldview is impervious to external feedback: if 70% disagree, then 70% must be wrong. That’s the hallmark of a narcissist.
This resonates with me and identifies my disdain for formal education. Everything I know, actually know, I've learned through self-education and working from first principles. I find it helpful to circle back and approach it through formal education to ensure I didn't miss anything and if I did, I repeat the self-education approach for that item. The upshot is I know what I know very well, but the downside is it can take me a lot longer than most to learn it.
I've often wondered whether there's a "happy medium" that would allow me to learn faster, but I haven't found it after decades of searching.
Winston Churchill one quipped 'You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they’ve tried everything else.' I suppose that also applies to managing their societal affairs as well. The upside to falling so far behind the industrial world? There are plenty of proven solutions to copy to which they'll loudly proclaim as their own stroke of genius.
Trump blaming Rob Reiner's murder on 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' is absurd. TDS is what conservatives accuse liberals of - and Reiner was a liberal. If politics were involved, it’d be someone who loves Trump. Maybe Trump doesn’t even know what TDS means?
I think Trump is arguing that Reiner by criticizing Trump, in spite of his "greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us" pissed off people enough to get killed. Nuts.
Not only has the price of goods gone up because of tariffs, but utility bills are climbing fast, grocery costs continue to surge, and health care premiums are skyrocketing. People have less money left for Christmas, and each dollar they do have buys far less than last year. I expect retail to take a brutal hit this season - and things will likely worsen in Q1 2026.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Kodak was founded in 1892. I think Oracle is going to go the way of HP. Look at HP over the past 10 years and what it had been in the 10 year period leading up to that. Sure, HP is still a company with $50+ billion in revenue, which actually matches where Oracle is today, but they had been a company with $100+ billion in revenue - and that's before adjusting for inflation.
So while it's hard to call a company with $50+ billion in revenue a failure, they're not nearly what they once were. That's the direction I see Oracle going.
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.
They always say "more research is needed", overlooking the extensive research already done. At concentrations required for antimicrobial effects, chlorine dioxide poses serious toxicity risks - endangering the patient rather than helping them. You’d think these same people would have been dismissed after pushing ivermectin during COVID, but here we are.
They’re going to milk this market for all it’s worth. The reason they’re still around is because they have money and the people around them keep enabling them because money.
I sometimes wonder what fraction of the peddlers of this nonsense know exactly what they’re doing but have no problem raking in the cash. Close to 100%? I feel the same about the elected politicians.
On more than one occasion I’ve thought it would be nice to retire wealthy by milking the easy money that seems to endlessly flow, but then I realize I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror if I did that.
I can respect this view, but at the same time, infectious diseases are public problems by nature. I am skeptical state coercion would work (didn't even work in China), but I don't think a laissez faire attitude on the cultural level is rational. We should "pressure" people to be vaccinated in the same way we pressure people to not do other dangerous things!
Hah! I worked with some men who were taking ivermectin, no amount of reasoning could talk them out of it because Fauci was in the "deep state". One of them became very ill, sadly.
There's another reason to use cloud: to determine your capacity and actual traffic patterns so you have the information you need to provision your physical server properly. That also allows you to move and implement fast with an eye toward bringing the compute back on-prem.
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