A friend met with Oracle salesdroids (his company has spent a few million with them in the last few years).
They told him everything is oriented towards AI, to the point that otherwise profitable software is not being updated and development has stopped on anything new.
Oracle has a lot of niche solutions and the one my friend’s corporation uses is profitable but not on the AI path, so it is being put into maintenance mode.
That’s makes sense in its way, if they’re convinced and absolutely certain that’s the future. By analogy, I bet there were some carriage manufacturers who bet the farm on internal combustion engines when horse drawn carriages were still popular. It would seem insane at the time for them to give up their reliable business for something risky and unknown. However, in retrospect it would seem like bad business to throw resources after dead-end product lines, even if they’re valuable, because each dollar not advancing their automobile R&D was a dollar wasted on legacy stuff.
I’m not saying AI is the next internal combustion engine. If Oracle is certain it is, though, then that sounds like a more rational move.
> However, in retrospect it would seem like bad business to throw resources after dead-end product lines, even if they’re valuable, because each dollar not advancing their automobile R&D was a dollar wasted on legacy stuff.
If each dollar you throw at dead-end product lines returns $1.20, that gives you more to spend on R&D for the new hotness. Shutting down the old business doesn't maximize spending on new R&D.
Now it's different when there's a conflict over resources. . However, in retrospect it would seem like bad business to throw resources after dead-end product lines, even if they’re valuable, because each dollar not advancing their automobile R&D was a dollar wasted on legacy stuff. If we need kstrauser to keep the old business running and we also need kstrauser to have effective R&D for the new business, hard choices are ahead. For carriage makers, manufacturing facilities would be the big resource issue; maybe you need to stop production of carriages to start working on horseless carriages because they're built in the same facility and can't share and a second location would be too costly.
I don't think the facility argument applies to Oracle. And probably not the key person argument either; line of business apps and AI are pretty different and I wouldn't expect a top person in one to be a top person in the other (although they might be).
That's a valid point, and to be clear, I'm not claiming Oracle's making a wise choice. Among other business risks with the plan is that customers who've been burned by Oracle abandoning the specific product line they needed might not be quick to start using Oracle for all their AI stuff. Like I don't think anyone likes using Oracle's products, and if you're starting your company's AI plan from scratch, that might be an excellent time to consider not-Oracle as your provider/partner/contractor/whatever.
However, if your dead-end investment has a 20% ROR, and you think your AI investment will have a 1000% ROR, you'd kinda be foolish not to throw every possible resource at the new venture. I'd bet that a lot of the people maintaining Product A could be switched to the AI project. It's going to need lots of people supporting the networking, CRUD APIs for various things, sales, tech support, legal, etc. The product itself will be different, but much of the underlying support might look the same between the two. Why "waste" someone maintaining Product A's CI/CD pipeline when they could be helping the AI project move faster?
And again, I'm not arguing that they're right. It's more that if they're completely convinced that this is the future of their company, then that could be a rational, defensible decision. There's a lot of "ifs" in all this, to be sure. And in any case, don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
Absolutely unhinged behavior. If orcl goes nuts over chatbots and dies that will make this strange and profoundly icky era in tech all worth it.
The good bits will be sold off. Some of their products are very valuable, even if you don't like them.
That's a good thing. While Oracle's software has it's ups and downs, the worst thing about Oracle has always been Oracle.
Yeah I don't dispute they have (had?) successful products. Just saying for a company to abandon successful products in favor of a wildly costly gamble is insane. To even arrive at the point where it seems like a "tradeoff" is delusional thinking--like, "we're going to stop supporting this successful product because the future value of this other thing is greater"... what? They've contorted themselves into believing that the future value that product is irrelevant, and all their customers whose trust they're burning are irrelevant, because... chatbots?
It seems reckless and unnecessary even if the gamble were 100% a sure thing, which no gamble ever is.
Even if AI is a game changer, it doesn't mean that your business model will have a role in it.
Time to copy&improve the niche solution.
You can use AI to eliminate Oracle from your org's dependencies.
In a roundabout way, AI may just eliminate Oracle from my org's dependencies
Anecdote time; startup I worked for was bought by Oracle in 2015
Oracle was all in on spinning up a less corporate bubble that felt like the startup zeitgeist; we had Slack while Oracle legacy units had in house XMPP
Management was dumping everything into data center and cloud growth and trying to catch up
I stayed for a couple years to help my team migrate and prepare for release the product Oracle bought the startup for. Not long but long enough to get a sense of the internal story and driving themes
No doubt in my mind this is Oracle trying to get ahead in this hype cycle. By 2017 upper management did nothing but lament how far behind Oracle was.
Cut n run from everything early this time to go all in on new meme is exactly the kind of choice Larry would make given constant anxiety on display about missing the cloud bubble.
That's rational. Oracle has bet the farm on AI, if they don't make it work they will fail.
It doesn't seem rational to me that such a big company wouldn't prefer to diversify.
Once they made the loans they can only pay back if AI works out, no, it's completely rational to put all of their effort into making AI work out.
Either that, or to declare bankruptcy earlier to get better terms.