AWS got a lot of startups and tech savvy companies (like Netflix). If I were Oracle I would target existing customers, who generally are not the tech savvy darlings (think Procter & Gamble, health companies, food companies, banks...) who can now tell their board their on-site Oracle licences have been moved to the cloud.
It's a market Oracle is uniquely qualified to pursue because they already have the sales operation and contacts in place. Now whether they are able to execute is why we are eating the popcorn and watching. The inside sales model is the 20th century sales model after all.
Oracle allows licensing on VMware on a hypervisor level. When VMware allowed you to vMotion between hosts in a vSphere HA cluster, Oracle would require that you license all the hosts in the cluster because the Oracle VMs might land on any of those hosts in a failover situation. When cross-cluster vMotion came with 5.1, the customer was told that they must license every host attached to that vCenter instance, forcing the customer to purchase and implement another vCenter strictly for Oracle.
And now, with vSphere 6, comes cross-vCenter vMotion. You can guess where that conversation with Oracle went. Customer bought an Oracle Enterprise license, which is presumably what the sales rep had in mind the whole time.
Microsoft has a lot of the same kind of sales operation and contacts, and they have a suite of cloud infrastructure that's on par with AWS.
You mean what IBM is doing/has done? Oracle doesn't know how to sell to those people, it knows how to EXTORT those people. Most people I know hate Oracle with a passion as a business, and only continue to do business with them out of obligation.
Sure, but having a compelling story about compute and having a massive advantage in knowledge of how to sell to the exact kinds of enterprises that haven't already made their big transition to the cloud yet isn't a bad combination to have if you want to establish a nice firm place in cloud. from which you can expand and develop what you need to bite off other parts of the market.
They aren't going to follow the same path as AWS, both because they aren't, as a corporation, oriented toward that path and because the low-hanging fruit you can pick up along that path has already been picked up by AWS.