The fact is that they have not grown their top line for five years(1), 70% of their business is in a dying sector and they have opted to cut R&D spending in favor of stock buybacks and dividend payouts for years(2).
I don't see how they can change course; their investors keep asking for dividends while the bulk of their competitors are either privately owned or public with strong founder/owners; point being Oracles competitors are controlled by investors that want R&D spending, Oracle is not, and Oracle sorely needs R&D to build a portfolio that'll keep them from being yet another leveraged buy-out..
(1) https://ycharts.com/companies/ORCL/revenues
(2) http://marketrealist.com/2016/12/oracles-share-buybacks-dividend-trend-will-run-2017/And the jury certainly is out on Oracle. Right now Oracle is a company where great software goes to die. All signs point to them eventually ending up like Yahoo. It'll take a while, but the handwriting is already on the wall.
(*within reason)
I've been at a couple of larger than Oracle-sized organizations that paid quite well and didn't have a lot of 'management oversight'....which I am taking to mean, roughly, 'top-down, heavy-handed management'.
>Stop checking our code for vulnerabilities
That's not the reaction from a company that's "grown up". It's a sign of a company that still has growing up to do.
Gosling is complaining about about pay and management oversight.
Has anyone wonder if overpay and no oversight is what contributed to Sun's failure.
Speaking as an insider, I can say with 100% certainty it was.
Sun had this hardware business that was printing money and then the music stopped.
I wonder if Google might suffer a similar fate like Sun. As soon as ad-revenue slows down, will they need to grow up and be managed like a real company by putting restrictions on pay and enforce management oversight.