It's completely absurd that anyone would choose IBM or Oracle, but having heard first hand the sales pitch that IBM cloud give you I understand it a bit given that a lot of people with decision-making power don't have enough tech expertise to detect nonsense and FUD when they hear it.

In my case, the guy spent half the pitch flat out lying to me about AWS and how Amazon charges etc. (sample lie "They basically don't let you transfer any data out once it's in the cloud"). I let him go for quite a while before I revealed that I actually know what I'm talking about and calling out his bs ("Gee that's pretty weird because I host quite a few servers in AWS and I'm able to get data from them just fine. I wonder how that works?")

> They basically don't let you transfer any data out once it's in the cloud"

And how much does transferring 1PB of your data from AWS to say GCP cost, with those outrageous egress costs?

That's how they stop you.

It's a name recognition thing. I've seen cases where people in decision-making positions are like "IBM? They're big and have been around for a while - they won't fuck this up."

Spoiler: they did.

Another recent thread provides one good reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17627093

Are kickbacks a thing? It wouldn't surprise me Oracle and IBM nurtured that or similar behaviour, massaging client's decision makers like that.

Yeah... from an engineer’s POV or a publicly-visible commercial POV it makes no sense. Something fishy is going on for Oracle to even get a seat at this table with their sorry excuse for a cloud.

15 years ago I worked with Oracle and guys from Oracle on a marketing side (they contracted me to help out with their marketing side), I definitely got that vibe. Years later, there was this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc And it kind of all makes sense.