See rst's comment. $ORCL doesn't sell "technology". It sell's a "Business Solution".

// Which in itself is generally a good strategy for most startups to emulate.

This is effective in the short term, yes. But "businessmen" do not create the future, they sell (or buy) the present. And the people creating the future are almost entirely aligned against the Oracle ecosystem.

The next generation of business leaders for most companies is inthe same meetings with Oracle's salespeople. They will pick "solutions" for business over their IT staff's opinion. Oracle thinks like them, the IT staff doesn't.

But most people don't want technology. I don't want a website or any complicated stuff - I want to communicate with and see what my friends are doing (facebook). I don't need an amzingly clustered spider and ranking engine, I just want to find sutff (google). I don't want to talk about feeds and speeds, I just want a computer that "works" (apple). I don't want to talk with some IT Nerd about how Open Source software is superior and about technological lock-in, I just want a positive ROI and want to grow my business (Oracle).

// Oh - and HN's favourite -- I just want to play Bingo with my students.

Last I heard though, Oracle was generating mountains of spare cash. The sort of profits they can lay their hands on can buy a lot of Next Big Things to let others take the initial risk and then sell out to Oracle when they're more established.

(Which, from what I understand, isn't far from what Google has done, with the bulk of non-search success having been from acquisitions.)

Didn't we have a fairly decent conversation regarding this idea less than a day ago, "Selling pickaxes during a gold rush"? [1]

I agree, however this is only a short term strategy. Soon, the gold rush will be over and there will be an abundance of pickaxes on the second hand market. Case in point, so called "dark fiber", or the unused infrastructure expansions of the early dot-com bubble.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2183207

Oracle doesn't sell technology. They sell solutions to {accounting, erp, mrp, etc} problems. Technology is just how they do it, the people buying it (and me, if I were buying oracle) don't care in the least about the technology.

Do you care about the fuel injectors in your car? What about the magnetron in your microwave?

I don't care because they don't seem like details I need to worry about — but if all the mechanics or microwave repairmen said the one I had was a terrible choice, I might care.

Except that Oracle is a platform company. As a CIO you are buying into a platform on top of which your in-house developers, or overpaid consultants, will be building a solution. ERP platforms are not Bingo Card Creator.

Well, okay. but for a CEO the business comes first, developer comfort second. If it can't meet business objectives (which oracle certainly can) it doesn't matter how much developers love it.

Developer comfort is the difference between being woefully understaffed, and having a quality team supporting your business objectives.

If productivity drops, or you suddenly only have 50% of your development staff because management bought an inferior product that developers hate, I don't see how that helps the business?

Wow, I guess I'm the naive techno-utopian of HN.