I wonder if Oracle worth was mostly an army of salesmen with one good product and loads of persistence (pun not intended). I've dabbled with 2 applicative from the 90s based on Oracle rebranded things and they were very subpar to say the least.

My previous experiences in dealing with Oracle as part of an RFP is that it's like something out of Mad Men, in the worst possible way: we had a bunch of requirements that they didn't want to meet, because they were trying to sell their DB appliances, they berated the RFP committee for having those requirements. They laid complaints with our management line against one staffer for asking "hostile" questions.

When they didn't get the decision they wanted, they quickly escalated to exec and director level, and the exec of a major shareholder to try and get the decision overturned.

It wasn't an especially pleasant experience personally, because obviously it involved a lot of very personal attacks by a vendor, but at the same time it was fascinating to watch how they networked from the top down to try to get the decision that they wanted, and run roughshod over the SMEs and process.

Some years later one of the sales team sent me a "Virtualisation for Dummies" book and told me I could learn something from it.

I have had Oracle, CA and Cisco sales teams do this to me, and I had one consulting company another manager brought in to work on AD forest consolidation start a campaign to get me fired after I outed their supposed SME as having no actual AD experience ("DNS has nothing to do with Active Directory" was just one gem he pushed). While unfortunately it worked for Oracle and CA, Cisco never really had enough juice with the executives to change architecture decisions after they'd been made outside of core networking.

It's made me always work to get Oracle and CA products replaced wherever I have a voice as a result. They may have scored one small $500k deal at that previous employer. I've often found I'm not alone in my dislike for these companies for their shady sales practices, and at least for Oracle enough of us worked together to lose them an 8-figure deal by showing we could do something different for far less once.

A lot of it seems to be the context that they're operating in: Oracle seems to be a really brutal environment for sales staff; I see account managers disappear every 6-12 months, and everything I've heard from people who work for resellers or Oracle in those kind of roles paints it as being absolutely ruthless in a "Glengarry Glen Ross" kind of way.

Reminds me of when a person on the Ars Technica forums posted something that upset the sensibilities of EMC, (it was something about an Avamar bug iirc) who cyberstalked the poster and called the CIO or CFO of his employer.

Ah yes those big companies have specialist "salespeople" whose job is berate the lower-ups and suck-up to the higher-ups trying to sell their overpriced crap

A non-trivial amount of cases is when you buy a software package that only supports Oracle - that was pretty much the only reason why we didn't have a campaign to eradicate Oracle DB in my first job - the most critical money-making system was dependant on it.

Do you think they (Oracle) crafted that situation or it was just organic ?

A little of both. Back in the day you had a few different platforms. Oracle was a safe choice and eventually a no brainer... most companies had either MS SqlServer or Oracle capability, and a smaller number ran DB2.

Open source created modern Oracle. I worked for a company built around Informix, and that database engine was one of the largest expenses of the company. I think we paid like $40k/socket in 2000. Today, you use an open source database to build your product.

So Oracle had to start selling integrated solutions. They do evil shit like pay higher commissions for salespeople to cross-sell their colleagues. So the Oracle Financials guy gets paid more to sell Identity crap than the identity guy. So the sales idiots form all sorts of weird alliances and kill each other.

Some of it was specific features offered by Oracle - the ones relevant to my first job were Oracle RAC and in-DB encryption, iirc. We were at the time (2008) upgrading from 3-node cluster in one DC to geographically dispersed system with hot backups.

Thing is, the vendor simply happened to build upon Oracle. If the software supported DB2, or more likely, supported a migration path from Oracle to DB2, I suspect we would have gone with that.

On another hand...

A lot of "Oracle required" software uses a ton of Oracle-specific stored procedures and other components, in fact, I have encountered an MRP software package that was written entirely inside Oracle database. All PL/SQL, with some bits of embedded Java.

I've worked closely with the developers of a couple of such apps and in those cases it was a mainly that Oracle had some non-standard features that made implementing certain core features in the app a lot easier and faster for the developers.