First and foremost, this is about Oracle. For the short period I worked there, my impression about culture and tech was: mediocre. Not excellent, not poor but just a around average.
Which raises the question: why is it such a successful company commercially? I believe it's being ruthless to customers, employees and suppliers combined with cooking the financials.
Which bring me to your remark about output being difficult to measure. Imho Oracle had been exceptionally good at manipulating and obfuscating their output. And this was true long before AI came to the scene.
That's probably where you'll end up if you're a company where that's an option.
No one was ever going to switch databases to a better DB as long as:
1) they did the bare minimum to ensure no alternative existed where switching made any sense.
2) they never charged too much where it made sense to switch thinking along the lines these businesses made decisions.
It's like the resource curse played out on a company scale.
If you have no incentive to get better, you won't.
Tons of mediocre enterprise software is built on Oracle DB.
Why enterprises are vendor locked-in? There are very few large enterprise players in every industry that implement all kind of ISO, standards, got an army of business analysts to generate million of requirement pages. Any new player must fight against that artificially overblown legacy systems, design and prove migration process is possible etc.
Here are just a bunch of industries my family/friends worked in and had first hand experience with these legacy systems - Airline (PSS), Banking, Healthcare, Hotel, Telecom.
And if they had it their way, Oracle would have similarly strangled every last customer of Java, MySQL, OpenOffice, Solaris, etc. to squeeze out every last dollar.
And then make it look like they're innovating.
Sometimes I feel like the only person left who remembers the pre-dotcom vibe. OpenClaw etc. should have set off alarms that we are back in the land of the Quick and the Dead.
It will be another dependency for all companies to bear. Hopefully significant gains for humanity, tbd
That seems like an insane gamble to me. Lay off all the workers now and hope that AI can deliver on its promise to replace them some time in the indeterminate future.
However, I’ve already seen a CTO of a F100 company explicitly state that whether AI is driving efficiency or not, the capital investment, and more importantly, the promises of efficiency to investors will mean some people will be let go.
Efficiency is output/input. The input is easy to measure. It’s cost and in this particular case salaries.
Output is a lot harder to measure, which means it can be fudged easily.
So you cut the easily measurable inputs and inflate the easily manipulable output.
One could imagine the reverse would also be possible, where you maintain inputs but inflate the output, but there is an asymmetry where investors will reward you for cutting costs even if there are no efficiency advantages that makes cutting inputs more sellable than inflating outputs.