I doubt they are on medium - probably low. I once met the IT guy onboard his yacht. Told me a funny story about trying to get the superbowl for one of Larry's mates one year.
Captain position ignored for a moment, I have no idea what second or third mate on a giant Russian/saudi oligarch class of yacht might make in yearly gross, but if I were a billionaire I'd be looking for people with many years of offshore experience and a degree from a major maritime University... $175k usd?
> That stuff is toxic, and I pity any organization that Oracle got its claws into using that junk.
In my experience, no one is really duped by these big companies. The people writing the checks generally start their search with magic quadrant leaders and then further narrow it down to the biggest players because "we can't trust our business to some no-name." It's really a situation that companies willingly put themselves in.
I've yet to see any way to procure custom "Enterprise" software that isn't awful, and sadly I do believe duping is a huge part of it.
The duping starts long before the Oracles/IBMs/Whomever of the world ever reach a customer too - the "analyst" firm role is a huge problem with companies like Gartner/Forester who dream up the "Magic Quadrant" that people purchasing this stuff end up stuck relying on. I've seen in several roles the enormous gulf between what Gartner/Forester will claim about a leading player's capabilities vs the reality, which of course is a state of affairs large Enterprise software companies are all too keen to encourage.
I've never seen a sales consultant answer "no" to a question about capability in an enterprise software sale scenario, ever, across many RFPs. If your job explicitly targets you to bring in x millions of dollars of business a year, you answer "yes, of course" safe in the knowledge that when it does blow up it's someone else's problem and far away from you by that point.
Duplicity is the name of the game in Enterprisey software. Whether you're a startup struggling to add the features that a client requested, that sales said "Of course we can!" to, and that are utterly foreign to your product ("Why the hell did they ask for voice recognition in this vacation hour tracker?"), or a hugecorp like Oracle with a do-nothing platform that is essentially re-written on site to customer specifications, the time-honored practice of "managing customer expectations" is the name of the game in this market.
Falling behind? Ship half a feature, lie about it or explain how it's going to be working in the next release (and when that doesn't happen, blame the customer's requests for churn, or the height of the tide, it doesn't matter). In danger of actually completing a contract? Trod hard on the bugs, you don't want that money pump to stop. Larry Ellison needs a new dock for his yacht? Time to increment the product's version field and let a thousand consultants bloom. Ka-ching, baby.
My experience with the space, both as a developer of Enterprisey software at several start-ups and as a customer, was that this corner of the industry is ethically sick, and I won't have anything to do with it.
My father was accused of being "anti-Microsoft" sometime in the early 90s, because he kept pushing for cheaper alternatives. He was writing Windows books at the time, so he ended up bringing in a book to show them.
A lot of this purchasing is purely "cover your ass" thinking. Going with IBM, Microsoft or Oracle won't get you fired.
I don't have a lot of love for MS today, but you'd be hard-pressed to compare the MS of today to the MS of the early 90s. Find some developer magazines from that time and check out their ads - they were still scrambling to grab market share in areas other than DOS/Windows for client PCs, and had a lot of competition in the form of Borland, Lotus, Novell, and Oracle, as well as smaller fish like Watcom, Gupta Technologies, Fox Software, etc.
Back in 1999, I was in the elevator and I heard the admin. staff say PeopleSoft (the software) doesn't do anything. This was @ Polytechnic Uni. in Brooklyn. This conflicted with the school's public message where (officially) adopting PeopleSoft was a big step in the right direction. I always wondered if PeopleSoft improved since. I guess not?
My employer recently switched from PeopleSoft to Oracle for HR stuff. So now instead of the system itself being slow to respond, it is plenty responsive when I put in for time off. However, if I fill out the form too quickly it rejects the input as invalid. They can't even get form input validation to work correctly.
Stuff like this reminds me of "Star Wars: A New Hope", where people noticed how the storm troopers kept missing Hans Solo despite having so many hi-tech rifles firing at him. "How can they miss him? They are highly trained and so many of them firing at him at once." These IT anecdotes might explain why.
SAP is just as bad - at my last place there was a member of staff who worked 4 days a week - SAP could never get the rounding on their annual leave correct, often leaving them with 0.999 or 0.499 days left that they couldn't book. We had to just record it manually.
I hope they get the crap sued out of them. That stuff is toxic, and I pity any organization that Oracle got its claws into using that junk.