You had a bad experience with Oracle and I get that. They didn't treat you well. However, not everyone has a bad experience with them and a lot of companies make mistakes and treat customers poorly. The question is not did it happen, the question is how often does it happen and how does the organization handle it. If Oracle has millions of customers and you are the only one they harmed, they are probably doing great. If your experience is a rare occurrence (say it occurs to 1% or 0.5% of customers), then everyone should avoid Oracle because they don't know if or when they will be the next victim.
In the OP's case, I have several comments:
- Companies should always be able to explain why an account was closed. If the person violated a policy, the exact line or paragraph of the policy should be given to the customer along with a detailed explanation of how the customer violated the policy.
- Companies should always notify customers when they close an account or when a customer is violating the terms of service. These notices should clearly explain what the customer did and should explain how they violated a policy.
- Companies should expect their automated systems and employees to make mistakes. They should rectify mistakes when they are found.
I think Oracle treated dijit and the OP horribly. I think Oracle should do a root cause analysis to determine why they misbehaved, fix the problem, reinstate the account (assuming the OP is telling the truth), and publicly apologize. Internally, Oracle should learn from this and fix their processes and communications.
There are so many cases where Oracle have acted in bad faith that I don’t think defending them is the right move.
“Don’t anthropomorphise the lawnmower”.
Let us not forget that they bankrupted the second largest city in the UK, it’s hardly an isolated incident.
They are exactly as evil as people say, I know its hard to reason, there’s always shades of grey after all, but I know of know of no other consistently one-dimensional company.
We are still talking about Oracle, right? That company that just a few years ago decided to sue all of their customers, worldwide, for whatever terms from their one-sided policies they decided were violated? The one that actually lost almost every time somebody took them to court, but insisted on doing it anyway?
The one that got the manager responsible sacked, but is still managed by the same CEO (and owner) that appointed him?
Oracle has a very impressive and long-standing reputation truly unlike any other large company. The stories that people are sharing in the comments here are not all that different from the stuff I heard about them back in the 90s.
I appreciate your effort to provide a balanced retort. I'll be extremely blunt: all the bad things you've heard about Oracle are about 95% true. I've been in meetings where someone from compliance suggested all "uncertain" customers (accounting-wise) be subject to a rigorous audit... with the comment added "we can probably squeeze a few mil easily this quarter out of the base". Most of the company does not behave like a healthy business. The parts that do perform well are usually walled off from the ridiculous bullshit.
source: was a PM for a BU that was acquired by Oracle
They have an excellent free tier for experimenting with some higher power ARM servers. As long as you're ready to give up when they decide they don't like you any more, that's a pretty cool deal. Just don't ever build anything with their hardware or software that you'd like to keep.
Edit: Java is usually pretty good, too. At least the open source stuff. Maybe stuff like GraalVM too but they had that locked down in licenses for a while and I don't trust Oracle at all.
They don't do support for free tiers, and their free tier is often overbooked, so from what I can tell they just silently drop people? Seems like terrible business to me, but so does most of what Oracle does.
When did you manage to get that? I tried signing up for the ARM server several times but it always says it's unavailable at the moment in my region (East - Toronto) and I should try a different region... however you can't switch regions after you set up your account. I talked to their support and they said it's unavailable for the foreseeable future... choose a different configuration.
Are people still able to provision those instances in other regions? If so, which one(s)? I'm just using the legacy free one for now, the 2GHz AMD with 0.5GB RAM.
You’d need to upgrade the account to a paid one (there will be no charges anyway if you stay within free limits of the ARM offer), which unlocks a different pool to spin up a server in.
From what I can tell you need to be lucky. When I register my (European) account there are ARM resources left and they were easy to claim. I think I was lucky because they just expanded a data center somewhere nearby, though, I think there was info about it on a Reddit post somewhere.
I don't think the forever-free tier allows cross region instances. You may just need to register an account in another region where they have more resources, but it's anyone's guess where Oracle still has them.
It's a neat playground but as should be blatantly obvious it's not worth investing too much time into, because they can make it disappear without recourse for no reason without warning.
In general, I agree but there's a lot of people "locked-in" to using their products so once a poor decision has been made, it's costly to move away from them.
I signed up a personal Oracle Cloud account to make use of their always-free tier of VMs. I was lucky to be able to get 4 of the VM.Standard.A1.Flex instances which have been running fine for a couple of years now. I've heard various tales of people on the free tier getting instances/accounts deleted for having idle instances, but presumably my backup of them is enough to stop them from being registered as idle (I've got a couple of websites running on them too, but they're just for my use).
The cold hard truth of the world is that things are not evaluated solely meritoriously by everyone.
Oracle know this, in fact, they rely on it.
If they are trying to win a big corporate contract you know a good way to get it? :
The dude who has an enormous amount of say is head of I.T. at EnormousBeanFactory, the world’s largest supplier of canned beans. Is it a sexy industry? Nope, but they do 3 billion a year in beans.
This dude is in his mid 50s, bald, out of shape, big glasses, and is likely very single. He has a comfortable wage but he’s not rich. He hasn’t gotten laid in 20 years.
Send in the energetic and charismatic Oracle salesman, instantly invite this guy for all expenses trip to Aspen to discuss the deal, but don’t make it obvious, a few 5 star lunches locally first. When in Aspen make sure this guy has the time of his life, got it? Here’s 20k expense account, this guy is going to have a weekend he is not going to forget. Do I need to spell out the details for you?
Once he’s back at his job and had a few days to recover then land the fish while the memories are still fresh, as long as your product MINIMALLY functions, they’ll sign.
Of course I personally think this is atrocious way of doing business, but I am wise enough to not let my rosy ideals prevent me from seeing the reality of the world, so there it is. That’s why “people continue to use ORACLE” products.
People will think that this is ridiculous, but I can tell you from experience that this is exactly what happens.
You are often relying on the altruism of the C-levels to care about people more than the “vibes” that sales people can give off, which just happens to be helped by expensive lunches, trips, invitations to shows with VIP seats, and being welcomed with beaming smiles and open arms like a celebrity at their HQ.
Obviously its not just Oracle that does this, all the large companies do it- even the ones you think have crappy support like Google.
These are hard things to turn down, and if you think you can you’re probably wrong.
And after that stops applying, you have spent a huge amount of work managing your software around their idiosyncrasies. So doing the same for another supplier looks like a huge (probably unsurmountable) task.
The price of "free" is very tempting. I guess the cost of the servers they offer is having to put up with idiotic requirements like "CPU utilization for the 95th percentile [must be more] than 20%" [1], or they'll shut off your server.
I use one of these servers for hosting some non-critical things, but nothing that I run there is particularly CPU intensive, so I was just forced to set up a cronjob that periodically spikes the CPU to 100% for a few minutes.
Honestly, I have never been in a position to see their salespeople so I have to assume they must be wining and dining the bosses first, because in my little corner of the universe, every single like entity uses them to some degree. I personally do not understand it.
I think it was more that Oracle was willing to take the political risk and had a lot of incentive to land a large, high visibility client that could help them build economies of scale and would come with a tier 1 JV partner.
There is a lot of upside for Oracle based on their position relative to others and Ellison does not have to manage his political capital the same way non-founder CEOs do (he made this move long before Trump’s second term).
People probably continue to use Oracle products because Oracle makes a lot of good and useful products. Oracle is typically not criticized for its products, its criticized for its high prices and price increases.
You could only mean the database? The stuff I am familiar with was good before they bought it and is better somewhere else despite all their work to choke options with IP law.
OK, what products have gotten worse under Oracle? How do they compare to their competitors? Why don't people leave Oracle if it is so bad? Remember, people can and do move platforms all of the time. A good example is how the cloud took off despite the huge amount of work it takes to move things to the cloud.
My main point is saying one of the largest software companies in the world is "bad" or "makes things worse" says nothing. You need to give specific examples. Also, it's hard to believe that Oracle never gets anything right. Really? Everyone of their thousands of employees does bad work? All of their products are "bad" and have no good points? That does not pass the laugh test.
I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java.
It's prolly gonna be hard to find any specific metrics to show that, though. But I remember everyone thinking that all of the Sun offerings had gotten worse after the acquisition. And OpenSolaris got axed altogether, of course. And Java had a series of security embarrassments.
Just anecdotally prior to the acquisition I could upload a core dump to Sun and within minutes be on the phone with a kernel developer, have a patch within 30 minutes and the fix would be incorporated into their updates.
After the acquisition I could not reach kernel developers the ones that remained and package management fell into the bog of eternal stench. Generic examples would be moving binaries into /tmp and moving an Oracle specific fix into place because they knew not how to do package management. Eventually it became impossible to do package verification. By this point we had moved most customers off Solaris, HP-UX and AIX over to Linux out of cost optimizations and making everything cookie-cutter but I was happy to depart from maintaining Oracle Sun systems.
At another company I worked for we replaced everything acquired by Oracle to forked alternatives. This was less to do with technical reasons and more to do with legal liability risk as Oracle could at any moment force licensing, change license terms, drop free support, etc... So as an example we moved from MySQL to Percona MySQL. We also quickly moved away from Dyn DNS due to concerns from the federal government and our lawyers as Dyn (Oracle, also being a competitor) could monitor DNS traffic and profile our customers.
> I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java.
Licenses apart - Java actually improved, but Oracle's name is so tainted that a lot of people ran for the hills the moment they acquired Sun. Solaris support on a lot of platforms used by my employer simply vanished within 36 months (in enterprise terms, that's instantaneous) because every customer started working on a migration/exit strategy as soon as they learned of the acquisition. Once a critical mass of customers was headed out, it got dropped as a platform by a lot of developers, and eventually Oracle itself put it on life support.
So yes, Oracle's name is THAT powerful it can kill you by association. Lawnmower story etc.
I've seen weblogic deteriorate after Oracle bought it. If you wrote e.g. a bad descriptor, pre oracle weblogic gave an error message inluding what you wrote, why it was wrong, and a reference to the spec. Post oracle code just crashed with an NPE, or had an unstable container with weird crashy behaviour in unrelated parts of your code.
Before that, OC4J used to be the first to implement a new EJB version etc. The project basically froze in time when oracle bought it, receiving minimal bugfuxes only.
