Oracle shoves IBM out of world's No 2 software seller spot – Gartner Oracle sold more software than IBM last year for the first time ever, making Larry Ellison’s database giant second only to Microsoft, at least according to analyst Gartner. Oracle made $29.6bn during 2013, growing 3.4 per cent over the previous year and elevating it from world’s third largest to second-largest software vendor …
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Well I expect M$ would pour a few more billion into R&D. tech support etc. than your average open source company would do, plus if their worldwide employee numbers are anything to go by "Worldwide 100,932"- this is off an M$ site with last years figures - that's a lot of people to pay for and you don't make enough money for a payroll that size by being totally incompetent.
There's a lot more to enterprise software than a wizzy GUI, try running a multi terabyte database with several thousand concurrent users on MS Access. Most serious software is administered through a text based terminal not point and click so there isn't generally anything interesting look at or play with.
Enterprise software in general, and Oracle software in particular, is crappy, buggy, too expensive and not innovative at all. Ugly to work with too. Enterprise IT is slow, inflexible, in firefighting mode and not responsive to business needs ( subsequently not held in high regard by business ). Since Y2K fiasco ( way overestimated impact of Y2K problem ) and dotcom crash, enterprise IT lost what little it had in prestige area.
Enterprise software is wide open for disruption. Reason's why corporations continue buying legacy software are: huge legacy base, labor issues ( training ); length of time and money needed to develop alternatives, "Can't get fired by buying X" thinking, etc.
That is all changing very slowly, as alternatives are also mired in various issues, biggest being lack of really innovative new technologies. Most of "new" we see is endless recycling of what we already know.
While most would agree that Oracle software is difficult to use and expensive, one of the critical factors of Oracle's success is momentum. The world has been trained to use Oracle's solutions and changing course for a large enterprise is in itself expensive and risky. Enterprises have legions of technical people valued for the knowledge of Oracle-ware. However, disruptive technologies associated with Big Data and other technological shifts will threaten Oracle in the same way that client-server computing brought down the mainframe. The Oracle database is the mainframe of our time. However, a corporate culture characterized by Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma will likely prevent the demise of any advantage Oracle has against these technological shifts.
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