In Reply to: Smart CEO vs Dumb CEO posted by confused442 on June 03, 2026 at 08:09:45
Unless things have radically changed recently, that's a corporation that's utterly rudderless. There is no discipline, no plan, no innovation, no vision, no leadership. Ever since the days of the relational databases, that company has been living off of acquisitions. Last I was involved with them, their biggest product was Siebel, an acquisition that still worked. Everything else has been some small company they bought.
They continually buy smaller companies for their product, then they have no idea what to do with them, how to market them, how to integrate them into their existing products, how to create an actual ecosystem that functions like an ecosystem. They take the product remove the parts they don't want, slap a new label on them and realize it's not working out, so they go and acquire another company in the same space and the cycle begins again. That's why their products have mixed code base, every one of them written in a different language, just communicating through batch jobs (maybe they've adopted some of the more modern techniques still then, but I'm pretty sure it's still all a hodgepodge).
I've been on an Oracle deathwatch since early to mid 10s. They haven't collapsed yet but they will. And it will be the most monumental collapse that will make the least impact on everyone's lives.
Ellison cares about three things in life: being relevant (he was the only unknown starter CEO at some point, and had some seriuos Gates/Jobs envy, buying another island for god knows what (now that we know how islands are being used), and destroying Salesforce (at least in the '10s, he was seriosly butt hurt about Benioff).