Oracle is reminiscent of IBM of, say, about 1985. Arrogant. Monopolistic. Just becoming aware of their own mortality and trying to steer an enormous ship away from the iceberg. They may succeed, they may not. But decades of chickens are coming home to roost.
Oracle has been customer hostile for a long time, refusing to work with customers to reduce costs by allowing them to drop unused licenses from support, behaving as if they are a simple monopoly, knowing the customer has little or no other choice. Who's going to bet a career on putting the enterprise data on anything other than IBM, er, Oracle. MS SQL isn't enterprise grade for lots of data. MySQL? Ha. DB2 on mainframe? Get real.
Oracle has long shied away from having single point of contact for customers. 'Let the internal teams compete' was the rule of law. The best answer anyone could come up with as to why was 'That's the way Mr. Ellison wants it.' It made (some) sense when the company was a pure software play, but once they started to integrate the stack, the silo approach broke down. Database sales people with 20 years of cooperation and partnering with IBM, HP, et al said to the customers 'Don't buy our HW. Other_Vendor is cheaper.' and got away with it. Hardware reps who said 'Hey, I don't care if you put Microsoft SQL on our hardware got, well, you can imagine.
No one at Oracle views the customer holistically, only through the lens of 'what of my stuff can I sell', never 'What's best for the shareholder bottom line'. But, that view is reflected by the company. It's policies are great for the shareholder, lousy for the employee. At a recent meeting attended, someone noticed that over 40% of the attendees had purchased their own laptops. (It's easy to tell, Oracle only buys laptops for the top tier of execs and a few other small groups). That room alone was a few hundred thousand dollars in costs pushed to the employees. The field sales engineering organization has not received a compensation increase in over 8 years. (It's actually gone down in fact as they 'tune' comp plans). The field sales organization(s)? Infighting used car sales. It's Glen Gary / Gen Ross on a daily basis. Coffee is for closers and what have you done for me this month.
But most of all, the doom is spelled by the incredibly poor service and support. If you need support on a Sev 2 issue, you must ask to have your ticket escalated, or it will sit until the next ice age. Severity one? Escalate it. Don't get back to support in short order, closed. Got a sticky problem? Watch support pass it around the globe by asking the same question and waiting for the answer, then letting it get picked up by the next shift. Got an engineered system? Make some popcorn, sit on phone with several support organizations and watch them play pin the tail on the donkey.
Cloud is a serious change from license and hardware sales. IaaS, Paas, SaaS all have one thing in common. It's about service. If your service is known throughout the industry to s---, why would I buy a service from you? Current customers are not going to buy your product, no matter how good it is if you've treated them poorly and not given them support.
I'd say sell the stock, but it's never been safe to bet against Larry.