Oracle long ago shifted to playing defense because they could. They have a large flow of support dollars flowing in every year, so they are looking to just protect that. They wait until a new market is proven and then use their stacks of cash to go buy other companies who either have mindshare, marketshare or useful technology. It really isn't that different from what other monstrosities (e.g. IBM) do -- chase the "new" thing that offers higher profits and dump old products/services/offerings when their useful life and/or profit margin has run its course.
Despite all of the marketing, Oracle isn't in the race to "win" the Cloud competition. Oracle just needs to hang on to enough customers to keep the money flowing in. So it has changed the way it sells its hardware to more of a leasing/hosted model, dubs it "Cloud at Customer" and then flaunts the fact that ATT and Bank of America signed up for "Cloud". The financials behind these deals are masked in secrecy, but basically amount to shuffling money around inside of Oracle instead of receiving real revenue. Suddenly, Oracle's Cloud business is "booming."
Oracle is doing exactly what IBM is doing -- getting executives rich, trying to avoid becoming totally irrelevant and chasing after just enough of the emerging markets to keep the whole thing afloat. The formula of "success" in this type of strategy is to drive down costs in order to keep profit margins up while revenue is, at best, flat. Both IBM and Oracle are shifting jobs overseas. Both IBM and Oracle are shifting jobs to younger workers. Both IBM and Oracle are saddled with legacy products and are looking for ways to say that they still matter. Both IBM and Oracle are paying a ton to executives to play the numbers game and to keep the company/stock afloat. Oracle is officially a legacy and increasingly irrelevant company.
In terms of change -- good luck seeing anything significant at Oracle. The real incentive at the executive level is stock. Their compensation contains a ton of it. And LE made $5B after the last earnings call where all the "fantastic" news about Cloud was released. Why would he change a thing? Oracle can try to hold back the flow of customers to the Cloud by selling them on-premise solutions with "Cloud pricing" and then continue to crow about how fast the Oracle "Cloud" is growing. In the meantime, they've adjusted their licensing terms so that running in other Clouds takes 2X the number of licenses in an attempt to stem the flow of customers to competing Clouds. It is all about holding onto as much cash flow as possible and keeping the stock price up.
Oracle has enough cash and revenue to last for quite a while. And it isn't easy for customers to just dump Oracle quickly, so the company is going to be around for a while. Hoping to "ice the puck until retirement" could be a strategy as long as one is in an area of the company that continues to be seen as strategic/profitable and the job isn't easily taken over by overseas or younger employees, but it is a gamble. However, customers still have mainframes from IBM after all of these years, so there will likely continue to be legacy Oracle apps and databases for some time to come too. It is just a matter of whether one can survive within the organization and if one wants to deal with what Oracle is turning into.
Originally posted by @O7QPBt4-1vyo.