Oracle going out of business would at least be one thing to celebrate in 2026.

> All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in.

1. Any cloud business essentially is "unpacking servers and plugging them in." Yet the cloud business has been exploding quarter-over-quarter ever since AWS came online. To the tune of double-digit billions cash flow every quarter for each of the hyperscalers, even before the AI boom.

2. Nvidia servers are at the moment even less commodity than typical cloud servers and are currently THE hottest hardware resource in the world. Everyone is scrambling desperately to procure them, and the US and China are battling geopolitically over access to these things, and they are actively being smuggled to bypass these restrictions.

> However, since then the AI hype has evaporated, and hyperscalers are no longer being rewarded with a higher stock price.

This is a misreading of what has been happening with hyperscaler stock prices. They have consistently been punished despite record estimate-beating earnings pretty much every quarter for the past multiple quarters, precisely because they keep incinerating all that money and more on the same CapEx that Oracle is.

At this point it is pretty clear that the biggest moat in the whole AI boom is access to compute, for which the demand has just kept exploding. (See: Anthropic paying its competitors through its nose to keep Claude up.)

I've little love for Oracle, so I fear they will actually make out like bandits with these moves.

They can raise cash by selling off the stock they have spent a decade buying back.

I'm very hopeful to see Larry loose everything, and Oracle stripped for parts. Karma that is well overdue.

>However, since then the AI hype has evaporated

What? Nvidia stock, for instance has been moving largely sideways for the past 4 months. Maybe it's not as jubilant as before, but it hasn't exactly "evaporated".

What else does Oracle have? Mostly just a bunch of IP that a sufficiently strong AI will be able to recreate for a fraction of each customers bill. Oracle is very aware.

Where is the value coming from when all knowledge work (and later manual work) is 10-100-10000x cheaper done by AIs? You probably don’t want to build models, too easy to move to another provider when one is better, open models eat your lunch etc. But there are still means of production to be owned but it’s just GPUs

ORCL down more than 50% in the past 12mo.

is it true that the companies investing 100s of billions into AI, have taken up a lot of debt in hope of AI making them trillions in revenue?

> All Oracle is doing is unpacking Nvidia servers and plugging them in. This is a commodity business

But it's not if you can jump to the front of the GPU allocation line like Musk has done.

There have been a couple of cases of honesty in tech layoffs in the last couple where the employer specifically said that the layoffs were for performance which added insult to injury to the people laid off in that round and damaged their future hiring prospects, e.g. https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performa.... I'd rather not have the honesty in that case; that's a terrible thing to do to people.

And open themselves up for liability and getting sued by admitting mistakes? In your dreams.

They have the same psychology the leaders of communist states had. It's a constant litany of self-congratulation and tone-deafness that has no connection to reality.

> desperate to get out of the squid games and quarterly layoff fears

"If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world."

— Satoru Iwata (former Nintendo CEO)

You could publicly brag about your company by naming it here :)

I'm not sure this is the come-uppance you've been waiting for. Oracle still has a larger market cap than at any point in history except the last ~2 years.

Yeah what’s the end game here? Can they keep running with such deep cuts to staff and morale…

Oracle is now doing quarterly DB releases. This is not just patches but including big features. Any SQL enthusiast would most likely find Assertions [1] or Deep Data Security [2] interesting.

So looks like they overcome their limitations.

[1] https://oracle-base.com/articles/26/assertions-26 [2] https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/security/deep-data-securi...

Interesting that the immediate reply to that comment is about how ASML code is equally shitty

I think agents have the capability to multiply this problem times 10. It doesn't have to be that way though. I think a skilled person will create great software regardless of the tools they use.

I remember that comment and thinking that the author is complaining about a kind of success.

Oracle RDBMS is a critical component of huge and important application platforms from banking to infrastructure.

Millions of tests are good! I would be concerned if it wasn’t a “test heavy” development process.

A slow and measured pace with every consequence thought out is also good. Otherwise the product rots away in all but the most common combination of configurations.

Etc…

The only valid complaint is that the test farm is under-scaled. Increasing its capacity would direly increase development velocity.

If you run sub-par agents on large codebase that's kinda what they do. Every task ends with duplication, added flags bifurcating the code and everything else described in that comment haha

That's already the law in the US, the WARN act. It requires 60 days notice before any mass layoffs. The way companies "get around" this is by not actually laying you off, but giving you 60 days notice that you will be laid off and then removing all your access during those 60 days, at the same time they report the 60 days notice of layoffs. It's essentially 60 days severance (plus reporting to the government), which IMO is better than everyone walking wondering who will actually be laid off in 60 days. You can even see that in the email they sent, "today is your last working day" but there will be an email with "details on your [...] termination date". It's unclear to me if this layoff doesn't qualify as a mass layoff (so no warning period needed) or if they just haven't filed it yet, but I'm guessing they'll file it soon enough.

This is how it works in Sweden: https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination

"Even if an employer does not have a collective agreement, they must negotiate major changes to working and employment conditions of employees who are members of a trade union as if the employer had a collective agreement."

Negotiations include getting the lists of positions that will be terminated, number of employees affected, new positions that may be opened during a reorganization, etc.

They can keep the free tier VPS, my problems with Oracle over the years go a bit deeper than that.

It’s 12gb and two ARM instances now. If you can get one. They’re frequently out of capacity. They even suspended the over-provisioned legacy instances.

No it's not, every time I try to sign up they just tell me no. Doesn't matter how much personal info I give them.

the only reason there is compute availability is because devs hate Oracle so much that they don't know about it

an LLM told me about that option when I was seeking out free tiers

This appears to be a UK new site*, and it's definitely not how they usually happen there. In fact, it's not even how they legally happen.

> 100 or more redundancies - the consultation must start at least 45 days before any dismissals take effect

https://www.gov.uk/redundancy-your-rights/consultation

If you want to have similar laws, you need to lobby your representatives, and get them to follow California's example, which introduced the Cal-WARN act:

> “an employer may not order a mass layoff, relocation, or termination at a covered establishment unless, 60 days before the order takes effect, the employer gives written notice of the order”

From https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Cal-WARNAct.html

But as others have said, it's not as strong as the UK laws, so it just becomes a de-facto notice period instead. It's still progress though.

* Although not one I've ever heard of, which is a little suspicious.

It seems to be a British article.

For European standards, it's not only cold but would be absurdly illegal.

Unless you're C level, in which case you get promoted to "Vice President in Charge of Looking for a New Job" for a quarter.

It might have helped draw out the layoff process, potentially. Still not convinced unions would optimize overall outcomes for employees _while_ employed.

Maybe a better conversation to have as we keep moving through this AI Engineering era and a bunch of new companies are created. If you are considering founding a company, would you start it as a union shop? If not, why?

The usual way companies handle this is to set the actual layoff date as 60 days from when the email goes out. If you hear about a mass layoff including two months of salary for everyone affected, that’s what’s going on. Typically system access is revoked but the paychecks keep coming as usual and vacation keeps accruing, because you’ve got that extra two months of “employment.” The company also gets the benefit of being able to call you back in if it turns out there was something vital you were doing that never got documented.

This, the company stays compliant with all the regulations but they don’t have to worry about disaffected employees during those 60 days.