The next sentence is more defensible:

>> Certainly, these companies not endure as innovators: when coercion is your business model, innovation is not merely unnecessary but actively antithetical.

Oracle and VMware do seem like just rent seekers. I'm sure those rents do pay for plenty of nice things, but it's really hard for me to ever understand Oracle or VMware as an "innovator", beyond their initial innovations (their flagship DB, x86 virtualization).

> Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure.

IMHO it's perfectly fine for companies to live well, and then be sold. AFAIAC persistence is only proof of persistence. Sun created plenty of wealth/millionaires too. And, by Bryan's lights, it did so mostly ethically. That's a good life.

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Centigonal 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think that companies like Oracle and Broadcom begin to resemble specialized private equity firms: they acquire innovative companies that have scaled to a level that they're familiar with. The acquirer then enforces "business discipline" and unlocks efficiencies (mainly this means leveraging the acquirer's existing connections with their customer base to cross-sell licenses, raising prices to the highest possible level their customers can sustain, and laying off/transferring redundant positions or positions not directly tied to revenue generation). This lasts 3-10 years until the market develops a lower-cost enterprise-ready alternative that starts to erode the captive customer base, but in that time these companies have collected enough rents to acquire another set of smaller companies and repeat the process.

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mustache_kimono 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think that companies like Oracle, SAP, and Broadcom begin to resemble specialized private equity firms

This is an entirely fair/accurate. I suppose what I am getting at is that these are just 2 different business models, and, the world can sustain a multitude of business models. There need not be only one (har har).

It's also fair to believe there is a moral dimension to one's own model which doesn't extract maximum value from the customer. Because IMHO "let's kick them in the dicks again" isn't an especially likable model, even if it is successful, and it's fair to avoid doing business with such people.

Imagine trying to sell your partners on doing business with Broadcom. If your core principle is "Broadcom needs to be around in 10 years", maybe the persistence/"kick them in the dicks" model is appealing, but otherwise, its fair for their competitors/Oxide to point out how awful dealing with a corporate sociopath might be.

	▲	Centigonal 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I agree with all of that. Extractive behemoths like Oracle couldn't exist without innovators like Oxide (well, not exactly Oxide since I doubt they'd sell to an Oracle, but you know what I mean). There are plenty of customers that jump into deals with e.g. Oracle for a variety of reasons, and it's definitely worthwhile to spread the news far and wide about how difficult it is to work with these companies, doubly so if you're ideologically and economically competing with them. I guess my point is that it's worthwhile to spend time understanding why this business model works in spite of all the shittiness, since the "hoping their poor treatment of customers will blow back on them" approach hasn't worked yet. I'm also fixating on the bad here, because I look at "both kind and nasty business models can succeed" and reflexively respond with "but why do the nasty ones succeed?"