I am moderately surprised that this didn’t have anything to do with Trump or Elon Musk. I was pretty curious what activist organization Erik Uden ran. But, the punchline wasn’t that, and was in the Mastodon replies.
Interestingly, two days before Oracle deleted my account and all servers associated with it, I publicly criticized Oracle’s CEO in a viral post for promising dystopian AI surveillance technology to his investors.
https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113879369270806353
What a weird coincidence
Sounds about right for Oracle. I worked for a company that got bought by Oracle, and the support ticketing system we used was owned by Salesforce. Now, Larry Ellison hates Salesforce. So everyone was told to eliminate use of all Salesforce software.
Only problem was the Oracle software they wanted me to switch to - Service Center - was terrible. It was designed for massive call centers, not my team of five. It had almost zero automation, and the UX was circa 1985.
So I had a meeting with the Service Center team to go over my concerns. One feature I needed was an autocomplete field for ticket macros. This let us quickly process messages in our workflow. And it was just an autocomplete field, something I’d built myself dozens of times.
The Service Center folks acted like they’d never seen anything like that. They said it would take a year to add that feature to their product, but management still said I had to switch. So my boss, who had my back, got it thrown up the chain of command at Oracle. And then again. And again.
After a year and a half of this, averaging about a meeting a quarter, I finally got on the phone with an EVP who asked a very good question: “How much is this costing us per year?”
“$5,000” I said
“Why are you wasting my time with this?” she said
“Good question” I said.
I ended up getting to keep my ticketing software. I don’t know if Service Center has autocomplete fields yet.
It’s the problem with their “always free” virtual machines. Use too much, and they delete it for abuse. Use just a little, and they delete it for inactivity.
Those aren’t free because Oracle is benevolent, but simply because probably they had a contract with Ampere to purchase millions of those arm server CPUs and they have vacancy
They’re “free” in the hope that they will catch a whale: someone gets used to their infrastructure with a test, then spin more paid virtual machines
If in a specific datacenter, suddenly a whale is asking more resources, the free ones are getting the cut
what’s oracle?
One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
