Comment by gkoberger
Comment by gkoberger 2 days ago
A bunch of years ago, at college, I built a class management platform for my university. It won me $1k (which was an insane amount of money to college me), and I met with president of the univeristy to pitch him on using it. They were potentially buying Oracle software, and I found myself up against them. At the time, I felt like this professor.
They obviously went with Oracle. I'm sure they spent a ton of money, and I'm sure it was the right choice. I would have gotten bored of it pretty quick. You don't pay Oracle because it's a good deal or a good product... you pay Oracle so you never have to think about it ever again.
I don't really have a point here. I wish there were better options in the market. But I certainly don't want to build them, since it's a boring problem with bad customers (edtech is a horrible sector to sell to). Oracle has a price point that makes it worth it to them, and they have customers willing to pay it.
Hopefully someone sees this blog, and rather than be annoyed at academic/government waste, sees a big market they can dominate with a better product. But given how it was written in 2013, I'm not so sure.
They're also paying $5M per year to maintain the servers and software. In theory they don't have to think about it but that just highlights the waste even more. I wish I could spend $5M without thinking.