Discussion for article #226808
Settled out of court, Oregon doesn’t see a dime and refrains from bad mouthing Oracle going forward. Oracle admits no wrong doing, but agrees to pay the legal fees and whole thing is put under an agreed to gag order.
Slander? If the website worked so poorly that people were forced to file paper applications, that’s not slander, it’s called the truth.
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It appears that Oregon’s big mistake was actually believing the ad copy. Oracle’s big mistake was thinking that it was possible that someone would take their sales drivel at face value.
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Wow, I’m sure there is plenty of incompetence to go around but as a person who does software projects if you take the money especially 130 million you have to figure out a way to get the customer what they want even if they don’t know what they want. So I can’t see how Oracle isn’t responsible for this. It’s not like they didn’t have the time or resources. A talented software development company could have done it for 10 million and made good money.
I’m sure that Oracle will say that Oregon micromanaged the project but that’s simply not an excuse when you talking about a failure of this magnitude.
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Pretty sure the truth is a defense to “slander”.
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Somehow, I’m reminded of a dozen different Dilbert cartoons working on the theme of marketing people utterly disconnected from any knowledge about how the product worked making promises the engineers they ignored or failed to consult can’t possibly fulfill.
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It’s criminal that they charged Oregon $139M for the work, and gross incompetence on Oracle’s part to not make a working web site.
Plus you have incompetence on Oregon’s part to even accept their bid.
Let’s say they used a rate of $200/hr for the work, which is really high for web development, even in Silicon Valley, that’s 695,000 man hours, or 238 man years of work (assuming 8 hr days).
There are far more complex web sites built by a handful of people in well under a year that work just fine. And I know people who have done it at various startups.
It’s just incomprehensible to me that this kind of money was spent on a worthless web site.
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Oracle is a big user of H-1Bs. These people are unable to find their way out of a paper bag without a road map. This is yet another example of bad results from H-1B coders.
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How else do we keep Ellison as the highest compensated CEO without a little padding?
I hope they plan on doing a contract audit. I suspect they’ll find all kinds of charges, totally unrelated to the contract, which will, in large part, help explain both the size of the contract, and the fact that it produced a completely unusable web site.
that contract became the piggy bank, for every oracle employee/officer in the company.
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That’s exactly what Oracle is claiming. Also that Oregon did not hire a system administrator, although a number of people familiar with the whole mess say that Oracle actively discouraged it. And it is more than $130 million - OR has refused to pay another $23 million which is the basis of Oracle’s suit.
The consensus among IT folks I know is that Oracle saw a chance to make a ton of money - checking the contract and payments is precisely what OR should do.
A lot of companies assume engineers are interchangeable parts. They eventually find out the hard way that is not the case. I know individual engineers who can literally do the work of a 100 typical people you’d find at a big company like Oracle. I’d rather have 2-3 really good engineers working for me than 100 so-so ones. I’d get a lot more done with fewer headaches.
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This is very true. I can point you to a guy who continues to ask the most amazingly stupid questions on LinkedIn about a system that I know very well. He is an employee of Tata Intl. Tata does not hire the “best and brightest”. It hires the “walking stupid”. Oracle does the same. You hire scabs, you get scab work.