Blame it on whatever you like. oracle has been a rudderless leech for nearly 30 years now.

- overpricing the database led to a predictable exodus and new players with often times better performance.

- acquisition of MySQL led to a predictable exodus and new players like maria with often times better performance.

- Oracle cloud arrived late to spectacular skepticism and low user turnout from customers who had been burned by high cost and users burned from decisions like the death of opensolaris. it exists on federal life support these days by the grace of the prevailing administration.

- more than 80 products, with hundreds of thousands of patches and updates, yet no coherent or meaningful reform of the build for more than forty years. DB 19c still ships broken for redhat 9 as a means of driving users to oracle linux, and patching the installer is a 1970s experience in itself. DB 23's greatest improvement has been to tack the letters "AI" onto it to chum what shallow AI waters Oracle deigns to tread outside of an investment portfolio.

- dumping cash into oracle enterprise linux despite it only having around 2500 active corporate users.

this is nearly 20% of the company being laid off.