Oracle exists solely on inertia and big, dumb, uninformed customers. They were an early mover in the space for erp, and then they tried to develop everything else. I work in HR and filter out jobs where “PeopleSoft” is their product as it’s so monumentally unfit for human and operational use and eats up all technical, financial and employee resources to try to make it do simple, common things. Companies spend far more training, hiring consultants (because the product is unintuitive and limited in functionality) to operate the system and “customizations” that take years to build and a cadre of expensive folks to keep running is not the exception but the standard. If you see “Oracle” or “PeopleSoft” in the URL for a job application, run far, far away.

20 years ago only big companies had a need for the scale of an erp, and unfortunately many of them went with Oracle. SAP was the other dog and while similarly unintuitive at least worked well at what it did, bless the Germans. There are soooo many better, more flexible more intuitive, modern products that users can learn and use to choose from, only the truly hopeless are still using Oracle products for ERP and HRIS.

The most insidious part of Oracle is that because of how difficult it is to use, change, modify and learn, the people responsible for changing these systems experience Stockholm syndrome where they don’t want to change to a better system. All they know is failure, pain, lack of comprehension and lack of understanding of products and the thought of starting over in another system mortifies them, and so they become the barrier to telling Oracle to piss off.

But it’s rare for management to press the go-live button on a system that is so woefully unfit for purpose.

I beg to differ.