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My immediate reaction to the announcement was one of these is not like the others. OpenAI, a couple of big investment funds, Microsoft, Nvidia, and...............Oracle?



Oracle provides two things: A datacenter for Nvidia chips, and health data. Oracle Cerner had a 21.7% market share for inpatient hospital Electronic Health Records (EHR). Larry Ellison specifically mentioned healthcare when announcing it in the Whitehouse.

The announcement was funny because they weren't quite sure what they are going to do in the health space. Sam Altman was asked, and he immediately deferred to Ellison and Masayoshi. Ellison was vague... it seems they know they want to do something with Ellison's massive stash of health data... but they don't quite know what they are building yet.


If they were smart, they'd build MS Fabric for health data, especially if they control a big chunk of the EHR.

Providing a turnkey HIPAA-compliant but modern health dataverse would be huge.


That already exists: https://www.truveta.com/


That looks like a different use case.

The Snowflake-for-health is more about opening EHR data for operational use by providers and facilities.

Versus being locked into respective EHR platforms.

If Oracle provided a compelling data suite (a la MS) within their own cloud ecosystem, they'd have less reason to restrict it at the EHR level (as they'd have lock-in at the platform level), which would help them compete against Epic (who can't pivot to openness in the same way, without risking their primary product).


I think you mean PostgreSQL for EHR data. MS Fabric and Snowflake are analytical databases, not operational. Patient privacy requirements (and HIPAA law) is a blocker for having an open operational database for EHR.


Oracle makes perfect sense in that they are 1) a massive datacenter company, and 2) sell a variety of saas products to enterprises, which is a major target market for AI.


Oracle has 2-3% market share as a Cloud Provider.

MSFT or even Google (AWS is not as mature in that space imho) made perfect sense, Oracle doesn't.

Elon and Larry are good friends, I would guess that has something to do with this development.


> Oracle has 2-3% market share as a Cloud Provider.

And the market leader is what, 30%? about 1 order of magnitude. That's not such a huge difference, and I suspect that Oracle's size is disproportionate in the enterprise space (which is where a lot of AI services are targeted) whereas AWS has a _ton_ of non-enterprise things hosted.

In any case, 2-3% is big enough where this kind of investment is 1) financially possible, 2) desirable to grow to be #2 or #3


Getting from 2% (Oracle) to 10% (GCP) market share would need 37.97% CAGR in 5 years. In a vacuum where everything else keeps the same, maybe, but I see that goal as very difficult to attain in what is a highly competitive industry right now.

Disclaimer: I work at a highly regulated industry and we are fine running our "enterprise" workloads in Azure (and even AWS for a spinoff company in the same sector). Oracle has no specific moat in that area imho, unless you already locked-in in one of their software offerings.


Sadly, it is not that unexpected given some of his recent interviews[1]. Any other day, I would agree it is a surprise.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...


Oracle has a lot of valuable classified information about the state and its enemies due to its business.


There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to be on his bad side right now. Moreover, we hear here and there that Trump "keeps his promises". A lot of the promises we do not know about and we may never will. These people did not spend money supporting his campaign for nothing. In other places and eras this would have been called corruption, now it is called "keeping his promises".


Trump is one of the most famous people in the world for not keeping promises of paying debts. But there is money to be made temporarily when he is running a caper, as long as you can get your hand in the pot before he steals it.


And you, are you simping for the Obidens of this world?

Corruption is as old as mankind; don't know why it's pointed out prominently. Just look at that Xipeng/Biden photo from the National Archives.


If your knee jerk response to any political discussion even remotely critical of 'your guy' is to snap into whataboutisim instead of participating in the conversation you might need a outrage pornography detox for a while.


> And you, are you simping for the Obidens of this world?

Did I?

> Corruption is as old as mankind

Yeah but seldomly celebrated or boasted about.


> There is a certain reason that last weeks everybody and their grandma is simping for Trump. Nobody would want to be on his bad side

It's worth keeping in mind how extremely unfriendly to tech the last admin was. At this point, it's basically proven in court that emails of the form "please deboost person x or else" were send, and there's probably plenty more we don't know about.

Combine that with the troubles in Europe which Biden's administration was extremely unwilling to help with, the obstacles thrown in the way of major energy buildouts, which are needed for AI... one would have to be stupid to be a tech CEO and not simp for Trump.

Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap the consequences.


> Tech has been extremely Democratic for many years. The Democrats have utterly alienated tech, and now they reap the consequences.

Well, on the other side it can be said that Big Tech wasn't really on the side of democracy (note: democracy, not the Democrat Party) itself, and it hasn't been for years - at the very least ever since Cambridge Analytica was discovered. The "big tech" sector has only looked at profit margins, clicks, eyeballs and other KPIs while completely neglecting its own responsibility towards its host, and it got treated as the danger it posed by the Biden administration and Europe alike.

As for the cryptocoin world that has also been campaigning for the 45th: they are an even worse cancer on the world. Nothing but a gigantic waste of resources (remember the prices of GPUs, HDDs and RAM going through the roof, coal power plants being reactivated?), rug pulls and other scams.

The current shift towards the far-right is just the final masks falling off. Tech has rather (openly) supported the 45th than to learn from the chaos it has brought upon the world and make at least a paper effort to be held accountable.


Yes, big tech was the kid caught in the corner cleaning out the cookie jar and threw a tantrum when one parent moved the jar out of reach as punishment in effort to help the industry learn self-control. Now the other parent has come home and has not only returned the cookie jar to the kid but pledged to bring them packs of cookies by the shipping container to gorge on in exchange for favors.


the troubles in Europe

Nice euphemism for giving people autonomy in their data and privacy.

Most of there companies are so large that they cannot really fail anymore. At this point it has very little to do with protecting themselves, more with making them more powerful than governments. JD Vance are said that the US could drop support for NATO if Europe tries to regulate X [1]. Oligarchs have fully infiltrated the US government and are trying to do the same to other countries.

I disagree with the grandparent. They don't support Trump because they do not want to be on his bad side (well, at least not only that), they support Trump because they see the opportunity to suppress regulation worldwide and become more powerful than governments.

We just keep making excuses (fiduciary duties, he just doesn't know how to wave his arm because he's an autist [2]). Why not just call it what it is?

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] Which is pretty offensive to people on the spectrum.


I do agree that big part of why they support Trump is for anti-regulation reasons. But, it is also a fact that Trump is one of them, a businessman, not a politician. With Trump they can now discuss more business and less policies. There is a certain dealing of business right now that seems not at all transparent. And in this, the amount of public simping is really weird to what usually happens, everybody praising Trump even before he was taking office, and even tiktok, "coming out" as whatever etc.

Oligarchs want less regulation, but they also want these beefy government contracts. They want weaker government to regulate them and stronger government to protect them and bully other countries. Way I see it, what they actually want is control of the government, and with Trump they have it (more than before).


That person is much more of a politician than a businessman.

We have more energy and are pumping more domestic oil than ever. We are a major exporter of LNG. Trump just killed EV subsidies, and electric charging network funding.

What are you talking about via Europe? Holding tech companies accountable to meddling in domestic politics? Not allowing carte blanche to user data?

I understand (though do not like) large corps tiptoeing around Trump in order to manipulate him, it is due to fear. Not due to Trump having respectable values.




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