Oracle's Cloud did not start recently. It goes back to 1999


This article in Fortune Magazine on May 24, 1999,   talks about Oracle's Business Online (BOL), where 22 customers were going to start paying Oracle a subsription fee and not purchase their own hardware, not purchase their own software, not hire their own DBA's. Oracle was going to manage their servers for them, over the internet.

Anybody who's thinking Oracle Cloud started just in the recent years may want to rethink their position. During the September 2021 Wall Street Earnings conference call, Larry Ellison stated that Oracle and Netsuite were pioneers in Cloud Computing, which is true. He also stated that Amazon was years behind Oracle in starting Cloud Computing, which is also true. Some people say that BOL did not have the elasticity that AWS and other current cloud offerings have today, but BOL was offering Oracle RAC (clustered servers), which was Oracle's way of adding elasticity at that time. Of course, many RAC installations were unstable, but that supports Vicken's claim that Oracle systems were being built and suffering failures on false assumptions, not because of a lack of elastic resources.

What happened? How did Amazon's AWS surpass Oracle's BOL, Hosting, Managed Services and now Oracle Cloud?

Is the problem with Oracle Cloud or the fact that most technicians around the world relate to Oracle's DB engine with unreliable assumptions?