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Oracle went to market in the 1980s with relational databases, a technology taken from IBM. Its pitch was that customers didn't want to be locked into IBM, and that a relational database could run anywhere. The reason that pitch is a joke is that Oracle, more than anyone, built a business on lock-in.
The cloud companies repeat the move. They talk about portability, then tell customers to use their service, which only runs in their cloud, and now the customers are locked in. All of enterprise sales is companies whose long-term goal is to lock you in, getting you on board by making you afraid of being locked into somebody else.
How did Oracle build lock-in?
Oracle added its own extensions to standard database tools, including the PL/SQL programming language introduced in the late 1980s. Applications written with those extensions run only on Oracle databases. Moving to another vendor meant rewriting the code.
How did IBM research lead to Oracle?
IBM researcher Edgar F. Codd published the relational model in 1970. IBM's System R project then built an early SQL prototype and published papers describing it. Larry Ellison's team built on those published ideas, and Oracle released the first commercial SQL database in 1979.
Why do cloud portability promises fall short?
Many managed cloud services have no equivalent elsewhere, and applications built on them have to be rewritten to move. Amazon DynamoDB, for example, runs only on AWS. The more services a customer adopts, the more code ties it to one provider.
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