I’ve seen people choose Oracle Cloud because it was cheaper than AWS/GCP/Azure. Maybe Oracle is selling at a loss to gain more market share, but if you design things right, moving to another provider isn’t that hard. In practice, AWS seems to have much more vendor lock-in
Oracle has so many acquired products, many businesses are paying for one and people don’t even notice. For example, NetSuite for accounting. Cerner runs hospitals. Lots of industry-specific software in utilities, insurance, manufacturing, etc
Compared to (say) IBM, Oracle is much keener on killing legacy products
i use oracle cloud for its extraordinarily generous free tier but it is straight up the worst website for any cloud service i've ever encountered, it reminds me of going into a retail shop that is clearly a money laundering front. the dashboard page seems purposefully designed to prevent you from managing your assets and i had to contact a support agent to figure out how to attach a credit card to my account.
I'm not talking about free usage, I'm talking about people spending serious money on cloud services. Cases I've heard about, Oracle sales were willing to engage in much more aggressive discounting on a large deal than AWS or GCP or Azure were, making going with Oracle pretty much a no-brainer from a cost viewpoint. I've heard similar stories about IBM as well. I suppose the second-tier players feel a need to fight for business that the first-tier players don't.
No idea about their web UI (although it can't possibly be as bad as the UIs of some of their legacy on-premise products) – but serious usage one tends to use the APIs much more than the web UI.
Oracle has so many acquired products, many businesses are paying for one and people don’t even notice. For example, NetSuite for accounting. Cerner runs hospitals. Lots of industry-specific software in utilities, insurance, manufacturing, etc
Compared to (say) IBM, Oracle is much keener on killing legacy products