I bet the mid-sized bank founded in 1888 will still be around well after 80% of these tech companies failed...

Being around isn't the same as growth though, and being around doesn't necessarily mean to run your own IT infrastructure either.

I find this modern fixation on growth MBA's have forced upon the business world to be facinating

Use to Stability, and Profitability not growth was important.

Stability, and Profitability were the goal, growth followed but was not in itself a goal

Now even if you are profitable, if you are not seeing growth then you failed. It is ridiculous.

I don't disagree in general, but Oracle is a tech company and technology has a particular function in our society that wasn't invented by MBAs.

The role of technology is to drive productivity growth, which is ultimately the only thing that improves living standards (or at least has the potential to do so).

A pizza sold in 1987 is just as useful as a pizza sold in 2017 measured by its nutritional value. But the same is not true of technologies from 1987.

I'd argue for the Oracle growth drivers, things are much better than 1987, but only marginally better than 1999.

These mega vendors drive co-dependency, not innovation.

Oracle's lockin doesn't just come from their database. There are also behemoth business/logistics/financial applications that exist only as PL/SQL packages and a bit of Java UI. Moving off Oracle Applications is a lot harder than switching databases.