Disclosure - I work for Oracle. If you think support is 13 levels removed from development, you haven't worked at a software company. As we speak, I'm sitting in a conference room with no fewer than 4 product managers. I've worked personally with developers for a variety of our products. And we're a BIG company. When I was working support at a startup, I could walk over to the dev area and physically bully them into helping me troubleshoot when it was necessary. Oracle is very good about making sure that development is well aware of how the products are used in the field and what the issues are; getting involved in support is only a part of that.

Well, I can't say much useful about that. As you know, list price usually != sale price, negotiate your discounts, etc. It's worth it to enough people, I suppose, otherwise they wouldn't charge that much.

Disclosure - I work for Oracle, though not for the OBIEE team. The people I know that work with OBIEE repeatedly claim the best scaling BI architecture in the industry. They even went so far as to describe in fairly deep detail the specific technical reasons for it, which I believe added up to being able to horizontally scale the software components to meet your specific performance needs.

Classic. Someone making fun of "furriners what can't read good" makes two mistakes in his post. Apparent, not appearant. Can't, not cant.

maybe PearPC has become much more useful? It wouldn't have to carry the burden of emulating a PowerPC on intel anymore- but I believe they've taken care of emulating Open Firmware. Unless Apple uses this mystery DRM scheme that Intel has supposedly stuffed into its latest Pentium variants, I'm pretty sure people will be installing the leaked OS X 10.4.1 for Intel on non-Apple branded PCs shortly after it ships to developers in two weeks...

re: do a search for linux... The "first thing" you're referring to is an ad. Do a search for Linux on Google, and you get the same exact link as the first result on the right-hand side under "Relevant ads" or whatever they're called - MSN just calls them "sponsored sites". I'm not advocating trusting Microsoft, but I really think you were not being objective here and felt the need to.....object.