market not buying the story
seems that may not be the case, the way I read it anyway, from el reg's story
"Sales of new software licenses [..] down 16.7 per cent, year on year."
"But new license revenue for the year was $8.54bn, down 9.4 per cent annually."
then
"Hardware systems sales were down 6 per cent in Q4 and down 5 per cent for the full year"
So new hardware sales down less than new software.
I'll be pretty shocked if Chuck can somehow (single handedly?) make Oracle's stuff "exciting". His EMC blog posts didn't seem all that great to me back in those days, I never bothered to follow him when he moved to VMware (nothing against him, I haven't really followed any bloggers the past 3 or even 4 years now, myself have mostly stopped blogging as well, very little in tech excites me these days)