Thread by @QuinnyPig

And now, it's time for a livetweet thread.

"What on earth could be happening now that's worth livetweeting?" you might reasonably wonder.

Why, the @oracle quarterly earnings call, of course! Let's tune in...

If you'll recall, @oracle was late to the cloud. Now they're late to the earnings call.

Credit where due, @oracle met their guidance.

The bad news is that cloud demonstrated year over year growth of... 4%. Ouch.

cnbc.com/2020/03/12/ora…

Hey, they have a new board member: @vsikka. I've met him a handful of times back in his @infosys days; he's sharp, warm, and personable. Great pick.

Ooh, the call is finally starting.

"Because our founder and chairman @FakeOracleLarry is on the call, we must begin with a disclaimer that none of what you're about to hear is necessarily true."

"We're modifying how we're reporting some earnings" means that it's a game of "spot the sucker" for analysts everywhere.

Cloud services and license nonsense (same business unit) has gross margins of over 80%. That's... a signal of underinvestment in cloud by a *LOT*. Building a cloud properly is fiendishly expensive.

Instead they're investing another $15 billion in share buybacks. Well, it's a good time to get stocks on a discount!

Now a COVID19 update: careful framing of 'the future is uncertain, don't blame us for whatever the stock is going to do next quarter.'

(@oracle CEO Safra Catz is very, very polished at this. Just enough personality injected to keep it from being monotonic, but she's not deviating from her prepared remarks. Incredibly hard balance to strike...)

And now passing the mic to @fakeoraclelarry, by way of contrast.

"We will be number 1 in Cloud ERP applications and Autonomous Database Infrastructure," not mentioning that the latter is a term they've entirely invented themselves.

"Now let me take a minute to shit on SAP. Now I'll do the same to Workday. Workday's lack of success is creating opportunities for @Oracle." Christ, what an asshole. Compete with folks all you want, but publicly shitting on their businesses is... a look.

"Here's a list of customers who bought Oracle ERP."

Name-checked Customer: "In retrospect we'd rather have been called out for an S3 Bucket Negligence Award."

"Dr. Pepper bought an array of our marketing products." Ouch. To everyone.

"Now let's talk about our infrastructure business, driven by our autonomous database."

Cites high growth rates, the "tremendous technology advantage" of Oracle databases as if Route 53 weren't a strategic threat...

Larry is very proud about his Gen 2 cloud. No, you didn't miss Gen 1; they're just framing it this way because OCI was terrible until recently.

Credit where due: @oraclecloud Gen2 is technically excellent.

Sunoco is migrating their e-business suite to OCI.

National Bank of Canada is migrating all of their Oracle Databases to Gen2 @oraclecloud. I suppose their ability to print money helps.

And now Q&A!

Heather Bellini at @GoldmanSachs: "Tell me about your database rebound. You told us things would improve there and they have; telling the truth isn't your style. What's going on?"

"Having great products overwhelms everything" says Safra.

She's right; @oracle technology *has* to be stellar, given how reviled they are for their business practices.

Then tags in Larry to see if he has anything to add.

"Human beings, as it turns out, REALLY love their kids, so when we threaten them we find they buy more. And as for their pets--"

"OKAY THANKS LARRY, OPERATOR CAN WE PLEASE GET ANOTHER GODDAMNED QUESTION RIGHT NOW!!!"

Larry continues talking about how bad Amazon's database pricing is and I somehow just spat coffee all over my screen despite not drinking coffee at the moment.

(@awscloud billing has serious issues, but they're very, very different than @oracle billing issues.)

"Where's your growth coming from?"

"New customers, migrating customers, winning customers over from our competitors, inventing fake customers--wait, scratch that last one."

(For those following along remotely, @oracle is HUGE. They offer a lot of things to an awful lot of folks. Their founder has an "I'm an asshole" problem, but a lot of those things they make are rock solid. Some great people do work there, to be clear.)

Barclay's Capital asks them to compare and contrast how this moment compares with 2008 right before the crash, as @Barclays analysts apparently enjoy asking unanswerable questions just to hear themselves talk.

Catz avoids it deftly, being well used to dumb questions.

"You're buying back a lot of stock. Can you give some color to that?"

"Because giving back money to the shareholders is the best possible investment we can see from where we sit" is the honest answer. It is *not* what they're saying.

"Our stock has gone on clearance sale over the last few days!" is something their CEO just said with a straight face.

Safra Catz continues to find ways to politely point out that trying to predict what COVID19 is going to do to next quarter's earnings is a fool's errand, but these analysts keep asking anyway.

Final question from @RaymondJames:
"Applications are growing well. Are there any headwinds against growth that you can foresee?"

Safra and Larry both weigh in and avoid mentioning the virus. Good attempt by the analyst, but a waste of a question.

Larry talks about a customer's in-house programming language. It's not clear how this relates to the question, but it does give Larry a chance to indulge his "shitting on customers" hobby, which is his favorite thing to do when a spare puppy isn't around for him to kick.

And that ends the call. Larry goes back to his island, Safra goes to drink away her despair at ever getting Larry on message, and the analysts go back to kindergarten.

Thanks for reading!