Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been trying really hard to make sure things are named in as straightforward a way as possible. It was a very early decision pre-launch, and unsurprisingly not that hard to stick to. Marketing people didn't argue, either, but maybe that's a difference between the marketing team backgrounds? Enterprise company CIOs etc. don't want to have a translation guide when it comes to making purchasing decisions.
Some of the "WTF, how did they come up with that name" with AWS comes entirely down to the public name being the internal project name, e.g. Snowball. Various engineers and managers have facepalmed hard when marketing decided to go with the easiest option and use that name rather than come up with something meaningful.
And then I’m stuck with the 4th (?) place cloud provider with a horrible reputation. Choosing Oracle definitely would violate the CYA rule - “No one ever got fired for choosing $what_everyone_else_chooses”. I would be safer choosing Azure or even GCP.
Er, I'd argue that aiming for safety and/or following the crowd aren't really the ingredients of a sound decision making process. On that basis no challenger would ever stand a chance.
That’s not my problem. Everyone looks out for their own self interest. Let’s say that OCI and AWS both statistically had the same uptime. If AWS went down for a day no one is going to question you as CTO for choosing AWS, besides you’re in the same boat as everyone else. If Oracle Cloud went down, everyone is going to be questioning your decision.
But, the saying initially was about IBM. The CTOs in the 60s and 70s who chose IBM instead of one of their competitors in hindsight made a good decision. You can still buy hardware from IBM today that can run COBOL programs written thirty to forty years ago. All of IBMs competitors are long dead.
From a recruitment standpoint, you can easily find someone who knows or wants to learn AWS or Azure - Oracle Cloud - not so much.
Some of the "WTF, how did they come up with that name" with AWS comes entirely down to the public name being the internal project name, e.g. Snowball. Various engineers and managers have facepalmed hard when marketing decided to go with the easiest option and use that name rather than come up with something meaningful.