I don't understand the negativity towards using consultants and off-shoring.

Using consultants is a business decision which helps the company hire people for the short term of the project and also offload risk. Not all companies have the capability to handle all kinds of risk. For example, software companies don't specialise in financial models and investing. So they don't take on financial risks by investing in derivatives and other instruments to make profit. Whenever possible, risk outside core competencies is outsourced. This is good for the company as then it can focus on the core business and make money.

Off-shoring is bad in the sense that jobs are lost in the local economy. But, this is again similar to having a factory in China as opposed to San Francisco. It brings in more expertise at a reduced cost. Off-shoring helps make things cheaper in the end. For example, as your insurance company uses off-shore consultants to make their software, it is cheaper directly translating to lower insurance premiums. the same for many other products.

While I understand that software is a different beast to build unlike toys or other products. Once built, the normal theories of economics still apply.

Oracle is lethargic from the perspective of its employees because the company is extraordinarily sluggish and apathetic.

The pace at which Oracle develops software, the flagship Oracle Database for example, is ridiculously slow. The Database team takes about 3 months to 6 months to develop tiny changes (say 10 to 20 lines of code). In other Fortune 500 companies I have worked for, I have seen such changes taking about a few days (5 days max!). I am not kidding! What takes say 3 days to develop in a normal software company may take about 3 months to develop in Oracle. And mind you, Oracle Database is one of the premier departments of Oracle; other departments are even worse!

Oracle is also remarkably apathetic to its employees. The link[1] shared by foo101, i.e. has a few anecdotes that highlights this apathy. In fact, when I read James Gosling's account of Oracle in that link, I thought, "Wow! This is so accurate. Even someone of the name and fame as James Gosling had to face the same lowly problems at Oracles that relatively unknown developers in Oracle face."

Disclaimer: I worked for Oracle for 2 years.

[1]: http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-...

Oracle lives in a market protected by high barriers to entry and low customer expectations. Protecting corporate databases from corruption and unauthorized access is crucial to any IT department. Incentive to change the DBMS vendor is nil compared to the expense and risks of converting. And no one, from CTO to DBA, makes any demand to substantially improve the product, such as by rectifying theoretical problems with SQL that have been recognized for decades.

It's no different with SQL Server or DB2. Each vendor has its captured market, with very little power to enlarge its share and commensurately little need to innovate. Customer demands amount to operational window dressing. Why spend money on engineering when customer and vendor are both satisfied?

It's the lethargic "itis" a tick or mosquito or lamprey feels after sucking your blood.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the%20Itis

You buy an Oracle DB because (a) you have a fleet of Oracle DBAs who agitate for you to keep Oracle, (b) plenty of software you want to buy only works with Oracle (or only has Oracle as the top-tier option) and once you've bought Oracle and hired Oracle DBAs it's hard to justify having other things, and (c) Oracle are very good at selling their product up the management chain; their enterprise sales teams speak the language people who run companies do, and IT departments don't.

(And I don't mean golf.)