Not Oracle related, but ... in the late 90s, I was at a company that was doing web stuff - number of cgi/perl projects, but they'd started doing ASP as well in 98. Had a couple clients really scale up - one client had 80 servers load balanced, all running Windows NT. A friendly MS rep stopped by because the client had been getting so much press for their ecommerce work (which we were doing) and went... "oh wow, you have 150 servers that each should be licensed at $8k/server... let's talk!". The very next day the CEO came to a big dev meeting and started ranting that we needed to optimize the hell out of the sites to get the server count down ASAP. And... we also became an 'official' MS partner, which seemed to put the kibosh (officially or otherwise) on more expansive work in to Java. We were doing a bit of Java, but I think we'd have expanded more in that direction without the MS pressure. Yes, they fed us more work... but it meant... we were doing more hands on work (fixing loads of bugs in their commerce server) while they just collected license revenue. Great business if you can get it, I guess...
FWIW, I have no doubt that story was not isolated at the start of the web boom. I just happened to see inside a company when it was happening. It's also why I tend to take a FOSS-first attitude to tech.
Windows NT (just like Oracle) simply had a setting in the control panel for the number of connections allowed. You were supposed to buy licenses for all of them, but in practice nobody seriously followed that. Until they got audited by the BSA (Business Software Alliance).
To be fair, though, Microsoft typically was willing to work with companies and negotiate volume discounts. They were not interested in immediate shakedowns (like Oracle), but preferred building long-term relationships.
I guess this is why Microsoft is respected, while Oracle is despised.
FWIW, I have no doubt that story was not isolated at the start of the web boom. I just happened to see inside a company when it was happening. It's also why I tend to take a FOSS-first attitude to tech.