Some will cheer “good riddance”, and welcome with open arms the new all-singing, all-dancing, “My Oracle Support”. Others, like me, may reflect on the demise of a stalwart of Oracle’s public-facing persona’s

With it’s configurable widgets, and shiny colours, the new Oracle Support site certainly conveys a sense of modernity that simply did not exist with Metalink. But then Metalink harks back to a bygone era of the Web, where functionality and form were the key attributes of a web site; where the phrase “user experience” was just a glint in the PR-man’s eye; where the key aim was to accept input, process and return results in a simple manner, with no thought to making the output pretty, or integrated, or encapsulated in Web 2.0 bubble wrap.

Sure Metalink had its foibles. The fact no matter how many times you set-up and saved your preferences in the “My Metalink News” option, the new items never seemed to fully reflect them. Or the fact that the search facility required an eccentric and devious turn of phrase to construct a search criteria that would actually bring back the results you really wanted, rather than just 100 hits of pages with a loose affiliation to some of the key words.

Nevertheless, it was used by countless thousands of users, managers, developers, hackers, day-in day-out for what seems like a lifetime. A constant companion and resource in an ever-changing world of technology.

I know Oracle have been pushing us hard over the last few months to ‘upgrade’ to the “new experience”, however i cannot be the only one who persisted in  checking the “use classic interface” option whilst logging in?

I’m also sure i cannot be the only one, who in the last few months run-up to this weekend’s big switch-off, have extended their use of 3rd-party sites, forums, blogs and even Google, in a bid to seek enlightenment, rather than tangle with the new beast.

Perhaps this is the price we must pay for “progress”. I will miss the ‘old fella’

Farewell, and good bye, to Metalink. You have served me well.