Low-ball
Reduced pricing is an interesting move by Oracle in the face of increasing competition from Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2.
Last year, according to IDC, Oracle's share of the market for database management software slipped below 40 percent, to 39.4 percent. IBM gained the most market share, reaching a total of 33.6 percent of the sales, while Microsoft gained 1.4 points to take 11.1 percent of the market, making it the fastest-growing vendor by percentage.
Also factor in the pricing structure has to be the rise of MySQL as a legitimate competitor in the DBMS space. None of this can be good for Oracle's database margins (but I'm sure it hasn't ruffled Ellison's ego).