Oracle sold their Designer and Developer product's to enterprises and consulting groups, who in turn created thousands of systems that are still in place as of 2021.

Oracle Designer was based on a well thought out set of concepts that suited the types of systems being developed from the 1980s to the mid 2000s.

Oracle Designer/Developer divided software development into data and applications, which were viewed at three levels of abstraction; Modelling, Design and implementation.

This gives a 2x3 matrix of views which was visible throughout the product's lifecycle: This structure was simpler than the software development processes that came before and was a better fit to the available technology.

It was also simpler and led to a higher level of code generation than competing methodologies of the time such as IBM's Rational Unified Process.

Although later versions of Oracle Developer included an application server, it required a java based plug-in to be installed in the users-browser which placed high demands on end-users browsers.

Eventually enterprises moved to other development tools which supported HTTP/HTML form based transactions, removing the need for the associated Oracle Designer.

Internet technologies such as HTTP, SOAP and Web-services became industry standards for data-exchange, but Oracle Developer's architecture made it hard to activate part of an application from an external source.

From 2000 onwards, graphical user interfaces and usability became a major factor in adopting newer development stacks.

For example each screen had a query and insert mode which allowed users to find and manipulate thinly veiled database records.

Expectations of system user-friendliness increased in the 2000s and eventually outweighed the development productivity advantages of generating these types of applications.