Softwar (eBook)

An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

Matthew Symonds (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2013 | 1. Auflage
528 Seiten
Simon & Schuster (Verlag)
9781439127582 (ISBN)

Infos

In a business where great risks, huge fortunes, and even bigger egos are common, Larry Ellison stands out as one of the most outspoken, driven, and daring leaders of the software industry. The company he cofounded and runs, Oracle, is the number one business software company: perhaps even more than Microsoft's, Oracle's products are essential to today's networked world.

But Oracle is as controversial as it is influential, as feared as it is revered, thanks in large part to Larry Ellison. Though Oracle is one of the world's most valuable and profitable companies, Ellison is not afraid to suddenly change course and reinvent Oracle in the pursuit of new and ever more ambitious goals. Softwar examines the results of these shifts in strategy and the forces that drive Ellison relentlessly on.

In Softwar, journalist Matthew Symonds gives readers an exclusive and intimate insight into both Oracle and the man who made it and runs it. As well as relating the story of Oracle's often bumpy path to industry dominance, Symonds deals with the private side of Ellison's life. From Ellison's troubled upbringing by adoptive parents and his lifelong search for emotional security to the challenges and opportunities that have come with unimaginable wealth, Softwar gets inside the skin of a fascinating and complicated human being. With unlimited insider access granted by Ellison himself, Symonds captures the intensity and, some would say, the recklessness that have made Ellison a legend.

The result of more than a hundred hours of interviews and many months spent with Ellison, Softwar is the most complete portrait undertaken of the man and his empire -- a unique and gripping account of both the way the computing industry really works and an extraordinary life.

Despite his closeness to Ellison, Matthew Symonds is a candid and at times highly critical observer. And in perhaps the book's most unusual feature, Ellison responds to Symonds's portrayal in the form of a running footnoted commentary.

The result is one of the most fascinating business stories of all time.

Textauszug

Chapter One: Larry and Me

I first met Larry Ellison in his office at Oracle's Redwood Shores headquarters on December 8, 1997. I had recently become The Economist's technology and communications editor, and this was the first of what became regular visits to Silicon Valley. I had just completed two days of meetings at Microsoft's campus at Redmond, Washington, 800 miles to the north, where an array of impressively on-message executives had been wheeled out for my benefit -- though unfortunately not Bill Gates himself. I would see him on my next visit, I was assured. But there was a strong hint that 'face time with Bill' was conditional on The Economist's taking a more sympathetic line toward Microsoft in the antitrust case that the Department of Justice was preparing against it. After a similar turn involving Oracle's most senior managers, I had been promised time with Ellison himself.

It turned out I'd picked a bad afternoon. I didn't know it at the time, but Oracle was about to issue its first earnings warning since the firm had nearly gone under in 1990. The economic crisis in Asia had taken its toll, and in North America, slowing license sales of Oracle's most important product, its all-conquering database, seemed to support the argument of some analysts that Oracle was dominating a market that was getting close to saturation. The following day, the stock lost 30 percent of its value.

As I waited, I could see Ellison through the glass doors of the eleventh-floor boardroom, huddled in conversation. He was already an hour and a half late for his interview with me and I knew he had to fly to New York later in the day to deliver a keynote speech at an Internet conference. I had heard stories about Ellison's lateness and didn't believe the press flak's distracted excuses about an 'emergency' being the cause of the delay. Let's leave it for another time, I suggested grumpily. But at that moment, I was suddenly ushered into Ellison's handsome office with its expensive Japanese artifacts and panoramic views across the bay.

Despite the strain he must have been under, Ellison was courtesy itself. After apologizing profusely for his lateness, he began to talk about technology. His theme was the failure of the prevailing computer architecture of the day, known as client/server (because the job of running software was shared between server computers in corporate data centers and their desktop PC 'clients'). He believed client/server was an 'evolutionary dead end' that was 'distributing complexity' with disastrous consequences. The answer was a new model of computing based on the Internet, in which the complexity and the computing would be hidden in the network. Users would be able to access everything they needed through a web browser that could be run by a machine much less expensive and cantankerous than a PC -- a network computer.

There was nothing unexpected in this. It was a drum that Ellison had been beating for some time, and conceptually it was little different from Sun Microsystems's famous slogan that 'the network is the computer.' Ellison had first declared the PC 'a ridiculous device' at a technology conference in Paris more than two years earlier. The speech, at the height of the hoopla surrounding the release of Windows 95 and in front of an audience that included Bill Gates, caused a...