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Softwar : An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison
Matthew Symonds took a leave of absence from The Economist in March 2000 to follow Ellison in his daily routines, his management meetings, his sales calls and his regattas. But he is not the only author of the book. After the manuscript was ready by Symonds' standards, Larry Ellison took over the footnotes. Both co-authors agreed not to change each other's text, but Ellison felt he had to clarify certain points about his life, career, and vision. Softwar is somewhere in the middle between biography and autobiography -- the life of Larry Ellison is retold by another author, although the book is uniquely personal with Ellison's remarks constantly adding to the personal touch of the book. Statements like "It was a big mistake, and it was my mistake. I didn't think that Microsoft Windows would crush IBM OS/2 and all the other desktop systems -- but it did" allow Ellison to showcase his personal viewpoint in a straightforward and succinct manner.
Unlike many biographies, Softwar doesn't start with Ellison's poverty-ridden childhood in a poor Russian-immigrant family, where he was an adopted kid. That story comes much later, but from the Chapter 1 we're involved in Oracle's selling process, with Ellison talking to the Japanese executives, Ellison giving a keynote speech, Ellison talking to his sales reps - it's all about Ellison, and it's all about selling. Rarely in the book will you see a description of the actual coding process or any description of software development practices at Oracle, which by revenue ranks second among the global software corporations. It's all about sales calls, support calls, commissions, discounts and sales numbers in the million and billion dollar range - Ellison is as concentrated on the financial revenues as a CEO could possibly be.
A supporter of open standards, Ellison does not like the cacophony of enterprise-scale products offered to the companies. "If Detroit ran like Silicon Valley, nobody would sell cars -- just parts", he proclaims. "Customers would have to figure out which were the best parts -- a Honda engine, a Ford transmission, a BMW chassis, GM electrical system -- and buy them and try to assemble them into a working car. Good luck. I know it sounds crazy, but that's how companies put together business systems today".
Since Symonds followed Ellison everywhere he went, the readers get to see Ellison's lifestyle, observe his Japanese gardens in Atherton, meet with Oracle vice-presidents and sales people, follow him in regattas, while listening to a heavy dose of why Oracle E-Business Suite is going to revolutionize many businesses around the country.
The author covers Ray Lane's departure from Oracle in great detail, while Ellison is profuse with comments on why Lane needed to be let go. Market moves of Oracle's main competitors -- Siebel, SAP and PeopleSoft -- are also followed closely, with obligatory disparaging remarks coming from Ellison about what's wrong with each competitor's business. Sometimes I felt the book got too much into describing Oracle politics, like departmental and subdivisional re-organizations with pointers on who was managing which operation, but perhaps the book would lose detail without it. If you have been employed at Oracle, or know some of the people personally, perhaps it's interesting; most of the time the descriptions of policy changes in sales force compensation is perhaps too mundane for a biographical book.
For instance, on page 139 Symonds describes Lane's pending departure to become the CEO of Novell. Symonds presents Lane's point of view:
"He said he'd talked to the board and he thought $2.5 million in options was the right number. You deserve it. I thought he'd gone way overboard, so of course I stayed. I didn't find out until I left Oracle that the board was pissed off about this. No one ever told me, and I certainly wasn't holding Oracle up for money."Lane's quote is followed by an asterisk with a footnote from Ellison: "Not a holdup? He said he was going to Novell because of the money. I offered him more money to stay. It was a classic holdup. He stayed."
This book being a recent publication, it covers a lot of Oracle products in detail, supplemented by Ellison's viewpoints on how this or that product is going to change a certain business or industry. While Oracle is hardly a household name outside the IT field, the author makes a great effort to explain Oracle server product family in simple terms, without going too basic. Competition (and general resentment) with Microsoft runs throughout the company, and Ellison is not afraid to accentuate it. Mark Jarvis, a senior marketing official, supplied an interesting quote about Microsoft's practices and current Linux outlook: "Linux is the first thing that customers ask about. They love it." And as for Microsoft, "When they felt threatened by Netscape, it was just another company with a known HQ that could go out and bomb. But that won't work with Linux, just as it didn't work with Apache. Apache creamed them, and so will Linux. Microsoft has lost the server war."
Softwar provides an interesting insight into one of the largest software corporations, its business practices and famous personality of its chief executive officer. While this book prefers not to discuss the burned-up Ferraris on Highway 101 and personal jet fighters, we see Ellison as a serious and dedicated businessman. Ellison shares his experience from the past mistakes, talks about the current practices, and what he sees best for the company, emphasizes the idea of network computer as still useful and applicable to desktops, envisions Linux taking over the world (with Oracle supplying a lot of backend databases) and provides his insight into the future of technology. The book is a great read for those willing to find out more about Oracle or Ellison personally, as well as a primer on technology development and its future (from Oracle standpoint).
You can purchase Softwar from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
as for Microsoft, "When they felt threatened by Netscape, it was just another company with a known HQ that could go out and bomb. But that won't work with Linux, just as it didn't work with Apache. Apache creamed them, and so will Linux. Microsoft has lost the server war."
;>
once again, the oracle has only told me what i needed to hear.
Customers would have to figure out which were the best parts -- a Honda engine, a Ford transmission, a BMW chassis, GM electrical system -- and buy them and try to assemble them into a working car. Good luck. I know it sounds crazy, but that's how companies put together business systems today".
So whats wrong with that? Sounds like a fun project if you ask me. How about a Mini Cooper / Unicycle hybrid?
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
So is the reason for the Peoplesoft acquisition because they want to put a competitor out of business or take it over because they want peoplesoft's software maintanance ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
are you on bad crack? It's $19.60 at Amazon, not $24.95.
sure they'd only sell parts, but you'd be able to get car parts, truck parts, tank parts, plane parts, train parts, crane parts, snowplower parts, tires, tracks, helicopter rotors, blueprints, jet fuel, nitrous oxide, spoilers, giant robotic arms, spray paint for the exterior, radar systems, chassis extensions, ROCKET LAUNCHERS, and reconfigurable engines.
ANALOGIES SUCK.
few people achieve such glamour and general recognition...
Few people outside communist dictatorships have invested so much money and time in such a powerful personality cult...
Ceci n'est pas une signature
"are you on bad crack? It's $19.60 at Amazon, not $24.95."
....
Wow! Amazon are certainly diversifying. I wonder if it'll get past customs if they gift-wrap it... Only if it's the good stuff though
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Does it detail his support of the H1B/L1 visa programs or his desire to drive US programmers wages down to the levels of Indian programmers?
What about the use of H1B/L1 visa 'labor' to replace higher paid US labor at there offies in the US?
Is any of that covered?
As to those who say that H1B's have to be paid the same wages as Americans, please check. That was tied to the higher number of allowed visas and I do not think it applies any more.
I guess that's "free as in speech" shipping, not "free as in beer" shipping?
All's true that is mistrusted
Yeah, this guy is worse than Scott McNealy. He rants on Microsoft destroying innovation in the technology industry. But when's the last time Oracle actually came out with a new innovative product? The most forward thinking thing they have done was port Oracle to run on Linux early on.
Then he rants about IBM's software and hardware business dying and them only selling services. Guess what Larry, the hardware and software businesses for 20-year old concepts like operating systems and relational databases is dying. And Linux is leading that trend, by commoditizing the software, and creating value in the support and services sector. People are willing to pay IBM for building new systems for them, but they don't want to continue spending ridiculous amounts of money on licenses ever year for your database software.
for being brutal to the competitors while staying within ethical limits
I think you are mistaking the difference between "ethical" limits and "legal" limits. There's a wide gap.
Ever hear of PeopleSoft?
Am I the only one who read the title and thought, Ewwwww ?
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
But a good one
What's the difference between Larry Ellison and God? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison...
Boom, boom.
Sailing over the event horizon
no-iron slacks and no-iron shits
Dude, if you're thinking of ironing your own faeces then you've got bigger problems than just dress sense...
Nae bother
So, there is no mention of Oracle's technical
strengths (like MVCC?) And, isn't Oracle to
Postgres as Windows to Linux? Sounds like a
crappy book!
In fact even though we bitche about microsoft and bill gates, others are not much different. As Oscar wild had said, their morality is the lack of opportnity. Thus SUN, which was a "better" company showed its true color by funding sco FUD and ellison showed it with failed coup attempt against Peoplesoft. In fact, I am sure most of these companies would be the same or even worse than microsoft had they been having such a cash balance and market share.
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
...While this book prefers not to discuss the burned-up Ferraris on Highway 101 and personal jet fighters...
I don't know about you guys, but those sound like good parts.
He tried to buy a Russian MiG jet fighter, but US customs wouldn't allow it and he blatantly upset San Jose-area officials by landing his private jet after the 11pm curfew imposed in the area. When you have $50 billion in the bank, a $10,000 fine seems like pocket change. Any guy who likes to defy convention and authorities, and flies fighter jets for fun, has to be cool. It's part of the definition
I want more of those kinds of stories. For those of of un in the technology sector (most of the slashdot readership, I'm sure) we've seen most of Larry's career develop I think. Sure, a biography like this will have some stuff we all missed, but juicy tidbits like the jet fighter can't be left out.
[ http://www.dvigroup.net/self ]
I know the old joke about God not thinking he's Larry Ellison seems like an exaggeration, but Ellison's ego is uncontainable. I'd never seen him speak until I saw the segment about him on Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds PBS series. I was immediately repulsed by him. The man is obsessed with not only winning, but showing up his competitors. That's the difference between Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. Gates doesn't (publicly, at least) give a shit about Ellison. Ellison's obsessed with beating Gates.
There are a lot of huge egos in the computer industry, but none are larger than Larry Ellison's.
Indeed. Mr. Ellison was a pioneer in the field of vapourware. There is a long history of his salespeople selling features to their database product then rushing back to the developers to see if it can be added.
And since we're talking about ethics, Ellision wrote the text book on sexual harassment in the high-tech industry, having sexual relations with high level female employees, then firing them within a week of the romantic breakup.
It's really a mistake to read a 'friendly' history of Mr. Ellison. There are far better and less biased books about Ellison and Oracle, for instance: this one which the big jerk must HATE.
If you look up the term 'Asshole in a suit' in the dictionary, you should find Mr. Ellison's picture on the page next to the defintion.
A Good Intro to NetBS
"overrated"?
I feel it my duty to warn people off from the Askmen link. Here is an example:
You know, this article doesn't even say "database". Of course, it's on one of those horrible ad sites so the content is well disguised. If you want a better article, see Pingulars oddly modified post. Or what about Sunderland56's post about Ellison Abuse links on google? Also oddly modified
These are interesting - Askmen is just "Seventeen" in disguise. It's a link to set cookies for advertisers (if you aren't a rejecter). It is NOT a geek magazine. Utterly useless. And the odd modifications of substantive information makes me wonder whether it's tin foil hat time here on Slashdot.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Ok, so Apache kills IIS and Linux kills Windows in the server space. How is it that MySQL, postgreSQL, et al don't kill Oracle? Why is Oracle spared when the rest of the proprietary software industry falls victim to commoditization?
Just wondering.
I had some personal contact with L. E.
ethical is about the last word I would use to describe him.
This space available.
It's done in business every day. Hell that is the only thing my parent company knows how to do (that is how the company I work for got purchased). I have a difficult time understanding the thought that it is unethical to buy out a competitor. Remember they don't have to sell.
The funny thing about Larry Ellison in Silicon Valley is that he's mostly ignored here. He has the database business, but nobody else in the Valley does much in that area. His ventures into new technologies like thin clients, video streaming, and supercomputers have all been duds. Oracle is viewed as a large but boring enterprise applications company like Computer Associates, SAP, or Automatic Data Processing.
Oracle has chased multi-million dollar businesses right out of its management structure - and then spent millions trying to duplicate this competing software to (re)capture market share.
I would be really interested to hear Larry's take on Oracle's mistakes. I'd also like to hear how he plans to compete with a free product from SAP-MySQL that begins to implement the equivalent features of his database.
Oracle is staying ahead because multiversioning reads are a better database design for 24/7 hybrid (OLTP/OLAP) systems (i.e. ecommerce and just about everything else).
PostgreSQL is the only other product out there (including MS-SQL Server, DB2, Postgress, Informix, Sybase and MySQL(unpatched)) in which reads don't block writes and vice-versa.
The row level locking is also an original design in Oracle, where SQL Server and DB2 it is an add-on and both of them will eventually run out of row level locking resources and escalate to table locking.
> Unlike many biographies, Softwar doesn't start with Ellison's poverty-ridden childhood in a
> poor Russian-immigrant family, where he was an adopted kid.
I'm not sure if the reviewer was being tongue-in-check when he wrote that, or was honestly bamboozled by Ellison's PR machine. I am sure that when I read that, I remembered the comment his older step-sister once made on Ellison & his background: ``Every time I read about my adopted brother, the old neighborhood seemed to drop another notch on the socioeconomic scale."
According to Gary Rivlin, who wrote in his _The Plot to Get Bill Gates_, Ellison ``had grown up in a tidy community, home to its share of judges, doctors, and univeristy professors. His stepfather had known failure, but by the time his nephew came along, the senior Ellison was working respectably if dully as a bean counter for the local public housing agency. Their two-bedroom apartment was small and money may have been tight, but it was hardly the fough-and-tumble world that Ellison conjured up later in life."
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I worked for Oracle, we actually called it "Whoracle". It was one of the worst experiences of my working life.
As for analogies, if I could have a car with a Honda engine, American styling, etc. then I'd be a happy person. Oracle certainly doesn't do everything right, they have a good database and that's about it. It's incredible overkill for most mid-sized business though, yet they cram it down the throat of everyone they can.
Ellison is no genius, his core business was actually built on the infinite resources of U.S. Military Black Ops contracts. Sure he hates Gates and MS, but only because he didn't get there himself.
Regards, Lex
I wouldnt say that; neither the "brutal" (in other than a blustering vocal way) nor the ethical are true.
Once again, Slashdot puts somebody on a pilliar just because they ARENT Microsoft.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
As a Sr. Oracle DBA who has experience on a variety of Database systems as well as coding, architecture, and QA, I must say that Larry owes me time in that Garden of his.
Oracle is built like a GM car in 1972 - badly. It started as a powerful database engine that has now got so much... crap... tacked onto it that is a kludgy mess. Larry wants to be the next Enterprise System of Everything (tm). It's rather like going back to IBM in the sixties - one system, one shop, one software, one hefty price.
A running joke in California is the established list of consultant fees for the State Government. Oracle has the highest rate per hour. The next highest consultant fees are for Nobel Prize-winning think tank consultants.
Larry was THE man with THE right answer at THE right time - a powerful database with SQL that resided on multiple platforms of the day. His salesmanship has parlied it into Software #2. But is his vision anything more than Market Hype nowadays?
Oracle is still plagued by Theta style (WHERE clause) joins, while SQL Server has used JOIN systex. To get Oracle to run well and keep it running requires a lot of knowledge, much of it "tribal". I personally don't mind it much, as being a "high priest" of oracle secrets keeps me employed and my databases running.
I am encouraged by Larry's continued support of Java and simplifying his price schedule, but how much of this is in reaction to the SQL Server threat?
Quite honestly, I find SQL Server a breeze to work with compared to oracle - and most of my fellow DBS's have agreed with me (well, 4 out of 5).
This rant ends, as mine always do, with a trip to the bathroom.
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men w