Oracle CEO Larry Ellison Steps Down

mrspoonsi writes Oracle founder Larry Ellison is stepping down as CEO. He will be replaced by two executives. Former Oracle presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd will be co-CEOs. Ellison will be the Executive Chairman of Oracle's Board, and the company's CTO. Oracle's shares are off by 3% on the news. "Larry has made it very clear that he wants to keep working full time and focus his energy on product engineering, technology development and strategy," said the Oracle Board's Presiding Director, Dr. Michael Boskin.

Comments

DING DONG!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

The Wicked Witch is dead!

Re:DING DONG!

[OakDragon]

Tsk - it's called Myanmar Shave now.

Re:DING DONG!

[bobbied]

The Wicked Witch is dead!

Apparently not, just replaced with two of her minions. She's still going to be there doing "product development" or some such. My guess is the two minions will take the fall for Ellison's mistakes.

Re:DING DONG!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Tsk - it's called Myanmar Shave now.

Aye. And I'll raise a Mumbai Sapphire martini to that!

Re:DING DONG!

[Phreakiture]

They'll need to find a new name for the company now. ORACLE = One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

Re:DING DONG!

[Zeio]

No, not at all. If you know who Mark Hurd and Safra Catz are, you will be wishing for kind, nice old Larry back.

I was in a meeting with Safra a while back. I was a fly on the wall. Then a discussion came up about engineering details. Not too relevant to business besides timelines.

She interrupted the line of thinking and said the "Little people will take care of this."

She is amazing to hear speak, she has her business acumen, some technical chops, and she has her stuff together. She is one lean, mean chainsaw. Larry is seriously tame compared to her.

And Hurd, well, he is known for slash and burn techniques that do well for shareholders (in consort with a favorable market) but usually reduce headcount in sometimes painful ways. HP has many coffins with Hurd's name on it.

Larry is going to sit in a lawn chair enjoying retirement and watch Hurd and Catz vie for total power, control and domination. I put my money on Safra. He gets to watch a cage match to see who wins the title of Larry, Turbo Version 2.0++

more evil things to do elsewhere?

[dmitrygr]

New Microsoft CEO candidate? New member of USPTO?

Re:more evil things to do elsewhere?

[I'm New Around Here]

>

maybe he'd want to run for a Senate seat or governorship. He already owns a whole island in Hawaii.

Yeah, but it's only the size of a large patio.

Re:more evil things to do elsewhere?

[devman]

For those who don't get the joke. Larry owns most of the real estate on the the island of Lanai. Lanai also happens to be the name of a popular style of roofed patio that originates from Hawaii.

Re:more evil things to do elsewhere?

[irq-1]

I made this half-Java, half-Database monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don't like it
What's with all the screaming?
You like Databases, you like the JVM
Maybe you don't like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many Databases
Isn't it enough to know that I ruined Java making a gift for you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

One of the most overpaid execs in history

[Blahblagger]

It's about time he stopped siphoning off shareholder value via executive compensation.

Re:One of the most overpaid execs in history

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Screw the shareholders. What about the rest of Oracle's workers? You know, the people who make Larry Ellison look good by busting their asses? Why not give them a raise?

Re:One of the most overpaid execs in history

[binarylarry]

Oracle workers look GOOD?

The fuck up everything: http://koin.com/2014/09/17/ora...

Re:One of the most overpaid execs in history

[I'm New Around Here]

Screw them both.

What about their customers?

Re:One of the most overpaid execs in history

[bobbied]

Screw them both.

What about their customers?

That's what MySQL is for...

Re:One of the most overpaid execs in history

[Shoten]

Screw the shareholders. What about the rest of Oracle's workers? You know, the people who make Larry Ellison look good by busting their asses? Why not give them a raise?

Oh don't worry about the employees, they'll be fine. With Mark Hurd at the helm, they'll be...*laughing*...*doubling over laughing*

Oh, I'm sorry...I couldn't QUITE make it through the rest of that sentence without laughing my BALLS off!

Re:One of the most overpaid execs in history

[viperidaenz]

He is 1/4 of the shareholders.
He makes all his money from shares
His salary is $1.00
He does get 7 million shares a year though. Pittance compared to the 1.1 billion he already owns.

Re:One of the most overpaid execs in history

[wezelboy]

They look great for hardware manufacturers! If Oracle were to go away, RAM manufacturers would go out of business.

Good riddance

[JohnFen]

Now, if only we could get rid of the rest of the company.

Re:Good riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, it'll take a few more Ages for this.

This is just Melkor, who is Morgoth, Black Foe of the Industry being cast out.

We've got to wait for a Sauron to appear, then fall, then appear again. Possibly some H1Bs will be involved in taking a ring to an island in Hawaii.

Re:Good riddance

[jandersen]

Just to represent another side to the argument, and because I like getting modded down for expressing my opinion - I don't think Oracle deserves ALL the flak it gets. Just to make it clear - I work for them as an engineer, so I may come with a certain bias, but I also have more actual insight than most on /.

Firstly, I don't think anybody can deny that Oracle RDBMS is top notch; I have worked with many other databases - MS SQL Server, Informix, DB2, MySQL, and I still prefer Oracle. The documentation is better than what you get from the competition. DB2 is the only one that comes close. Plus, you can legally download even Oracle Enterprise Edition for free and use it for development and testing. I think it is excellent.

Secondly, Oracle was amongst the first of the big companies to come out in support of Linux with version 8 of their database. I think that was before IBM came out with an official port of Linux to their mainframe. To me that counts for a lot in terms of street cred.

Thirdly, in my experience Oracle is a very decent company to work for. They are not hugely generous, but they have some good benefits and I feel valued as an employee. I don't whether Larry Ellison is good or bad; I don't expect to find out for myself, but so far I have no complaints.

Wow

[M3.14]

Just wow. I wonder what happened. Maybe there's some money threshold where you just say: "naah, I've got enough". Or maybe his bank just phoned and said - "your account balance does not fit anymore in our VARCHAR2(10) column.."
Anyway - looking forward to see the bright *snicker* future.

Jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison

Re:Jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

So Larry Ellison thinks he's Larry Ellison? What a nutbag.

Stable as a three-legged...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Former Oracle presidents Safra Catz and Mark Hurd will be co-CEOs. Ellison will be the Executive Chairman of Oracle's Board, and the company's CTO

I can see why the stock dove. Ellison appears unsure that either Safra or Mark has the stuff to run the company by appointing them both to do part of the former job of one man.

In a best case scenario (where this triumvirate works for a while) I wonder which one's Brutus and which one's Cassius, because I'm pretty sure I know who Caesar is here.

Co-CEOs..

[Rodness]

Because that worked out SO well for Blackberry.

Time to update that Oracle joke ...

[UnknownSoldier]

/Oblg.

O/ne
Rich
Asshole
Called
Larry
Ellison

Attention Oracle Employees -

[Anonymous Coward]

For those not familiar with the Hurd game plan, let me tell you how it goes.

1. He will say all the right things in front of employees. Part of the team, all in it together, shared sacrifice.
2. He will make the numbers look good for Wall Street.
3. Your cubicles / office space will shrink.
4. Employees will be asked to work from home
5. Real estate will be targeted as a way to reduce expenses.
6. The stock will look good for a while, then implode.
7. When he's finally run out, the next person in charge will realize the business fundamentals are seriously lacking and will have a major cleanup job to do.

What Is He Thinking?

[FrankDrebin]

Sheesh, I know he has a big ego, but even Larry Ellison can't Hurd Catz.

Re: actually not gone

[kyjellyfish]

I agree... It's not possible to detach an ego like Ellison's from a company like Oracle without killing the patient. Larry knows this, which is why he so generously offered to stay on as CTO and Chairman. "After the revolution, business as usual"....

Leisure lawsuit Larry

[Mister Liberty]

Is gonna miss boat.

I commented because I could not mod in good faith.

[slack_justyb]

I just couldn't stomach the idea of up-voting all of the ding-dong the witch is dead comments, no matter how much I wanted to blow all my mod point here. Instead I'll just add to the crush of Ellison hate, especially considering the whole notion of copyrighting APIs that the smug dickface motherfucker is trying to pander to make a few quick ones from Google.

Wow. The end of an era.

[msobkow]

That's almost as big as when Bill Gates stepped down from Microsoft -- it's the end of an era.

It'll be interesting to see what direction Oracle heads without him at the helm.

Larry steps down

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised he didn't break a pool cue in half and walk out of the room saying "there's only one opening boys, make it quick."

Let the hate fly!

[FlyingGuy]

But here is the problem...

You cannot deny that he built a huge empire on something as banal as a database. Arguably the best RDBMS pretty much ever and where is the competition?

I use Oracle extensively. I am a DBA and of all the alternatives out there ( and I have tried most of them ) the only thing that comes even close is DB2 with postGres running a close third and depending on your POV, catching up fairly quickly. Perhaps postGres will eclipse Oracle one day, but not unless they get some serious money behind the project and that probably won't happen because no one wants to pump the millions of dollars it would take into a project that cannot even fix the TXID problem, and make no mistake about it, it is a problem. Also if someone dumps that kind of money into a project they expect some kind of ROI. There might be a few white knights that have that kind of money but they are few and far between and most can find more worthy causes to spend that kind of money on. Don't get me wrong, postGres is a fine DB but it has some faults that make it not so attractive.

Larry understands how to stitch technology together around a DB better than most anyone else I have seen. Arguably Microsoft gets it, but they are stuck running in the windows universe which despite a lot of progress is still broken. You cannot run MS-SQL Server across hundreds of Intel machines and expect it to hold together, but they ave built and end to end ecosystem and MS-SQL Server is tightly integrated, but you can't drop it on a Z-Series mainframe under either IBM's native OS or Linux. PostGres has the same problem but they are moving to fix that, but I am not sure they really understand the problem. Of the other DB's out there ( Mongo, Hadoop, et all. ) that you can do that with, they don't support things like ACID which, like it or not, is pretty much a requirement in way to many situations.

The facts speak for themselves. If Oracle really sucked as a Database it would not be in the vast number spaces that it occupies. You can cap on Larry Ellison all you want, question his lineage, say he is an ego maniacal asshole, but you have to give the man his due. He built a company that does have the answer to almost all the spaces where a DB matters and he built a business that relentlessly pursues those spaces to the betterment of their stock holders and 98% of the people and organizations that use their products.

Re:Let the hate fly!

[Bing Tsher E]

Oracle is the big hairy ape database who has prevailed.

That success doesn't mean it isn't a big shit-hurling ape.

It's way too late to second guess what we would have if the big hairy ape hadn't prevailed and didn't dominate. But there probably wouldn't be the overwhelming stench of apeshit we've all been forced to be accustomed to.

It probably pays well, being that close to the ape shit.

Re:Let the hate fly!

[FlyingGuy]

Happy to share, and I have posted a link as well.

So every SQL database, Oracle included, has to have some way of keeping transaction order, which is to say which transaction got there 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. This is part of ACID and it cannot be ignored. Oracle and others solved the problem by using a synthetic number. Oracle's "number" type is not a recognized IEEE standard like an INT or a FLOAT, DOUBLE etc. It i stored using a proprietary scheme in the DB that Oracle guarantees to be correct when it is accessed and it is completely portable. The last estimate I saw ( I rarely look ) was that pushing Oracle to its absolute limits was that it would take ~ 141 years to wrap around. Personally I am not going to be alive then and I doubt Oracle will be either.

In postGres they use a 32 bit unsigned int to keep tract of this. Now 2^32 is 4,294,967,296 transactions, which is a very large number indeed, but when you get into extremely hi volume transaction environments this can get used up pretty fast, like in a few days fast! Since the number is unsigned and postGres is written in C ( although I don't think it matters ) when you hit INT MAX it wraps back to 1!!! and that is a disaster. In older versions it just kept going and corrupting your data and there was really no way out of it, you were just hosed. In the latest version, the database will only go so far and it will force itself down before it wraps around AND will refuse to come up until the vacuum process is complete. On VERY large tables this can take days!

Now the guys who write PG are no dummies. They recognized this and came up with a process called VACUUM, it does many things and it will reset the TXID and keep you safe. In most every application this is fine. In Extreme transaction environments where you build up billions of rows very quickly you have to set the VACUUM process to it's most aggressive level to keep up with inbound transactions and it just kills performance and your TX rate falls into the basement.

This link explains it better than I can. PostGres Wrap Around Problem

Re:Let the hate fly!

[RelliK]

> the only thing that comes even close is DB2 with postGres running a close third and depending on your POV, catching up fairly quickly.

But PostgreSQL is enough for 90% of the installations and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Re:Let the hate fly!

[FlyingGuy]

Don't worry, COBOL didn't die quickly...

I don't usually feed the trolls so I am so very sorry to put a damper on your rant, but it is far from dead.

O.R.A.C.L.E

[12WTF$]

One
  Rich
    Arsehole
      Called
        Larry
          Ellison

Re:disaster

[tehcyder]

Java is the worst thing that has happened in all human history

It's OK, you don't have to sit on the fence. Just tell us how you feel.