When Ellison goes, will he go gracefully? Graceful CEO exits are rare: the driven man with his hands on the corporate steering wheel finds it hard to sit in a rear seat and let someone else drive. More often they want to be the satnav. As far as they're concerned, it's their way or an abrupt turn onto the highway. How will Larry Ellison leave Oracle? Will he do a Dan …
Can I take a stab at calling him a scumbag then? Or have I just offended all of the Pond Scum out there?
Hope not...but please do let me know if I have, & I will try and find some other appropriate derrisive epithet to describe him. Just has to be something.
While the classic "Larry speech to Yale" is known to be an urban legend it is none the less an excellent definition of Larry:
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/ellison.asp
He may not do things gracefully, but he does them successfully. You may hate him, you may loathe him, but you have to give him a credit where credit is due.
People will not be comparing him to Ford, Edison, Einstein,....
The media will mention it but not spend all day interviewing people about his impact.
He should listen to Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford address and go do something meaningful with his life.
Sad to see Steve go.
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I don't think Ellison plans on stopping with HP. He won't stop before Oracle is the only IT company on the planet. Then he will beat up Chuck Norris and proclam himself sun-god of the universe. Or something.
I wonder how much it costs to build one of these pyramid things nowadays...
HP losing Mark Hurd was a classic foot-shot. The rationale for getting rid of him smacks of politics forcing any dirt, whether real or not, to the surface. In other words, they cased him up! And, in the end, took him out by claiming he'd put in expenses for his girlfriend, which ranges somewhere between a misdemeanor and trivia, and might well have been an oversight.
Ellison's game plan is easy to read, and has been in place for years. He will have the dominant database running on Oracle-devised and optimized hardware. He intends to own the full database solution with 80+% market share. Well, he's succeeding, with a massive cost performance improvement setting a new bar, and in doing so may have pulled off an "Apple" story!
HP faces commodity hardware as a cloud competitor, the death of Itanium, and the loss of database revenue. Oracle, on the other hand, has a rich and growing niche. The HP board did Mark a signal favor!
I don't like Larry much. Got laid off after an Oracle ERP acquisition, so no reason to like him.
And I also think that Oracle gouges customers. And Larry is paid way too much. And he's a pr!ck.
But... making a company work and being able to extract premium prices from its victims, errr.... customers, is precisely what a competitive company's CEO is paid to do.
Ellison has successfully parlayed the db cashcow dollars into a much wider stack of software and make money along the way. He founded the company as well, not just a high priced caretaker he.
So, give the dirtbag due credit - many other CEOs collect nearly as much money, while running their company way, way less well.
This article is spot on that a large measure of his legacy will be an successful succession.
"In the wider IT world Ellison is admired with awe but he is also resented. There is little respect shown by Ellison to his peers. He does not appear to actually see IBM's Sam Palmisano, HP's Meg Whitman, Microsoft's Ballmer or Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff as his peers. The only CEO he seems to shows respect to is Steve Jobs.~
Could we all suggest that actually Steve Jobs is the only recent CEO of comarable talent (we'llleave ex HP and IBM CEOs out of this mess)
Larry's enough of an asshat to spend a couple billion to buy out HP, just to get even. But I dont see how buying HP would benefit Oracle. Sun was a no brainer really, they had custom architectures down to a T with Sparc, as well as a very specialized OS with Solaris, not to mention the Java IP, but HP doesnt have a shred of anything that sets them apart from a company like Dell or Acer since they spun off their instrumentation company. The only area I can think of where they have something slightly special, Enterprise level, they face a very large amount of competition from IBM.
For the most part HP makes commodity x86 and IA-64 products that run Linux or Windows, and given Oracle's dim view of the Home and SMB market, I think Oracle would rather see HP fail than buy them out.
I'd rephrase it slightly...
he sees a way to sell an interpretation of reality that is black and white to customers who want to be sold stuff in simple black and white terms so that they can be decisive and not get bogged down by inconvenient details, and who then leave it to their internal IT folk to translate the black and white back into the real world of a million colours
I don't have quite the glowing admiration that the author of this article apparently has. But when I think about how Ellison will leave Oracle, I'm almost certain it's going to happen in one of two ways:
1) He is hauled out of Oracle's HQ in a body bag.
2) He leaves in a rather spectacular, if not explosive way, that will be the talk of the IT industry for years.
My money's on the latter. Mainly because if Larry's delicate sensibilities and massive ego are offended in any way, shape or form, his head will probably explode. My guess is if he's put into a situation where it would be better for Oracle for him to quietly step down or it would result it in being torn to shreds, he'd allow the company to be ripped apart just to spite the entities questioning his authority or, well, sanity.
While I certainly hope it's a good long time before he takes his last breath, I can't wait to see him melt down in an epic way.
Ellison is a good sailor - so he knows full well that HP would be nothing but a boat anchor.
What he might do is to convince a private equity outfit to buy HP. And then pick out the bits he wants EDS is all I can think of, but I've lost sight of HP in recent times maybe there's some cloudy stuff he could use.
The only other reason I can think of that might see Larry buy HP, would be to make sure Oracle fails after his departure; as he sails off into the sunset saying "I told you so".
RIP Steven Jobs, although I never liked you much, I have admired your courage in recent times.
Larry is one of those guys that just can't publicly admit he's ever been beaten at anything, which is why he can't show respect to any CEO other than Jobs. It's no coincidence that Apple does not compete with Oracle in any market, so therefore there is no skin off Larry's nose in admiring Jobs' success. But to show respect for someone like Benioff would be to admit that there is someone doing something better than Larry, and his ego simply can't stomach that.
Anybody who has such a lack of respect, such a big mouth, and who is happy to slaughter open source free software by any means necessary is not worthy of respect.
I've never resented or disliked a person so much.
The IT industry as a whole is better without him, he may benefit Oracle greatly, but at a cost to the industry and its innovation and scale.
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