Larry Ellison says he's not following Oracle to Texas, prefers his private Hawaii pad Last week, Larry Ellison wished staff well as his IT giant Oracle prepares to move its headquarters from Silicon Valley, California, to Austin, Texas... though he apparently will be going in the opposite direction, to Hawaii. "Following Friday's announcement ... I've received a number of inquiries about whether or not I will …
I, for one, thought it was fascinating.
The 'vid has accelerated adoption of letting people work from home.
The logical next step is for people to move where they actually want to live, rather than being forced to shack up next to work.
I chose an island off the west coast of Sweden. Larry obviously have different tastes (and money) so he chose a slightly different island.
Then there is the question of outsourcing. I see some companies adopting javascript on the server side. In my mind that leads to crapware and spaghetticoding. At which point it shouldn't make much difference if you outsource coding to a small village in the middle of nowhere on a different continent, or hire people fresh from high school. (just remember to use a simple password for your github repository to make things easier for all involved)
what feels like a different lifetime ago, Scott McNealy was in the UK a bit after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. He was in a talkative mood and came out with a quip about the takeover that has stuck in my head as it was out of character for him. He said that Larry had proved to be the better capitalist in the end and that he (Scott) had taken his eye off the ball, which he regretted. All very well and good, but that left me and the rest of us in the grasps of the meat grinder that is Big Red as it destroyed Solaris and everyone who had worked on it for decades.
I know that this is just a part of the inevitable churn of capitalism, but the corporate culture of Oracle made the borging and dismantling of Sun very unpleasant. The culture of a company comes in a mysterious way from those at the top and in particular, from the founders. I have never met Larry, but judging from those that he chooses to employ as his lieutenants, I don't think I would really want to. Whether Larry chooses to spend his time in Hawaii or Texas, I don't care. What I would care about is if he started to see how his obsessions get reflected in the company he helped found and how toxic they have become.
Fat chance I know.
To be blunt - anyone who worked in the Unix world could see that low end server and high end desktop Sun kit was way overpriced back in the late 90s , early 00s and its lunch was rapidly being eaten by x86 kit running SCO, NT and the then upcoming Linux . I can only imagine the silo bunker mentality that seems to eventually affect C-Suites happened at Sun too and they just couldn't see what was obvious to everyone else. No surprise that Oracle almost immediately binned those parts of the hardware catalogue and focused on high end server systems.
It didn't have to end that way for Sun but they got addicted to the high profit margins on their big systems. Solaris X86 was miles ahead of Linux, and had they allowed it to continue then maybe it would have become the dominant server OS instead of Linux. But they didn't want the low end PC servers cutting in on their business and so Solaris X86 wasn't allowed to prosper
That's not my recollection. Sun (Scott in particular) had difficulties with software and fluffed Solaris on x86 a number of times wanting to wrap it in Sun tin rather than let it out into the wild. That hurt in the medium term and proved one of the fatal errors in the long term.
The same mistakes were made to a degree with JAVA. Sun coming late to the application server and tools market and doggedly using software to pull through hardware sales. The appointment of the pony tailed one came too late in my estimation to change anything significantly. By that time the ship was sinking.
Sun at heart was a hardware company and a very good one. The early growth was fueled by an astonishing (for the time) chip evolution cycle time that blew the opposition out of the water. Later, after the acquisition of a switching back plane (from Cray via Silicone Graphics) Sun became besotted and addicted to selling E10,000's by the lorry loads to all and sundry. The Dot Com bubble was the boon and the death of Sun.
It expanded fast to fill what seemed like an inexhaustible demand for big iron. Taking on staff and property to fulfill the demand. We all know what happened after that.
Sun failed for many reasons including, not letting it's fine software run on different hardware platforms until it was too late. Expanding it's property portfolio massively which saddled it was long term leases it couldn't get out of (that was a big one). Focusing on hardware and not fully exploiting it's software and services potential. There were many others, but I don't think that a few lines of pizza boxes and workstations that were more costly than the cut price alternatives was one of the main ones.
He needs to take a moment of his busy day to research Long Run Out Landslides off the coast of Hawaii; from which he will discover that there is a long history of gigantic landslides off the Hawaii islands, any one of which would have eliminated the human population . . . if there had been any at the time. That the strip of land (45 miles long by 14 miles back up from the sea shore) below the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory is sliding towards the surrounding ocean, as until recently, the associated volcano's have been adding ~ 1 million tons of lava to that area every day since the early 1980's. https://www.livescience.com/25293-hawaii-giant-tsunami-landslides.html
There is nothing in your linked article that states how much lava is being added. Personally, I think a million tons a day is a bit much.
This page indicates that the Long Mountain, aka Mauna Loa, has not erupted since 1984, although it also specifies that the threat level is very high.
I don't know how to parse that information.
By moving the HQ domicile to TX it solves a lot of future legals problems when it comes to just how much money Larry and his family have taken out of Oracle in the last three decades. Its already been in the courts a few times. Next time around, which might be the big one which has been avoided so far, Larry would be able to fight his corner much better in TX rather than CA when it comes to state laws and case law for Larry's systematic looting of Oracle's treasury dept. TX gives Larry much better options when it comes to drawing out the court cases for many years. Long enough to give Larry time to kick the bucket and end up in his eventual destination which will be a lot hotter and a lot less scenic than Lanai. Although according to local legend Mona Kea would give him a direct route downwards. So being in Lanai means he will have a much shorter trip, spiritually speaking, to hang out with Milu.
Sure, he probably keeps his finger on the pulse of the company and has a few big hand waving future direction statement meetings now and then, but I suspect the day to day and even month to month running of the company decisions are made by others and have been for a long time so there's really no need for him to be there. Even sociopathic megalomanics want to retire eventually.
"Even sociopathic megalomanics want to retire eventually."
Given Larry did a fund raiser for Trump earlier this year, and Trump's neighbours in Mar-a-lago don't want him there, and if Larry is short of a friend or two, may be he can invite Trump to base himself at Lanai.
If Larry can also accommodate Boris who is partial to sunny island destinations, then all the better. The 3 amigos can sit and plot world domination, and the rest of the world can get on with their lives.
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