10 ms·

Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison

148 points by sajid 10y ago

datashovel 10y ago
I have a policy when assessing opportunities. Use of Oracle products is a deal breaker.
- dijit 10y ago
  I have a similar policy, if I'm working on something and looking for solutions, the solution that doesn't involve Oracle wins by default.
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  I try to not be ideological about technology; oracle is a pretty decent database and for some cases is still superior to my favorite RDBMS (Postgres). But while the technology is fine, the licensing leads me to believe that the decision to use oracle was made on a golf course by a guy that doesn't even know how to set up his own email client, and doesn't care how anything works as long as he's next in line for CEO. And so yeah, I agree with you...Oracle is a deal breaker.
  - chris_wot 10y ago
    A golf course or an entirely different establishment?
- hodgesrm 10y ago
  Why? Is it the money? The DBMS technology is excellent. I worked at Sybase from 1990 on and much as I loved the company Oracle beat us fair and square with features like Row Level Locking and Multi-version Concurrency Control. Oracle also had a healthier attitude about data corruption. Oracle fixed the bugs or didn't let them get in in the first place. Sybase on the other hand developed DBCC, which repaired the problems on live databases. I lost numerous tables on Sybase while developing products. This never happened after switching to Oracle in the late 90s. One of the things I still like about Oracle is that no matter what data management problem you are solving there is generally some feature that helps you do it. VPD (virtual private database) is a great example. I was working at a SaaS in the late 90s and we ran into a problem where we absolutely needed data from multiple tenants in a single database but still fully isolated between each tenant. Oracle had a feature called VPD that did exactly that. It saved our bacon on that project. I have dealt with the Oracle license police and yes they can be jerks. But you can't fault their technology. The company deserves respect for what they have accomplished. Edit: fixed typo.
  - datashovel 10y ago
    Just one reason, among many. From the article: He often said, “It’s not enough to win—all others must fail.” I think capitalism taken to its extreme is counter-productive to society.
    - rhizome 10y ago
      One of the big lies of capitalism is that competition is desirable.
      - andrewwhartion 10y ago
        Competition is desirable for the consumer, not for the producer.
        ksdale 10y ago
        In addition to this, I would add that competition can take many different forms. I think it's very useful when it inspires everyone to do better and everyone can shake hands afterwards because they enjoyed the journey. It's less than useless when people use it as an excuse to cut each other down without improving anyone's performance, which is disappointingly often.
        rhizome 10y ago
        I think it's very useful when it inspires everyone to do better and everyone can shake hands afterwards because they enjoyed the journey. Do you have any examples of this happening in real life?
      - ersii 10y ago
        If you meant crony capitalism, sure. Then you'll use enough old boy tactics to ban your competition or give you a state-enforced monopoly or deal (effectively skewing the market in your favor and against your competition).
  - 10y ago
- ribs 10y ago
  Now come on. Oracle and PostgreSQL and MySQL and the others all overlap a lot, but there's one thing that Oracle does much better than any of the others. It makes money for the Oracle Corporation!
dave_sullivan 10y ago
For anyone interested in learning more about Larry Ellison and Oracle, I'd highly suggest "The difference between god and Larry Ellison (god doesn't think he's Larry Ellison)." Oracle is a 150 billion dollar company, similar in market cap to Intel. Once you've read histories on these people, it suddenly makes sense that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates hang out, while Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were BFFs. Like with Jobs and Apple, Ellison and Oracle are aggressively polarizing. I see a future of declines for Oracle; Salesforce.com is redefining and taking their market (corporate IT budgets). There is simply no way other than lock-in and being dicks that they'll be able to see the profitability they once had, let alone sales growth (unless by acquisition). You can see it already with their patent suits; they're out of ideas. But if you work in the business of software, Oracle's history is worth knowing.
- tinbad 10y ago
  Every enterprise I have worked at/with had Salesforce, but I've never seen or heard about anyone use it. (What do they even do?) I feel like it's one of those companies that's good at selling but not really building product(s) people actually use. Not sure same can be said about Oracle, I worked at many corporations where the tech teams were using Oracle DBs for simple 1-page microsites.
  - dave_sullivan 10y ago
    Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, started out at Oracle. Larry Ellison was his mentor. I think he was even at Larry Ellison's (3rd?) wedding. He left Oracle to start Salesforce. Salesforce is a software layer on top of databases, often called CRM. It's the answer for "how do you sell a relational database to a guy that just needs a rolodex?" Salesforce actually uses Oracle databases to power their infrastructure, to this day. Over the past 10 years, Salesforce has built out its own platform that basically turns Salesforce into a web-based version of visual fox pro. Which sounds bad, but consider that many "Salesforce.com administrators" are NOT programmers. Then to be taken more seriously as a custom development platform, to be able to add more advanced logic, they built their own scripting language (Apex) and bought Heroku. So it started as (pretty much) a fancy rolodex but has evolved into a platform through which you can develop certain types of software and workflows that would be difficult with alternatives. "Difficult with alternatives" becomes less true every day (which is why I got away from pitching businesses on custom development with Salesforce and into pitching businesses on custom development with python and purely open solutions.) Despite having legitimate competition from open source, their sales and marketing has done a very good job at convincing their users that those don't exist, or that Salesforce invented them (cough heroku). Maybe you've heard of Oracle or SAP consultants in the 90s making a very good living advising businesses how to set up and use these products? Salesforce.com is now that. And despite being "enterprise" they actually have very talented engineers. Also, critical mass. They have managed to build this ecosystem and everyone working in Corporate IT is drinking the kool aid. Google "Dreamforce 2016" if you want to see just how cult like it's all become. Like I say, they are going to replace Oracle. It's funny how much shared DNA they have though.
whack 10y ago
I was expecting to see a lot of Oracle hate here, and looks like the train's already started. Regardless of your perspective of Oracle today, it's hard to dispute that Larry Ellison was a successful entrepreneur and businessman. He co-founded a $150B company, remained in the senior leadership position for decades, and guided the company towards extremely profitable outcomes for shareholders. You may not like him personally, you may not like his products, you may not like his company's work environment, but I'm sure any aspiring entrepreneur can learn a lot from Larry Ellison's example.
- hodgesrm 10y ago
  Completely agree. Oracle's success did not happen by chance. They have a great track record of navigating successive technology waves. Their strategy is often "bring a gun to a knife fight" like when they bought InnoDB out from under MySQL AB. Not to everyone's taste but they have outmaneuvered an amazing number of competitors over the years. Ellison in the flesh is quite personable.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    > Ellison in the flesh is quite personable. Sounds oddly familiar...
  - abraae 10y ago
    I was in a couple of meetings with Larry Ellison when I worked for Oracle back last century. I found him to be very pleasant and pretty considerate. Couldn't reconcile this with the fear with which people regarded him.
- combatentropy 10y ago
  I suppose the same could be said about Al Capone.
  - edoceo 10y ago
    Nope. Al's business was short lived and he did not remain in command
TH3R3LL1K 10y ago
I think people forget that the Oracle database is just one of the many products that oracle has. I think Weblogic is the best application server around.
- krzyk 10y ago
  Why is it best? The only time I encountered it was in conversation of people that were using it and hated it, everywhere else it was either JBoss or just Tomcat (with new frameworks one doesn't need all the EJBs). Are there any comparison chart with e.g. JBoss?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    You don't need application servers. They just being bloat. Their ship has sailed.
- ginko 10y ago
  Seem s like Weblogic came under Oracle's control when they bought BEA Systems, so it's just another good product they bought with their db money.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Weblogic was bad in 2007. It's a crime against humanity now.
CrazyCatDog 10y ago
I found this post completely uninspiring, though I'm biased as I thing Steve Blank often does more damage than good with his recipes for success. Would love to hear the broader HN community's sentiment towards Steve, and the broader entrepreneurial snake oil in a book/consultant movement.
- ridruejo 10y ago
  Steve Blank's snake oil??? "The 4 steps to the epiphany" was a transforming book for me and other entrepreneurs and the popular "The Lean Startup" follow up from Eric Ries a direct result of working with Steve. He genuinely cares about entrepreneurs and the valley ecosystem go watch "The secret history of Silicon Valley"
- alexpetralia 10y ago
  That's a pretty solid ad hominem case you got going there..
digi_owl 10y ago
I find myself thinking that recent years of change in the Linux world is partially to blame on Oracle and Red Hat having a falling out. Those two used to have a fruitful partnership where RH suppiled the distro, and Oracle supplied the software that ran on top. But right around the time RH released RHEL 6.0, Oracle up and forked RHEL into Oracle Linux and started offering support contracts for the whole stack. Since then RH seems to be on the warpath, tightening their control over the various sub-projects that RHEL is made of.
- blahi 10y ago
  But didn't RedHat enter middleware first, snatching jboss under Oracle's nose?
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Well neither was established in that market at the time, afaik. But Oracle Linux was not only Oracle entering onto RH turf, but using the very FOSS that was RH life blood against them. Oracle was basically offering existing RH customers to consolidate their support contracts with Oracle rather than have the OS with RH and the database with Oracle.
noir_lord 10y ago
Helps if you are ruthless unscrupulous bastard who uses vendor locking to hold customers one step short of hostage I guess.
ttam 10y ago
(2014)
cha-cho 10y ago
A good book about Larry Ellison is “Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle” from 2004. It looks like Larry himself proofread the book as he offers comments and corrections at the bottom of some of the pages. Oracle is unlike any other technology company in the world. The majority of their software offerings are not aimed at consumers, so many people (including programmers and IT-savvy folks) have a hard time understanding the company unless they’ve spent weeks studying one piece of their product stack. I started working for Oracle in 1998. I thought I would be able to get up to speed quickly on everything Oracle. I was wrong. It took a long time to get a feeling of confidence. The main product, the Oracle database, is a vast monolith of technology and features that is constantly being updated. It has a documentation set that could easily fill a bookshelf. Taker a look: http://docs.oracle.com http://docs.oracle.com Every so often someone takes at shot at Larry at a press conference or online, implying that Oracle’s time has passed, that some new hotshot company was going to overtake them in some way. Spend some time studying Oracle and Larry Ellison, and you’ll understand why Larry always smiles at these questions.
cha-cho 10y ago
A good book about Larry Ellison is “Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle” from 2004. It looks like Larry himself proofread the book as he offers comments and corrections at the bottom of some of the pages. Oracle is unlike any other technology company in the world. The majority of their software offerings are not aimed at consumers, so many people (including programmers and IT-savvy folks) have a hard time understanding the company unless they’ve spent weeks studying one piece of their product stack. I started working for Oracle in 1998. I thought I would be able to get up to speed quickly on everything Oracle. I was wrong. It took a long time to get a feeling of confidence. The main product, the Oracle database, is a vast monolith of technology and features that is constantly being updated. It has a documentation set that could easily fill a bookshelf. Taker a look: http://docs.oracle.com http://docs.oracle.com Every so often someone takes at shot at Larry at a press conference or online, implying that Oracle’s time has passed, that some new hotshot company was going to overtake them in some way. Spend some time studying Oracle and Larry Ellison, and you’ll understand why Larry always smiles at these questions.

148 points by sajid 10y ago

datashovel 10y ago

I have a policy when assessing opportunities. Use of Oracle products is a deal breaker.

dijit 10y ago
I have a similar policy, if I'm working on something and looking for solutions, the solution that doesn't involve Oracle wins by default.
saosebastiao 10y ago
I try to not be ideological about technology; oracle is a pretty decent database and for some cases is still superior to my favorite RDBMS (Postgres). But while the technology is fine, the licensing leads me to believe that the decision to use oracle was made on a golf course by a guy that doesn't even know how to set up his own email client, and doesn't care how anything works as long as he's next in line for CEO. And so yeah, I agree with you...Oracle is a deal breaker.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  A golf course or an entirely different establishment?
hodgesrm 10y ago
Why? Is it the money? The DBMS technology is excellent. I worked at Sybase from 1990 on and much as I loved the company Oracle beat us fair and square with features like Row Level Locking and Multi-version Concurrency Control. Oracle also had a healthier attitude about data corruption. Oracle fixed the bugs or didn't let them get in in the first place. Sybase on the other hand developed DBCC, which repaired the problems on live databases. I lost numerous tables on Sybase while developing products. This never happened after switching to Oracle in the late 90s. One of the things I still like about Oracle is that no matter what data management problem you are solving there is generally some feature that helps you do it. VPD (virtual private database) is a great example. I was working at a SaaS in the late 90s and we ran into a problem where we absolutely needed data from multiple tenants in a single database but still fully isolated between each tenant. Oracle had a feature called VPD that did exactly that. It saved our bacon on that project. I have dealt with the Oracle license police and yes they can be jerks. But you can't fault their technology. The company deserves respect for what they have accomplished. Edit: fixed typo.
- datashovel 10y ago
  Just one reason, among many. From the article: He often said, “It’s not enough to win—all others must fail.” I think capitalism taken to its extreme is counter-productive to society.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    One of the big lies of capitalism is that competition is desirable.
    - andrewwhartion 10y ago
      Competition is desirable for the consumer, not for the producer.
      - ksdale 10y ago
        In addition to this, I would add that competition can take many different forms. I think it's very useful when it inspires everyone to do better and everyone can shake hands afterwards because they enjoyed the journey. It's less than useless when people use it as an excuse to cut each other down without improving anyone's performance, which is disappointingly often.
        rhizome 10y ago
        I think it's very useful when it inspires everyone to do better and everyone can shake hands afterwards because they enjoyed the journey. Do you have any examples of this happening in real life?
    - ersii 10y ago
      If you meant crony capitalism, sure. Then you'll use enough old boy tactics to ban your competition or give you a state-enforced monopoly or deal (effectively skewing the market in your favor and against your competition).
- 10y ago
ribs 10y ago
Now come on. Oracle and PostgreSQL and MySQL and the others all overlap a lot, but there's one thing that Oracle does much better than any of the others. It makes money for the Oracle Corporation!

dave_sullivan 10y ago

For anyone interested in learning more about Larry Ellison and Oracle, I'd highly suggest "The difference between god and Larry Ellison (god doesn't think he's Larry Ellison)." Oracle is a 150 billion dollar company, similar in market cap to Intel. Once you've read histories on these people, it suddenly makes sense that Warren Buffet and Bill Gates hang out, while Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were BFFs. Like with Jobs and Apple, Ellison and Oracle are aggressively polarizing. I see a future of declines for Oracle; Salesforce.com is redefining and taking their market (corporate IT budgets). There is simply no way other than lock-in and being dicks that they'll be able to see the profitability they once had, let alone sales growth (unless by acquisition). You can see it already with their patent suits; they're out of ideas. But if you work in the business of software, Oracle's history is worth knowing.

tinbad 10y ago
Every enterprise I have worked at/with had Salesforce, but I've never seen or heard about anyone use it. (What do they even do?) I feel like it's one of those companies that's good at selling but not really building product(s) people actually use. Not sure same can be said about Oracle, I worked at many corporations where the tech teams were using Oracle DBs for simple 1-page microsites.
- dave_sullivan 10y ago
  Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, started out at Oracle. Larry Ellison was his mentor. I think he was even at Larry Ellison's (3rd?) wedding. He left Oracle to start Salesforce. Salesforce is a software layer on top of databases, often called CRM. It's the answer for "how do you sell a relational database to a guy that just needs a rolodex?" Salesforce actually uses Oracle databases to power their infrastructure, to this day. Over the past 10 years, Salesforce has built out its own platform that basically turns Salesforce into a web-based version of visual fox pro. Which sounds bad, but consider that many "Salesforce.com administrators" are NOT programmers. Then to be taken more seriously as a custom development platform, to be able to add more advanced logic, they built their own scripting language (Apex) and bought Heroku. So it started as (pretty much) a fancy rolodex but has evolved into a platform through which you can develop certain types of software and workflows that would be difficult with alternatives. "Difficult with alternatives" becomes less true every day (which is why I got away from pitching businesses on custom development with Salesforce and into pitching businesses on custom development with python and purely open solutions.) Despite having legitimate competition from open source, their sales and marketing has done a very good job at convincing their users that those don't exist, or that Salesforce invented them (cough heroku). Maybe you've heard of Oracle or SAP consultants in the 90s making a very good living advising businesses how to set up and use these products? Salesforce.com is now that. And despite being "enterprise" they actually have very talented engineers. Also, critical mass. They have managed to build this ecosystem and everyone working in Corporate IT is drinking the kool aid. Google "Dreamforce 2016" if you want to see just how cult like it's all become. Like I say, they are going to replace Oracle. It's funny how much shared DNA they have though.

whack 10y ago

I was expecting to see a lot of Oracle hate here, and looks like the train's already started. Regardless of your perspective of Oracle today, it's hard to dispute that Larry Ellison was a successful entrepreneur and businessman. He co-founded a $150B company, remained in the senior leadership position for decades, and guided the company towards extremely profitable outcomes for shareholders. You may not like him personally, you may not like his products, you may not like his company's work environment, but I'm sure any aspiring entrepreneur can learn a lot from Larry Ellison's example.

hodgesrm 10y ago
Completely agree. Oracle's success did not happen by chance. They have a great track record of navigating successive technology waves. Their strategy is often "bring a gun to a knife fight" like when they bought InnoDB out from under MySQL AB. Not to everyone's taste but they have outmaneuvered an amazing number of competitors over the years. Ellison in the flesh is quite personable.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  > Ellison in the flesh is quite personable. Sounds oddly familiar...
- abraae 10y ago
  I was in a couple of meetings with Larry Ellison when I worked for Oracle back last century. I found him to be very pleasant and pretty considerate. Couldn't reconcile this with the fear with which people regarded him.
combatentropy 10y ago
I suppose the same could be said about Al Capone.
- edoceo 10y ago
  Nope. Al's business was short lived and he did not remain in command

TH3R3LL1K 10y ago

I think people forget that the Oracle database is just one of the many products that oracle has. I think Weblogic is the best application server around.

krzyk 10y ago
Why is it best? The only time I encountered it was in conversation of people that were using it and hated it, everywhere else it was either JBoss or just Tomcat (with new frameworks one doesn't need all the EJBs). Are there any comparison chart with e.g. JBoss?
- brianwawok 10y ago
  You don't need application servers. They just being bloat. Their ship has sailed.
ginko 10y ago
Seem s like Weblogic came under Oracle's control when they bought BEA Systems, so it's just another good product they bought with their db money.
brianwawok 10y ago
Weblogic was bad in 2007. It's a crime against humanity now.

CrazyCatDog 10y ago

I found this post completely uninspiring, though I'm biased as I thing Steve Blank often does more damage than good with his recipes for success. Would love to hear the broader HN community's sentiment towards Steve, and the broader entrepreneurial snake oil in a book/consultant movement.

ridruejo 10y ago
Steve Blank's snake oil??? "The 4 steps to the epiphany" was a transforming book for me and other entrepreneurs and the popular "The Lean Startup" follow up from Eric Ries a direct result of working with Steve. He genuinely cares about entrepreneurs and the valley ecosystem go watch "The secret history of Silicon Valley"
alexpetralia 10y ago
That's a pretty solid ad hominem case you got going there..

digi_owl 10y ago

I find myself thinking that recent years of change in the Linux world is partially to blame on Oracle and Red Hat having a falling out. Those two used to have a fruitful partnership where RH suppiled the distro, and Oracle supplied the software that ran on top. But right around the time RH released RHEL 6.0, Oracle up and forked RHEL into Oracle Linux and started offering support contracts for the whole stack. Since then RH seems to be on the warpath, tightening their control over the various sub-projects that RHEL is made of.

blahi 10y ago
But didn't RedHat enter middleware first, snatching jboss under Oracle's nose?
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Well neither was established in that market at the time, afaik. But Oracle Linux was not only Oracle entering onto RH turf, but using the very FOSS that was RH life blood against them. Oracle was basically offering existing RH customers to consolidate their support contracts with Oracle rather than have the OS with RH and the database with Oracle.

noir_lord 10y ago

Helps if you are ruthless unscrupulous bastard who uses vendor locking to hold customers one step short of hostage I guess.

ttam 10y ago

(2014)

cha-cho 10y ago

A good book about Larry Ellison is “Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle” from 2004. It looks like Larry himself proofread the book as he offers comments and corrections at the bottom of some of the pages. Oracle is unlike any other technology company in the world. The majority of their software offerings are not aimed at consumers, so many people (including programmers and IT-savvy folks) have a hard time understanding the company unless they’ve spent weeks studying one piece of their product stack. I started working for Oracle in 1998. I thought I would be able to get up to speed quickly on everything Oracle. I was wrong. It took a long time to get a feeling of confidence. The main product, the Oracle database, is a vast monolith of technology and features that is constantly being updated. It has a documentation set that could easily fill a bookshelf. Taker a look: http://docs.oracle.com http://docs.oracle.com Every so often someone takes at shot at Larry at a press conference or online, implying that Oracle’s time has passed, that some new hotshot company was going to overtake them in some way. Spend some time studying Oracle and Larry Ellison, and you’ll understand why Larry always smiles at these questions.

cha-cho 10y ago