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Larry Ellison On Sun Ex-CEO: Blogging Was Silly Diversion

59 points by whyleyc 16y ago

whyleyc 16y ago
Ellison: "The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed. Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales."
- sgift 16y ago
  I'm pretty sure the direction at Oracle is far better. That must be the reason Gosling et al are leaving Oracle as fast as they can.
  - sriramk 16y ago
    If Oracle winds up making more money with Sun's assets than Sun did, would that necessarily be a bad thing? I'm not saying losing the likes of Tim Bray and Gosling is good but having them didn't help Sun much either.
whyleyc 16y ago
Full interview here: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034
- maukdaddy 16y ago
  ^^ Go straight to that. Skip the InformationWeek crap. Who even reads InformationWeek any more?
- Legion 16y ago
  Or you can go right to the source, Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64B5YX20100513 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64B5YX20100513 What's the deal with the article title? "Special Report: Can that guy in Ironman 2 whip IBM in real life?"? Ironically, if not for the little InformationWeek repackaging, I probably wouldn't have read this article at all, because that's a headline I would have just skipped right past.
ivenkys 16y ago
Larry Ellison might not be a role model for anyone on the Technology side but he is one hell of a Salesman.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
cobralibre 16y ago
Interesting, though, that so many of Sun's software engineers are leaving Oracle.
ableal 16y ago
Good big picture stuff. Clicky to the print version of the five page article the blog leads into: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034 Couple of quotes/notes: Schwartz declined comment as did Sun co-founder and former Chairman Scott McNealy. Probable translation: signed a gag clause forbidding any comment on acquirer's management. Expensive money. ... Ellison was known to mock advisers who recommended that he consider acquisitions, saying "we write software, we don't write checks." But he changed gears .... They're also investing in Linux (pushing btrfs, etc - http://oss.oracle.com http://oss.oracle.com ). Smart enough to figure it's shared infrastructure they can leverage profitably. P.S. Ironically, just noticed the 'Blogs' section in that OSS page, e.g. Virtual Box blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/ http://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/ (Hey, good news: "May 10, Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.1.8 released ... Supporting new platforms such as Ubuntu 10.04 ...")
- merubin75 16y ago
  "Probable translation: signed a gag clause forbidding any comment on acquirer's management. Expensive money." Or consider that they don't want to have anything to do with the transaction anymore. If someone is trying to throw up all over you, you don't stick around and wait to see if he succeeds.
- wmf 16y ago
  Actually, Schwartz has a new tell-all blog: http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/ http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/
Jun8 16y ago
I quite dislike Ellison (read about his excesses in The Silicon Boys). He's one hell of a pusher, tough, which is what you need in times of distress. From the article linked from the post: >In typical Ellison fashion, he took a hands-on approach to the integration, choosing to meet directly with technical managers at Sun as often as four days a week to diagnose its problems, rather than delegating the work to underlings. Exactly! I've seen some CEO's who don't know the location of their R&D Lab better than the janitor closet. This is how it needs to be done. Dictatorships are awful, except when the dictator knows the right direction to go in hard times.
- lolracle 16y ago
  This is a flat lie. I can tell you from firsthand experience that Oracle changed quite a number of things at Sun without understanding what they were or what the ramifications could -- and in fact turned out to -- be. This ranges from buying incompatible kit for servers because they didn't know and didn't ask, to shutting off services and causing all kinds of problems, to rolling software that was in a testing queue to production and wondering why other deployments were held back dealing with the sudden incompatibilities. Oracle may have some inspiring qualities but good communication, management involvement "in the trenches", and solid corporate infrastructure are not among them. Ellison is right about one thing in that Sun's sales and marketing completely destroyed many decent products. Their executive team took care of the rest.
  - Jun8 16y ago
    Hmm, seems like I was misled by the PR spin (not an uncommon occurrence). I hear you, we are a big company going through a split and we had many stories of our CEO, god bless his soul, doing similar things, e.g. grabbing a list of people and cutting randomly, cutting off crucial teams in the process. And we did have a Sun alumni who totally blew our company with his cool but ineffective sales mumbo-jumbo. As much as I agree the wrongness of these decisions, I also see that some circumstances present a no-win scenario (Captain Kirk be damned), whatever you do there will be mistakes, but the important thing is to ACT! As far as I can see Ellison at least did that.
- 16y ago
michael_dorfman 16y ago
Ellison: The sales staff was compensated based on deal size, not profit. So the commission on a $1 million sale that generated $500,000 in profit was the same as one that cost the company $100,000, he said. "The sales force could care less if they sold things that lost money because the commission was the same in either case," he said. Meanwhile, I've never encountered an organization with more perverse sales incentives than Oracle had when I used to deal with them, back in the early 90s. Salesman were fired if they missed their sales quota for a single quarter, so we used to get phone calls at the end of each quarter begging us to buy something, anything, and return the item and cancel the invoice after the first of the month. Et cetera.
- logicalmind 16y ago
  Are you sure this wasn't simply a sales tactic? Or did you know this sales person personally? I generally don't find sales people to be the most honest and trustworthy individuals.
  - n8agrin 16y ago
    Firing salespeople that don't make their quarterly projections is fairly common afaik.
    - logicalmind 16y ago
      Maybe so, but a sales person guilting a customer into making a purchase in order to save his job would be something a bit different.
      - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
        You would think that one would follow from the other. In fact you could guess that the very point of threatening to fire someone is to drive them towards tactics that people with a secure job wouldn't countenance.
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
pw0ncakes 16y ago
What an asshole. I don't have a huge objection to discontinuing unprofitable products, but bad-mouthing the previous management because they had a different philosophy of R&D is beyond the pale.
blackguardx 16y ago
"His first [hardware] appliance was developed as engineers found that hardware bottlenecks slowed the pace at which computers could process information stored in Oracle's database software." Are they sure it wasn't the poorly written software? Is it really easier to design hardware nowadays than to optimize a huge mess of enterprise software?
- gaius 16y ago
  The Exadata stuff is really good. It's to data processing what a GPU is to graphics. Think compiling SQL and running it on the storage controller. It's not a matter of the database finding the right blocks on the disk any more - the database doesn't even see the blocks that don't match the SELECT.
sutro 16y ago
Ellison is an arrogant douche but he's absolutely right about Schwartz. Schwartz's high-level corporate strategy, as near as I could determine it, was to try to get people to like him by giving everything his company used to sell away for free and by doing "cool" things like blogging. The problems started before his stewardship, but he greatly accelerated them. Schwartz and his fellow execs should be ashamed at how much money they lost sitting atop one of the world's most valuable repositories of technical talent and intellectual property. An Ellison enema is exactly what Sun needs, or needed. Unfortunately it's about 5 years too late.
johnohara 16y ago
But pursuing the America's Cup wasn't.
bokchoi 16y ago
"Help me beat Oracle" blogs James Gosling who apparently doesn't like Oracle salesdroids much. http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/forgerock http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/forgerock
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  There is a certain irony that this comes as a blog post.
jhancock 16y ago
Well of course Tony Stark can do everything better.
smallhands 16y ago
Ellison will definitely make more money than SUN did with its own assets.He is going to put price tag to anything that boots. But SUN represent something much much bigger how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!!
- tsuraan 16y ago
  > how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!! Not a fan of oracle, but http://oss.oracle.com/ http://oss.oracle.com/ isn't entirely empty. Btrfs and OCFS2 certainly come to mind as interesting oracle projects.
strlen 16y ago
There's a lot to dislike about Oracle and Larry Ellison (especially as a person) but there's something to be said of a CEO who used the word "permgen" (in reference to HotSpot's generational garbage collector) at the first speech after an acquisition. Having been at Yahoo at the times of Terry Semel, it's incredibly refreshing to see a CEO of company take a hands-on approach to technology (even if Oracle is primarily a sales rather than engineering company).
- gaius 16y ago
  It's a bit more subtle than that. Oracle's product range is vast, and there's lots of overlap between products, and sometimes they'll have 3 different products that do the same thing! Why is this? Because Oracle builds stuff then figures out a way to sell it. That's in part why the salesforce is so hypercompetitive - they have to be just to not get drowned (it's also why Oracle has so many consulting types). It's not as free as Google perhaps - but if you can find your niche, it's not a bad company to be an engineer at.

59 points by whyleyc 16y ago

Ellison: "The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed. Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales."

sgift 16y ago
I'm pretty sure the direction at Oracle is far better. That must be the reason Gosling et al are leaving Oracle as fast as they can.
- sriramk 16y ago
  If Oracle winds up making more money with Sun's assets than Sun did, would that necessarily be a bad thing? I'm not saying losing the likes of Tim Bray and Gosling is good but having them didn't help Sun much either.

whyleyc 16y ago

Full interview here: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034

maukdaddy 16y ago
^^ Go straight to that. Skip the InformationWeek crap. Who even reads InformationWeek any more?
Legion 16y ago
Or you can go right to the source, Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64B5YX20100513 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64B5YX20100513 What's the deal with the article title? "Special Report: Can that guy in Ironman 2 whip IBM in real life?"? Ironically, if not for the little InformationWeek repackaging, I probably wouldn't have read this article at all, because that's a headline I would have just skipped right past.

ivenkys 16y ago

Larry Ellison might not be a role model for anyone on the Technology side but he is one hell of a Salesman.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

cobralibre 16y ago

Interesting, though, that so many of Sun's software engineers are leaving Oracle.

ableal 16y ago

Good big picture stuff. Clicky to the print version of the five page article the blog leads into: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034 Couple of quotes/notes: Schwartz declined comment as did Sun co-founder and former Chairman Scott McNealy. Probable translation: signed a gag clause forbidding any comment on acquirer's management. Expensive money. ... Ellison was known to mock advisers who recommended that he consider acquisitions, saying "we write software, we don't write checks." But he changed gears .... They're also investing in Linux (pushing btrfs, etc - http://oss.oracle.com http://oss.oracle.com ). Smart enough to figure it's shared infrastructure they can leverage profitably. P.S. Ironically, just noticed the 'Blogs' section in that OSS page, e.g. Virtual Box blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/ http://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/ (Hey, good news: "May 10, Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.1.8 released ... Supporting new platforms such as Ubuntu 10.04 ...")

merubin75 16y ago
"Probable translation: signed a gag clause forbidding any comment on acquirer's management. Expensive money." Or consider that they don't want to have anything to do with the transaction anymore. If someone is trying to throw up all over you, you don't stick around and wait to see if he succeeds.
wmf 16y ago
Actually, Schwartz has a new tell-all blog: http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/ http://jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com/

Jun8 16y ago

I quite dislike Ellison (read about his excesses in The Silicon Boys). He's one hell of a pusher, tough, which is what you need in times of distress. From the article linked from the post: >In typical Ellison fashion, he took a hands-on approach to the integration, choosing to meet directly with technical managers at Sun as often as four days a week to diagnose its problems, rather than delegating the work to underlings. Exactly! I've seen some CEO's who don't know the location of their R&D Lab better than the janitor closet. This is how it needs to be done. Dictatorships are awful, except when the dictator knows the right direction to go in hard times.

lolracle 16y ago
This is a flat lie. I can tell you from firsthand experience that Oracle changed quite a number of things at Sun without understanding what they were or what the ramifications could -- and in fact turned out to -- be. This ranges from buying incompatible kit for servers because they didn't know and didn't ask, to shutting off services and causing all kinds of problems, to rolling software that was in a testing queue to production and wondering why other deployments were held back dealing with the sudden incompatibilities. Oracle may have some inspiring qualities but good communication, management involvement "in the trenches", and solid corporate infrastructure are not among them. Ellison is right about one thing in that Sun's sales and marketing completely destroyed many decent products. Their executive team took care of the rest.
- Jun8 16y ago
  Hmm, seems like I was misled by the PR spin (not an uncommon occurrence). I hear you, we are a big company going through a split and we had many stories of our CEO, god bless his soul, doing similar things, e.g. grabbing a list of people and cutting randomly, cutting off crucial teams in the process. And we did have a Sun alumni who totally blew our company with his cool but ineffective sales mumbo-jumbo. As much as I agree the wrongness of these decisions, I also see that some circumstances present a no-win scenario (Captain Kirk be damned), whatever you do there will be mistakes, but the important thing is to ACT! As far as I can see Ellison at least did that.
16y ago

michael_dorfman 16y ago

Ellison: The sales staff was compensated based on deal size, not profit. So the commission on a $1 million sale that generated $500,000 in profit was the same as one that cost the company $100,000, he said. "The sales force could care less if they sold things that lost money because the commission was the same in either case," he said. Meanwhile, I've never encountered an organization with more perverse sales incentives than Oracle had when I used to deal with them, back in the early 90s. Salesman were fired if they missed their sales quota for a single quarter, so we used to get phone calls at the end of each quarter begging us to buy something, anything, and return the item and cancel the invoice after the first of the month. Et cetera.

logicalmind 16y ago
Are you sure this wasn't simply a sales tactic? Or did you know this sales person personally? I generally don't find sales people to be the most honest and trustworthy individuals.
- n8agrin 16y ago
  Firing salespeople that don't make their quarterly projections is fairly common afaik.
  - logicalmind 16y ago
    Maybe so, but a sales person guilting a customer into making a purchase in order to save his job would be something a bit different.
    - ZeroGravitas 16y ago
      You would think that one would follow from the other. In fact you could guess that the very point of threatening to fire someone is to drive them towards tactics that people with a secure job wouldn't countenance.
- michael_dorfman 16y ago

pw0ncakes 16y ago

What an asshole. I don't have a huge objection to discontinuing unprofitable products, but bad-mouthing the previous management because they had a different philosophy of R&D is beyond the pale.

blackguardx 16y ago

"His first [hardware] appliance was developed as engineers found that hardware bottlenecks slowed the pace at which computers could process information stored in Oracle's database software." Are they sure it wasn't the poorly written software? Is it really easier to design hardware nowadays than to optimize a huge mess of enterprise software?

gaius 16y ago
The Exadata stuff is really good. It's to data processing what a GPU is to graphics. Think compiling SQL and running it on the storage controller. It's not a matter of the database finding the right blocks on the disk any more - the database doesn't even see the blocks that don't match the SELECT.

sutro 16y ago

Ellison is an arrogant douche but he's absolutely right about Schwartz. Schwartz's high-level corporate strategy, as near as I could determine it, was to try to get people to like him by giving everything his company used to sell away for free and by doing "cool" things like blogging. The problems started before his stewardship, but he greatly accelerated them. Schwartz and his fellow execs should be ashamed at how much money they lost sitting atop one of the world's most valuable repositories of technical talent and intellectual property. An Ellison enema is exactly what Sun needs, or needed. Unfortunately it's about 5 years too late.

johnohara 16y ago

But pursuing the America's Cup wasn't.

bokchoi 16y ago

"Help me beat Oracle" blogs James Gosling who apparently doesn't like Oracle salesdroids much. http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/forgerock http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/forgerock

SoftwareMaven 16y ago
There is a certain irony that this comes as a blog post.

jhancock 16y ago

Well of course Tony Stark can do everything better.

smallhands 16y ago

Ellison will definitely make more money than SUN did with its own assets.He is going to put price tag to anything that boots. But SUN represent something much much bigger how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!!

tsuraan 16y ago
> how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!! Not a fan of oracle, but http://oss.oracle.com/ http://oss.oracle.com/ isn't entirely empty. Btrfs and OCFS2 certainly come to mind as interesting oracle projects.

strlen 16y ago

There's a lot to dislike about Oracle and Larry Ellison (especially as a person) but there's something to be said of a CEO who used the word "permgen" (in reference to HotSpot's generational garbage collector) at the first speech after an acquisition. Having been at Yahoo at the times of Terry Semel, it's incredibly refreshing to see a CEO of company take a hands-on approach to technology (even if Oracle is primarily a sales rather than engineering company).

gaius 16y ago
It's a bit more subtle than that. Oracle's product range is vast, and there's lots of overlap between products, and sometimes they'll have 3 different products that do the same thing! Why is this? Because Oracle builds stuff then figures out a way to sell it. That's in part why the salesforce is so hypercompetitive - they have to be just to not get drowned (it's also why Oracle has so many consulting types). It's not as free as Google perhaps - but if you can find your niche, it's not a bad company to be an engineer at.