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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

by Jun8 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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.
jcnnghm 17y ago
I can't get firmware updates for two year old servers because of the Oracle takeover. My company will never purchase an Oracle product, they screw their customers.

by Jun8 17y ago

lolracle 17y 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 17y 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.

jcnnghm 17y ago

I can't get firmware updates for two year old servers because of the Oracle takeover. My company will never purchase an Oracle product, they screw their customers.