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Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle (Paperback)
by Matthew Symonds
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Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Business success, Technology, New economy |
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Author: Matthew Symonds
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pub. in: August, 2004
ISBN: 0743225058
Pages: 528
Measurements: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01178
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0743225052
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- MSL Picks -
For years it seems like I've heard about Larry Ellison being the complete antithesis of Bill Gates while at the same time earning almost as much money. Knowing this about him and very little about Oracle, I decided it was time to look into it. "Softwar" appears to blend a few things that I find very desirable into one book.
First, its written by an independent observer-- Matthew Symonds of the Economist. While who can say whether this is truly an unbiased account, the vast majority of the book seems to portray Oracle in good light, but contains quips that allow the reader to see where all the Oracle detractors might have a point.
Second, Larry Ellison. When Symonds writes something or quotes someone (like Tom Siebel or other former employees) and Ellison disagrees, he gets to chime in and tell his side of the story through footnotes. After looking at so many books that just don't seem to have any proximity to Ellison, I chose this book mainly because you can get Ellison's rhetoric straight from the horses's mouth.
Third, if you read this book soon, the information will be more practical than books that seem to focus on interesting, but outdated info about a companies products or strategies. I personally knew nothing of Enterprise software or hardware other than hearing people complain about SAP. Now I at least have a semblence of knowledge about a field I'll probably end up at least working with.
If you want a book that puts Oracle in a good light while displaying its bad side at times and to hear mostly about Oracle with a brief biography of Ellison and how he commands the world's second largest software company, read it! PS I loved it.
(From quoting Nicholas Honko, USA)
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Matthew Symonds is currently political editor of The Economist, but before that was the magazine's technology and communications editor for nearly four years. He has also been a founding editorial director of The Independent and strategy director of BBC Worldwide Television. Symonds lives in London with his wife and three children.
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From Publisher
In a business where great risks, huge fortunes, and even bigger egos are common, Larry Ellison stands out as one of the most outspoken, driven, and daring leaders of the software industry. The company he cofounded and runs, Oracle, is the number one business software company. Perhaps even more than Microsoft's, Oracle's products are essential to today's networked world.
In Softwar, journalist Matthew Symonds gives readers exclusive and intimate insight into both Oracle and the man who made it and runs it. As well as relating the story of Oracle's often bumpy path to industry dominance, Symonds deals with the private side of Ellison's life. With unlimited insider access granted by Ellison himself, Symonds captures the intensity and, some would say, the recklessness that have made Ellison a legend.
With a new and expanded epilogue for the paperback edition that tells the story behind Oracle's epic struggle to win control of PeopleSoft, Softwar is the most complete portrait undertaken of the man and his empire - a unique and gripping account of both the way the computing industry really works and an extraordinary life.
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Chapter One: Larry and Me
I first met Larry Ellison in his office at Oracle's Redwood Shores headquarters on December 8, 1997. I had recently become The Economist's technology and communications editor, and this was the first of what became regular visits to Silicon Valley. I had just completed two days of meetings at Microsoft's campus at Redmond, Washington, 800 miles to the north, where an array of impressively on-message executives had been wheeled out for my benefit - though unfortunately not Bill Gates himself. I would see him on my next visit, I was assured. But there was a strong hint that "face time with Bill" was conditional on The Economist's taking a more sympathetic line toward Microsoft in the antitrust case that the Department of Justice was preparing against it. After a similar turn involving Oracle's most senior managers, I had been promised time with Ellison himself.
It turned out I'd picked a bad afternoon. I didn't know it at the time, but Oracle was about to issue its first earnings warning since the firm had nearly gone under in 1990. The economic crisis in Asia had taken its toll, and in North America, slowing license sales of Oracle's most important product, its all-conquering database, seemed to support the argument of some analysts that Oracle was dominating a market that was getting close to saturation. The following day, the stock lost 30 percent of its value.
As I waited, I could see Ellison through the glass doors of the eleventh-floor boardroom, huddled in conversation. He was already an hour and a half late for his interview with me and I knew he had to fly to New York later in the day to deliver a keynote speech at an Internet conference. I had heard stories about Ellison's lateness and didn't believe the press flak's distracted excuses about an "emergency" being the cause of the delay. Let's leave it for another time, I suggested grumpily. But at that moment, I was suddenly ushered into Ellison's handsome office with its expensive Japanese artifacts and panoramic views across the bay.
Despite the strain he must have been under, Ellison was courtesy itself. After apologizing profusely for his lateness, he began to talk about technology. His theme was the failure of the prevailing computer architecture of the day, known as client/server (because the job of running software was shared between server computers in corporate data centers and their desktop PC "clients"). He believed client/server was an "evolutionary dead end" that was "distributing complexity" with disastrous consequences. The answer was a new model of computing based on the Internet, in which the complexity and the computing would be hidden in the network. Users would be able to access everything they needed through a web browser that could be run by a machine much less expensive and cantankerous than a PC -- a network computer.
There was nothing unexpected in this. It was a drum that Ellison had been beating for some time, and conceptually it was little different from Sun Microsystems's famous slogan that "the network is the computer." Ellison had first declared the PC "a ridiculous device" at a technology conference in Paris more than two years earlier. The speech, at the height of the hoopla surrounding the release of Windows 95 and in front of an audience that included Bill Gates, caused a minor sensation.
Ellison ran through a well-rehearsed routine, but there was nonetheless something extraordinarily compelling about his argument. He seemed to be speaking directly to the problems that anyone who depended on computers at work knew all too well: the crash-prone PC with its incomprehensible error messages; the incredible effort of maintaining thousands of PCs across a company; the apparently insurmountable difficulties of getting reasonable performance and scalability across wide-area networks. The arguments seemed utterly rational and commonsensical, while Ellison himself was passionate and funny.
Over the next three years, Ellison was proved to be far more right than wrong. The network computer itself proved to be a dazzling digression: Ellison had been right about how the Internet would change the way computers were used, but most people still reckoned that the best way of getting to the Internet was through a PC. A few network computers were made by Oracle and a loosely knit coalition of Microsoft's enemies, such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, but tumbling PC prices and the limitations imposed by slow dial-up connections quickly condemned them to irrelevance. Microsoft crowed; Ellison was made to look a bit foolish. But the PC versus the NC was a sideshow that stole attention from the real struggle for the future of computing. What mattered was that Ellison had understood better than anyone the potential impact of the Internet on enterprise computing in general and on Oracle in particular.
While the technology analysts in the investment banks and the consultancies confidently predicted the maturing of the database market, Ellison realized that the Internet would exponentially increase both the number of database transactions and the number of people who would interact with Oracle's databases. That would mean more license growth than the analysts had dreamed of. Every time someone looked for a book on Amazon.com, bought stock through ETRADE, or put something up for auction on eBay, that person was using an Oracle database. Ellison believed that the database would be the essential platform for Internet computing, effectively displacing the once all-important operating system.
Within companies, the same thing would happen. Instead of business software being used by only a handful of specialists, Internet-based applications could be extended to anyone with authorization and a browser. Every time one of those applications was used, there was a good chance that it would query the database that the application ran on. When the networking giant Cisco Systems talked of having a "URL for everything we do," it was another way of saying that everybody they employed was constantly using the firm's Oracle database. In a client/server world, less sophisticated databases, such as Microsoft's SQL Server, might have become "good enough" for many businesses, but with Internet computing came the need for databases that could support millions of users at once. With the coming of e-business, Oracle's databases became at least as much an essential element of infrastructure as Cisco's routers or the big server computers made by the likes of Sun that were also back in fashion. It was no coincidence that in early 2000 those three companies -- the three superstars of the Internet - had a combined market value of nearly a trillion dollars.
If that was a stroke of luck for Oracle, what wasn't was Ellison's decision, to the horror of many colleagues and customers, to abandon all further development of client/server-based applications and concentrate the firm's entire engineering effort on building for the new computing architecture of the Internet. While rivals in the apps business, such as the German powerhouse SAP and PeopleSoft, talked up the Internet and put a web front-end on some of their products, Ellison went much further. Oracle was the first established software firm to risk everything on the new paradigm.
His rationale was simple: Oracle could never hope to be number one in enterprise applications as long as client/server prevailed -- it was fated always to play second fiddle to SAP, whose strength in the enterprise apps market almost matched Oracle's dominance in databases. By getting to the Internet first, assuming that the software could be made to work, Ellison would force Oracle's competitors to become followers, gaining vital time-to-market over them. And, crucially in an industry in which perception is as important as reality, if Ellison's bet came off, it would make Oracle appear very cool.
The strategy of harnessing Internet hype and turning Oracle from stodgy to hip - Ellison's mantra had become "the Internet changes everything" - helped drive Oracle's market cap in 2000 to within touching distance of a Microsoft brought low by the government's antitrust case. Ellison even briefly overtook Bill Gates as the world's richest man, with a net worth of more than $50 billion. If newspaper and magazine articles about Ellison still found plenty of space to describe in loving detail his high-rolling ways, they were also forced to concede that there was substance too. Even though Ellison refused to conform to their idea of what an Über-geek should look and sound like - Gates had that one sewn up - there was a growing willingness to concede that, although as arrogant and addicted to hyperbole as ever, Ellison probably was an authentic business and technology visionary.
In December 2000, when I was thinking about writing this book, Ellison told me that he was preparing to bet the company all over again in a do-or-die attempt to make Oracle not just the biggest software company, but the world's most influential corporation. To Ellison, that meant not so much passing Microsoft in revenues, although that would be nice, but Oracle having become the successor to industrial icons such as Ford and IBM, whose products and vision had changed the way the world works. He couldn't bear to include Microsoft in that pantheon. At first it sounded like a characteristic piece of Ellisonian exaggeration. With Ellison, you never quite knew whether he was being provocative for the sake of it or whether he really meant it.
Before deciding to do the book, I went to see him at his home in Atherton. I needed to gauge how serious he really was. After talking through the day and well into the night, I concluded that he was very serious indeed.
His logic went like this: The arrival of the Internet meant we were now living at the beginning of the information age - "it's the information age, not the fucking operating system age" - and Oracle, it just so happened, was the leading company for helping people to manage their inf...
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Amazon.com (MSL quote), USA
<2008-02-26 00:00>
Softwar is a biography of Larry Ellison and his company, Oracle. As such, it's simultaneously a portrait of a clever and driven man, a case study of a successful software development company, and a tableau of the commercial software industry from its beginnings, through the dot-com craze, and into the present era. Matthew Symonds, who began this project while working as the editor of the excellent technology section of the Economist, has done a great job with all three elements of his project, thanks in no small part to the tremendous access he was given and to his close collaboration with Ellison.
Collaboration is very nearly the right word, as Ellison reviewed Symonds' manuscript before publication and, while he did not alter it, he did make a large number of comments, which appear in the book as footnotes. As Symonds is a good journalist who attributes most of his material, Ellison is able to take issue immediately with statements other people make about him and his company. The overall effect is hypertextual, and represents an important new biographical technique that other writers should imitate. Softwar succeeds because Ellison has a fantastically interesting life, tremendous experience, and carefully considered opinions, and because Symonds communicates them with clarity and style. -David Wall
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Topics covered, USA
<2008-02-26 00:00>
The life, times, acquaintances, tastes, toys, and opinions of Larry Ellison, the database entrepreneur and CEO of Oracle Corporation. |
Publishers Weekly (MSL quote), USA
<2008-02-26 00:00>
Symonds was technology editor at the Economist when Ellison invited him to collaborate on a book about e-business, but the journalist decided he would rather write a profile of the software tycoon, one of Silicon Valley's most notorious figures. Oracle's database programs have become integral to the Internet and other networked computer systems, and Oracle's head is convinced that he can surpass Microsoft as the industry leader. But he's also developed a reputation for his aggressive corporate tactics and personal flamboyance. Ellison agreed to cooperate with the project, but as part of the deal, he reserved the right to respond, which he does in a series of running footnotes. Sometimes he only uses the opportunity to mouth business platitudes, but he also refutes stories, cracks jokes and even argues with other sources. Although the book deals extensively with Oracle's efforts to promote a new software package, it comes to life most when it follows Ellison outside the office-prepping his sailboat for a run at the America's Cup or overseeing the final touches on a Japanese garden complex. Symonds's near-total access to his subject leads to intimate observations that verge on personal advice, as when the writer suggests how best to handle a top Oracle executive or comments on the relationship between Ellison and his two children. But he remains objective enough to point out several mistakes in the past management of Oracle (many of which Ellison acknowledges or clarifies). Even without its unusual counterpoint, the book would stand as a compelling portrayal of one of the computer industry's most influential leaders.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. |
Booklist (MSL quote), USA
<2008-02-26 00:00>
There has been a war brewing in the software industry that most computer users don't even know about. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, wants to supplant the current Windows-based client-server network architecture with a totally Internet-based solution that would simplify computing and make Microsoft's server software obsolete. Even now, Oracle is the dominant software in business; every time you do a Google search or buy something on Amazon.com, you are using it. Anyone who craves a play-by-play account of Ellison and the evolution of the number-one relational database in the world can really sink their teeth into this. There is a slightly bizarre twist to this high-tech tale: Ellison himself gets to throw in running commentary at the bottom of many pages, augmenting and often contradicting the author's text in his own brash style. Beware if you 're not up on your geekspeak, though, as the casual reader will get lost in all the IT systems acronyms thrown around, such as CRM, ERP, HR and TPC-C. More entertaining than the technical jargon is the ruthless backstabbing that goes on between Ellison and big-name competitors such as Microsoft, Seibel Systems, PeopleSoft and i2
Technologies. David Siegfried
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