Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

by Matthew Symonds

“dumbed down”

emasculated.

cowboys

Closing that $2 million deal isn’t going to solve my problem for me, but if I can make seventeen thousand people more effective in their job every day, that has a real impact top line and bottom line. That’s a huge win.”

A salesman shouldn’t want to cut deals. Okay, at the high end, the top hundred accounts, there may be some relationships and arrangements. But as you move further downstream, the more standard the business should be.

There is still a human element to selling software.”5

“shadow management team”

He’s especially proud of the fact that much of the support work is done out of Bangalore by Indian engineers, who earn a fraction of the wages expected in California or Europe.

Selling brand-new software is always difficult until a reference base of satisfied early customers exists.

opined that most of the savings had come from old-fashioned belt-tightening:

hard pounding

cocked hat.

When you have someone who has facts versus someone who has none, facts, not personality, rule the day.

The more we know, the more rational our decisions and the less we argue.

Because once you knew that certain facts were true, the...

It’s really quite extraordinary how different an organization becomes when decisions are based on facts rather than force ...

Now every manager in Oracle is required to come to planning sessions with a first slide that says ‘How we’re going to do more while spending less.’

We no longer have a culture in which people think that the more money they spend, the more important they are. We have a culture that finally understands: expenses are bad.”

it’s quite another for a company full of very smart people to become obsessively rule-based.

For him, the process by which the suite had evolved and Oracle had been transformed into an e-business was utterly symbiotic.

I was trying to make the point that ERP systems delivered very little value to senior managers because they were process automation systems, not information systems.

such as telling you if this purchase order put you over your capital budget.

An engineered process is almost always—not always but almost always—better than an ad hoc process.

crewneck

pullover.

The “first Internet database,” as Ellison described it, was packed with hip-sounding new features: a built-in Java virtual machine that could execute applications written in the new Java programming language, which was taking the development community by storm;

agnostic

axiomatic

If a business flow was interrupted by manual processes at any stage, it almost always meant that the information stored was, at best, partial.

esoteric

perfunctory

ramble,

pouncing

prognostication:

bitten off more than it could chew,

vaunting

cardinal

It was a bit like the beginning of World War I: once the troop mobilizations began, there was no turning back.”

avant-garde

sanguine.

Ellison signed off with this: “The more we know, the more rational our decisions. Oracle’s getting smarter. Oh, the possibilities. . . .”

legion.

The software business likes to play the blame game when products don’t work as billed.

‘No software is perfect in its early release, but it took seven months to resolve these problems,’ Young says.”

leapt

unbowed.

misapprehension

discrete

nickel,”

It’s a lot easier writing checks than writing software.”