

Larry Ellison: The Old Valley Is History (2003) - raghus
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_34/b3846648.htm

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wallflower
Repost but Larry Ellison, 2005 interview with SF Chronicle

The entire interview is interesting for Larry Ellison predicting the future
and then implementing it.

"Q: Does that lead to a consolidation period?

A: The industry is maturing. It is going to consolidate. That's exactly what
happened to every other industry. I didn't invent the idea of consolidation.
What happens during a period of consolidation is (the company in) second place
can suddenly move and become the winner.

One of the interesting things is (that) when you look at when the automobile
industry, the clear winner in the early phase of the automobile industry was
Henry Ford. Ford was the No. 1 car company in the world by far. Then a guy by
the name of Alfred Sloan decided to get all of the good losers together --
Chevrolet and Buick and all those guys -- and built General Motors. Then
General Motors passed Ford during the consolidation phase in the automobile
industry.

So during the entrepreneurial growth phase, Ford won. During the consolidation
phase, Ford lost and found itself in second place.

Q: So you don't want to be Henry Ford.

A: It's too late for anyone to be Henry Ford. That phase is over. We did
pretty well in the database business. We have the No. 1 database in the world,
and I'll argue that, at the dawn of the information age, that's not a bad
position to have."

2003 - Peoplesoft acquires JD Edwards

January 2005 - Peoplesoft acquisition

January 2006 - Siebel acquisition

January 2008 - BEA acquisition

January 2010 - Sun acquisition

(via Wikipedia)

[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/08/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/08/BUGP7CKKEJ1.DTL&hw=larry+ellison&sn=293&sc=185)

~~~
va_coder
"Then a guy by the name of Alfred Sloan decided to get all of the good losers
together"

Larry's now the guy putting the losers together.

~~~
locopati
Hard to see how BEA & Sun can be considered losers (at least when it comes to
tech) - for better or worse they are some of the most popular enterprise
technologies in use, alongside Oracle.

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kanwisher
Larry Ellison always tries this scare tactics when the economy is bad, of
course he needs to paint that big businesses are the only way to go. However
we seeing that gigantic j2ee solutions with Oracle being to expensive and a
move to a lot of cheaper OSS solutions like php, rails and django.

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csomar
Okay,I see different things. He said big companies will win and small ones
will fail, and he thinks that the future is in "molecular biology", Wifi and
other advanced technologies, which I don't agree with.

The future of the Internet and technology? I see that companies like Envato
will win in the long run. MicroStock sites like Themeforest, code canyon and
Active Den. Every man and his dog will purchase a computer, install some
software and build something tiny and useful. People will build script,
themes, plug-ins... They'll make enough money from it to live and some will
become rich.

The ones that don't understand well what it is and the bad developers will get
jobs at the 'big companies'. The smart will start small startups that either
sells for millions or make 10 times a salary they can get from working a 9-5
job.

The future is in the hand of the smart. Sites like Hacker News and companies
like Ycombinator will help them. I'm from a third world country, I know
programming before I knew the Internet, but I wasn't able to use my full
potential before sites like HN and blogs, forums, communities existed.

They completely changed my mind, made me another person. From someone that
loves programming and build software to someone that understand the market and
is able to build something that can makes him many and avoid working for a
company with a stupid boss.

The future is in Freelancing, at least for me.

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kqr2
(2003) more specifically from August 2003. Maybe someone can add that to the
title.

~~~
hop
The article is 6 years, 6 months, 6 days from today. Spooky.

[http://www.timeanddate.com/date/durationresult.html?m1=8&...](http://www.timeanddate.com/date/durationresult.html?m1=8&d1=25&y1=2003&m2=3&d2=3&y2=2010)

~~~
jey
Spooky? Why? Pick any day and you could find articles written 6 years, 6
months, and 6 days before that date.

~~~
hop
Thanks, I'll write that down.

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allertonm
He's had a bit of a change of heart about Cloud Computing since 2003, eh?

2003: "But the thing I'm most interested in is software as a service. That
idea that every customer who wants to do accounting on computers, or every
customer who wants to do inventory, or manufacturing, has to figure out what
computer to buy, what operating system to buy, what Cisco router and switch to
buy, what database to buy, is just nonsense.

Companies should be experts in their business, and computing should be
available on the Net as a service. So more and more, our business is changing
from selling our applications to our customers to: We buy the computers, we
run the applications, and you use it. We'll be the experts. And you just pay
us a monthly fee. That really is utility computing."

2009: "Cloud’s water vapor….Cloud computing is not only the future of
computing, it is the present and the entire past of computing.

…Salesforce.com has been around for a decade. And so has NetSuite…and people
are saying, “Well, that’s cloud computing.” Google is cloud computing.
Everyone is cloud computing….Everything is in the cloud now….It’s this
nonsense.

…But it’s not water vapor. All it is is a computer attached to a network. What
are you talking about? I mean, what do you think Google runs on?…Water vapor?
It’s databases and operating systems and memory and microprocessors and the
Internet!

…And the VCs, I love the VCs. [They ask their start-ups] “Oh…is that cloud?”
[And the start-ups go] “Oh! Oh! Microsoft Word! Change ‘Internet’ to ‘cloud’!
Mass change. Give it back to these nitwits on Sand Hill Road.”

…What do you mean by “cloud computing”?…All the cloud is is computers on a
network.

Our industry is so bizarre. They just change a term and they think they’ve
invented technology….You can’t just come up with a [slogan] like “Let’s call
that ‘cloud.” [But] it sure beats innovation.”

~~~
kanwisher
Haha Larry only says stuff to get people riled up and he is never impartial
its always about his position with Oracle.

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va_coder
The railroad industry, which he used for comparison, is not apples to apples.
Reason: There was no open source, cloud computing, etc. disruptive equivalents
in the railroad industry.

On the other hand he's successfully made a boatload of money for investors.

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stcredzero
_IBM has been a cornucopia of invention. And they stand in stark contrast to a
much younger company, Microsoft, which has done no innovation at all._

M$ has good research going on. The question is whether it can be productized.

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bayam
There's some truth to what he's saying, in that the most interesting
innovation is probably going to happen beyond the web- clean tech, biotech,
and life sciences.

~~~
evanrmurphy
Since that interview, a lot of interesting developments have happened on the
web, e.g. proliferation of VoIP, mobile dev, microblogging and real-time
search.

It does seem like the fields you mention are ripe for innovation, though. I
wonder if CS will be playing a significant auxiliary role.

