
Larry Ellison On Sun Ex-CEO: Blogging Was Silly Diversion - whyleyc
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/05/larry_ellison_o_1.html
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michael_dorfman
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
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.

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n8agrin
Firing salespeople that don't make their quarterly projections is fairly
common afaik.

~~~
logicalmind
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
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.

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

~~~
maukdaddy
^^ Go straight to that. Skip the InformationWeek crap. Who even reads
InformationWeek any more?

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Jun8
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.

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lolracle
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
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.

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sutro
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.

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whyleyc
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."

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sgift
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.

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sriramk
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.

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ableal
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>

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>
). 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/> (Hey, good news:
"May 10, Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.1.8 released ... Supporting new platforms such
as Ubuntu 10.04 ...")

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merubin75
"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.

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

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

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blackguardx
"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?

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gaius
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.

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bokchoi
"Help me beat Oracle" blogs James Gosling who apparently doesn't like Oracle
salesdroids much.

<http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/forgerock>

~~~
SoftwareMaven
There is a certain irony that this comes as a blog post.

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strlen
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
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.

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johnohara
But pursuing the America's Cup wasn't.

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jhancock
Well of course Tony Stark can do everything better.

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smallhands
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!!!

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tsuraan
> how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!!

Not a fan of oracle, but <http://oss.oracle.com/> isn't entirely empty. Btrfs
and OCFS2 certainly come to mind as interesting oracle projects.

