
Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison - sajid
https://steveblank.com/2014/09/25/watching-larry-ellison-become-larry-ellison-the-dna-of-a-winner/
======
dave_sullivan
For anyone interested in learning more about Larry Ellison and Oracle, I'd
highly suggest "The difference between god and Larry Ellison (god doesn't
think he's Larry Ellison)."

Oracle is a 150 billion dollar company, similar in market cap to Intel. Once
you've read histories on these people, it suddenly makes sense that Warren
Buffet and Bill Gates hang out, while Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were BFFs.
Like with Jobs and Apple, Ellison and Oracle are aggressively polarizing.

I see a future of declines for Oracle; Salesforce.com is redefining and taking
their market (corporate IT budgets). There is simply _no way_ other than lock-
in and being dicks that they'll be able to see the profitability they once
had, let alone sales growth (unless by acquisition). You can see it already
with their patent suits; they're out of ideas. But if you work in the business
of software, Oracle's history is worth knowing.

~~~
tinbad
Every enterprise I have worked at/with had Salesforce, but I've never seen or
heard about anyone use it. (What do they even do?) I feel like it's one of
those companies that's good at selling but not really building product(s)
people actually use. Not sure same can be said about Oracle, I worked at many
corporations where the tech teams were using Oracle DBs for simple 1-page
microsites.

~~~
dave_sullivan
Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, started out at Oracle. Larry Ellison was
his mentor. I think he was even at Larry Ellison's (3rd?) wedding. He left
Oracle to start Salesforce.

Salesforce is a software layer on top of databases, often called CRM. It's the
answer for "how do you sell a relational database to a guy that just needs a
rolodex?" Salesforce actually uses Oracle databases to power their
infrastructure, to this day.

Over the past 10 years, Salesforce has built out its own platform that
basically turns Salesforce into a web-based version of visual fox pro. Which
sounds bad, but consider that many "Salesforce.com administrators" are NOT
programmers. Then to be taken more seriously as a custom development platform,
to be able to add more advanced logic, they built their own scripting language
(Apex) and bought Heroku.

So it started as (pretty much) a fancy rolodex but has evolved into a platform
through which you can develop certain types of software and workflows that
would be difficult with alternatives. "Difficult with alternatives" becomes
less true every day (which is why I got away from pitching businesses on
custom development with Salesforce and into pitching businesses on custom
development with python and purely open solutions.) Despite having legitimate
competition from open source, their sales and marketing has done a very good
job at convincing their users that those don't exist, or that Salesforce
invented them ( _cough_ heroku).

Maybe you've heard of Oracle or SAP consultants in the 90s making a very good
living advising businesses how to set up and use these products?
Salesforce.com is now that. And despite being "enterprise" they actually have
very talented engineers. Also, critical mass. They have managed to build this
ecosystem and everyone working in Corporate IT is drinking the kool aid.
Google "Dreamforce 2016" if you want to see just how cult like it's all
become. Like I say, they are going to replace Oracle. It's funny how much
shared DNA they have though.

~~~
gaius
ApEx (Application Express) is an Oracle product, more like a visual RAD tool
for the web. Did Salesforce really call their scripting language the same
thing??

~~~
jacques_chester
Yep. That's one of the reasons why searching for "ApEx" on Stack Overflow
isn't fruitful.

The other is that nobody, if they can help it, uses ApEx.

~~~
reitanqild
> The other is that nobody, if they can help it, uses ApEx.

Oh oh. I worked for more than two years with a team that continued to expand
their investment in Oracle and Apex.

When everything you know is Oracle, everything looks like a task for Oracle
;-)

~~~
jacques_chester
That was my experience too, I worked on ApEx stuff for around 2 years.

It came free with the database license, so it got used.

I don't miss it.

------
whack
I was expecting to see a lot of Oracle hate here, and looks like the train's
already started. Regardless of your perspective of Oracle today, it's hard to
dispute that Larry Ellison was a successful entrepreneur and businessman. He
co-founded a $150B company, remained in the senior leadership position for
decades, and guided the company towards extremely profitable outcomes for
shareholders. You may not like him personally, you may not like his products,
you may not like his company's work environment, but I'm sure any aspiring
entrepreneur can learn a lot from Larry Ellison's example.

~~~
hodgesrm
Completely agree. Oracle's success did not happen by chance. They have a great
track record of navigating successive technology waves. Their strategy is
often "bring a gun to a knife fight" like when they bought InnoDB out from
under MySQL AB. Not to everyone's taste but they have outmaneuvered an amazing
number of competitors over the years.

Ellison in the flesh is quite personable.

~~~
digi_owl
> Ellison in the flesh is quite personable.

Sounds oddly familiar...

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cha-cho
A good book about Larry Ellison is “Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry
Ellison and Oracle” from 2004. It looks like Larry himself proofread the book
as he offers comments and corrections at the bottom of some of the pages.

Oracle is unlike any other technology company in the world. The majority of
their software offerings are not aimed at consumers, so many people (including
programmers and IT-savvy folks) have a hard time understanding the company
unless they’ve spent weeks studying one piece of their product stack.

I started working for Oracle in 1998. I thought I would be able to get up to
speed quickly on everything Oracle. I was wrong. It took a long time to get a
feeling of confidence. The main product, the Oracle database, is a vast
monolith of technology and features that is constantly being updated. It has a
documentation set that could easily fill a bookshelf. Taker a look:
[http://docs.oracle.com](http://docs.oracle.com)

Every so often someone takes at shot at Larry at a press conference or online,
implying that Oracle’s time has passed, that some new hotshot company was
going to overtake them in some way.

Spend some time studying Oracle and Larry Ellison, and you’ll understand why
Larry always smiles at these questions.

------
digi_owl
I find myself thinking that recent years of change in the Linux world is
partially to blame on Oracle and Red Hat having a falling out.

Those two used to have a fruitful partnership where RH suppiled the distro,
and Oracle supplied the software that ran on top.

But right around the time RH released RHEL 6.0, Oracle up and forked RHEL into
Oracle Linux and started offering support contracts for the whole stack. Since
then RH seems to be on the warpath, tightening their control over the various
sub-projects that RHEL is made of.

~~~
blahi
But didn't RedHat enter middleware first, snatching jboss under Oracle's nose?

~~~
digi_owl
Well neither was established in that market at the time, afaik. But Oracle
Linux was not only Oracle entering onto RH turf, but using the very FOSS that
was RH life blood against them.

Oracle was basically offering existing RH customers to consolidate their
support contracts with Oracle rather than have the OS with RH and the database
with Oracle.

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datashovel
I have a policy when assessing opportunities. Use of Oracle products is a deal
breaker.

~~~
hodgesrm
Why? Is it the money?

The DBMS technology is excellent. I worked at Sybase from 1990 on and much as
I _loved_ the company Oracle beat us fair and square with features like Row
Level Locking and Multi-version Concurrency Control. Oracle also had a
healthier attitude about data corruption. Oracle fixed the bugs or didn't let
them get in in the first place. Sybase on the other hand developed DBCC, which
repaired the problems on live databases. I lost numerous tables on Sybase
while developing products. This never happened after switching to Oracle in
the late 90s.

One of the things I still like about Oracle is that no matter what data
management problem you are solving there is generally some feature that helps
you do it.

VPD (virtual private database) is a great example. I was working at a SaaS in
the late 90s and we ran into a problem where we absolutely needed data from
multiple tenants in a single database but still fully isolated between each
tenant. Oracle had a feature called VPD that did exactly that. It saved our
bacon on that project.

I have dealt with the Oracle license police and yes they can be jerks. But you
can't fault their technology. The company deserves respect for what they have
accomplished.

Edit: fixed typo.

~~~
chris_wot
Really? I sure as hell can fault them - getting them to even _acknowledge_
bugs is a gigantic PITA. Unless you are huge, getting their support people to
respond or even understand issues is impossible. The CBO is a gigantic black
box and can be incredibly hard to troubleshoot.

They have a CSO who has publicly stated they don't want bug reports or anyone
to give them security exploits, and who once gave a talk "How Joshua DoSed
Jericho: Cybersecrets of the Bible". [1]

There's plenty more to make you stay away from them at all costs, not the
least of which are completely unethical business practices.

1\. [https://www.rsaconference.com/videos/how-joshua-dosed-
jerich...](https://www.rsaconference.com/videos/how-joshua-dosed-jericho-
cybersecrets-of-the-bible)

~~~
hodgesrm
Fair point on support and security. Mary Ann Davidson's rant about security on
the Oracle blog was indefensible. [1]

While I'm impressed by some of the Oracle engineering there's no question they
also know how to squeeze customers just up to the breaking point.

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2015/08/oracle-deletes-csos-screed-
hac...](https://www.wired.com/2015/08/oracle-deletes-csos-screed-hackers-
report-bugs/)

------
TH3R3LL1K
I think people forget that the Oracle database is just one of the many
products that oracle has. I think Weblogic is the best application server
around.

~~~
krzyk
Why is it best? The only time I encountered it was in conversation of people
that were using it and hated it, everywhere else it was either JBoss or just
Tomcat (with new frameworks one doesn't need all the EJBs).

Are there any comparison chart with e.g. JBoss?

~~~
brianwawok
You don't need application servers. They just being bloat. Their ship has
sailed.

------
ttam
(2014)

------
CrazyCatDog
I found this post completely uninspiring, though I'm biased as I thing Steve
Blank often does more damage than good with his recipes for success. Would
love to hear the broader HN community's sentiment towards Steve, and the
broader entrepreneurial snake oil in a book/consultant movement.

~~~
ridruejo
Steve Blank's snake oil??? "The 4 steps to the epiphany" was a transforming
book for me and other entrepreneurs and the popular "The Lean Startup" follow
up from Eric Ries a direct result of working with Steve. He genuinely cares
about entrepreneurs and the valley ecosystem go watch "The secret history of
Silicon Valley"

