Larry Ellison

Oracle Beginnings

I see the black America’s Cup yachts with “Oracle” written across them and they just put me in a bad mood. I happen to have a little experience with Larry Ellison.

1980s Software Database Market

It was back in the 1980s that computers were starting to make great strides in automating business. These, mostly from IBM, were large machines that took up whole rooms with special raised floors, a staff to run them and air conditioning, which, often, the humans working outside of the computer room didn’t have.

Companies were paying millions of dollars for these machines, which had less than a thousandth of the power of a modern cell phone. But they could hold and manage the data needed to run a corporation, and that was worth something.

However, it’s wasn’t actually the computer that could run a business. It was the software running on the computer, and there was a growing market for software systems that could do exactly that, manage the data. They were called database management systems and they sold for a quarter of a million dollars a pop. There were a lot of software vendors hungry for that business.

I was working for one of them, Cullinet software, the first commercial software company. (Up til then software was simply included with the hardware from the computer company.) How big was it? Cullinet was the first software company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, Cullinet was the first software company to advertise in the Super Bowl, and Cullinet was the first software company to hire a sports celebrity spokesperson. We had Bobby Orr.

Larry Ellison in Public

Now there were different theoretical ways to manage data, some systems used a “network” model, and others an “indexed” model, and there were vendors of systems that used each. Cullinet used the network model. And there were conferences where companies would send people to learn about the different technologies, with presentations by experts and all the vendors there as well, pitching their wares.

I was at one, making presentations about Cullinet’s software. They say the only thing constant is change, and that was a time of major change in database technology. There was a new model catching everyone’s attention, “relational,” which promised to make it easier to model and access corporate data.

There were a number of new, small vendors coming out with software that supported the new “relational” model, challenging the dominance of the older (we’re talking maybe five years which is old in software time) established vendors. One of them was Oracle with Larry Ellison at the helm. I went to see his presentation.

Now most of these presentations were technical dry sorts of things, and relational technology was theoretical and certainly deserving of that sort of approach, but that’s not how Larry Ellison presented it. This man was a Salesman with a capital S and what an incredible over the top performance he gave. I mean he was a caricature of the classic snake-oil salesmen of our pioneer days telling how relational could cure all your database woes, just step up and buy a bottle. It was hard for me to believe anyone in that technical environment would buy into that sort of all glitz, no substance, presentation.

I remember his conclusion, he put up a slide and said “this is how you model customers and orders using Oracle” and showed a picture of two database tables, one for customers and one for orders. How simple could it be?

And then, with incredible flare said “and here is a slide showing how Cullinet does the EXACT same thing!” and flashes a picture direct from our documentation, showing a dozen or more circles and arrows that was a network design for a whole system, not just customers and orders. It had inventory, accounts receivable, bills of material, all sorts of stuff needed in a real world application…, not just customers and orders. Of course it was more complicated.

But before anyone had time to see, he took it down and invited people to see him for more information and people were just tripping over themselves in the aisle to get to him and exchange business cards. Jeez. Larry Ellison wasn’t one of the creators of relational database software, but he was a businessman and salesman who saw the potential for a lot of money to be made.

There were a number of other vendors with the vision of relational database being the future of database (it was), Oracle was only one of them, and not by any means the best. The key issue at the time was performance. Everyone understood the theory of relational was clearly a better way to think about and represent data, but if it took two days to run your payroll, then relational wasn’t really a practical option. So performance was key in a company’s decision on which system to purchase.

The back of every computer magazine of the day featured full page ads of Oracle with benchmark data documenting how well Oracle performed. They were lies. It simply wasn’t true. But the ads worked, and Oracle, under Larry Ellison’s salesmanship and marketing, became the leading relational database company.

Hold that thought — using pushy salesmanship and marketing lies, he achieved dominance in the market. Now Oracle was certainly a good enough system, but still…

Larry Ellison in Private

I had a personal insight into him as well. We were all still competing for that database market and we were interviewing a new salesman. Understand that these were quarter of a million dollar sales, and there was at least a six month sales cycle, with multiple competing vendors. Skilled technical sales people were a key factor.

For this reason, as part of the interview process, a potential salesperson would interview directly with the president of the company. As John Cullinane, the president of Cullinet once said, a CEO should be involved in any million dollar decision, and each of his salespeople carried sales quotas over a million dollars.

One of the salespeople we were interviewing had had an interview with Larry Ellison, who had a house in Marin County, the expensive area north of San Francisco. He told us of the experience.

He and his relatively shy and conservative German wife were invited for dinner, and while they were dressed as you might expect, Ellison was simply wearing a robe at dinner. When the dinner was over, he said they could all go hang out in the hot tub for a while.

The wife said she couldn’t because she didn’t bring a bathing suit. Ellison said that didn’t matter, a bathing suit wasn’t needed. The wife said “well, where I was raised, it does matter.” Where upon Ellison stood up and exclaimed (probably with that same flare I saw at that conference) “well this is California and it doesn’t matter!” and flashed open the robe he was wearing over his fully naked body.

The salesman decided he didn’t want to work for him.

Those two incidents shaped my thinking of him. I don’t like him and it always bugs me how successful Oracle was/is and it really pisses me off to watch the America Cup races where Oracle has one of the boats with its evil looking black sails and big “Oracle” written on them.

Today

That brings us up to the present and here’s just one sentence from the Economist in a recent article on AI:

“Oracle is the latest to join the party. Its value surged on September 10th after it published an ambitious forecast for its AI-related cloud business, briefly turning its boss, Larry Ellison, into the world’s richest man.”

The key word that resonates with me is “ambitious.” He’s lying. Again. And it works.

Sailing Epilog

While looking for a picture of the Oracle America’s Cup boats, I came across this article about how they had to return the two trophies they won because the boats had been illegally modified. They cheated. Hmmm.

https://www.yachtingworld.com/news/americas-cup-oracles-illegal-boats-746