Wow. Even after you said it I didn't really believe it, but googling confirms it - born in '44. And I thought he was younger than Gates - not 12 years older.
He was already doing the CTO job, in effect. He's just retaining that post as well as becoming Executive Chairman, where he will still be in charge....
What is it about Ellison that makes people say Bond villain, beyond the yacht and such? You're not the first person I've heard say that. (I'm not critiquing, I think it's amusing.)
The problem is not that it's expensive. What is wrong with Oracle's software is that people buy it mostly because migrating away is more expensive. And Oracle works hard to ensure that things will stay that way, even if that requires reducing the quality of their software.
I started digging into companies with Co-CEOs and found this: "Research by consulting firm Mercer found that as of the end of 2008, just 34 of 6,487 public firms, or 0.5 percent, had co-CEOs."
Interesting that they name Co-CEO's in Catz and Hurd. I wonder how that will work, especially given Hurd's "tough to work with" reputation.
Interestingly Ellison will be the CTO. This could be a shit show with 3 people trying to run the show!
I mean does anyone really expect Larry Ellison to start taking marching orders. Will be interesting to watch the short interest on this company!
I think the two headed CEO is what the street expected all along as Catz has been around for ever and alot of people thought that Hurd, the former HP CEO, was promised the CEO title when Ellison resigned.
It looks like they, Catz and Hurd, will split the running of day to day operations as Hurd gets sales, marketing and strategy reporting to him, while Catz will continue to have finance, legal and manufacturing.
Its down about a dollar after the close on about a third higher trading volume than normal. So it doesn't look like anyone is "spooked" by the news.
Oracle has been run by the three of them for awhile now. This is most likely a reduction in the responsibilities for Larry (ie. not getting flak for skipping out on earnings calls/keynotes when he wants to watch his boat race) and thus mostly a change in title without significant change to operations (other than messaging to the Street what the succession plan is).
Yeah, I think Ellison is heading for a "phased" retirement. Eventually, he'll give up the CTO role and just be Chairman. Then he'll give up the Chairman role (perhaps when he dies).
I don't see becoming CTO as heading for retirement. If he wanted to semi-retire he could adopt some other title like Chief Software Architect.
Also your mention of his eventual death sounds insulting. There are plenty of better things to pick apart Ellison for besides his age, and he isn't all that old. There isn't a single mention of his health in the wikipedia article about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
It's odd that you would see a reference to someone's eventual death as an insult. For a 70-year-old man, death looms large, whatever Wikipedia has to say on the subject.
I think you're right. At first I thought it would be to bring out a knife fight. In reflection, it seems like they're going towards a triumvirate similar to Google. Larry wants to be Eric Schmidt, but can't be if he's got the CEO title. Everyone would defer to him for everything.
Why do you think that a CTO has to be highly technical? Does a CTO at a big technology company write code? Line level engineering managers don't even write code a lot of the time. You just deal in the high-level abstract.
Their course corrections have been as good as any large company. Even if the product wasn't there, they caught many of the biggest trends. Even Microsoft didn't see the internet coming.
Not to dwelve too far into Oracle hagiography but,
>During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His projects included a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".[10] In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his.
It's really not clear from the first few hits off Google what his role was in developing Oracle, the application, but he's not like, _untechnical_.
Also, apparently Bob Miner programmed the bulk of the original product and ran engineering, but the Quora link above says Miner considered Ellison a good programmer.
Someone I spoke to after the Sun merger said one of the adjustments Sun engineers had to make was Ellison wandering around desks in Oracle talking about what people were working on, and asking "That looks cool. What could you achieve if I gave another $x million in funding?" if the technology looked interesting to him.
A received anecdote, but the thrust was that Ellison is pretty keenly interested in how it all works, as well as being a ruthless businessman.
I doubt this'll happen. I wish this would happen. But I sincerely doubt this will happen. Sun really felt like a once in a life time company. I think the best thing we can hope for is board room infighting will just kill Oracle.
Not really sure what to say about this. I don't know Ellison, nor do I own Oracle stock, or have any particular interest in Oracle per-se. But nonetheless, I've always seen Ellison as an important character in our industry, and after reading a biography about him, I felt a sort of kinship with him based on some shared interests.
At any rate, it definitely feels like the "end of an era" in a sense. I got my start in this industry in the mid to late 90's when Oracle, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Borland, etc. were duking it out for supremacy, and - for better or worse - you've never really been able to escape Oracle's shadow to some extent. And Ellison was Oracle, in so many ways.
Edit: It's been a while, but I think this[1] was the biography I read. I'll just say this: regardless of what you think of Ellison, he's an interesting character and reading about the history of Ellison / Oracle is quite fascinating.
I don't really buy that line of thinking. Nobody is perfect, and I don't see denying "a certain sense of kinship" with a fellow human being, which is based on certain shared interests, just because I might dislike or disapprove of other aspects of that person's character.
That said, I don't think I'd like Larry Ellison if I knew him (although I could be wrong). I'm just saying that there are things about him where I can see some overlap in thinking and interests. It doesn't mean I want him sainted or anything. :-)
If you want to read about Larry Ellison's personality and his management style, you should read - "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation; God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison". (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/181369.The_Difference_Bet...)
It's one of the best books written on him and the way he managed Oracle right from it's beginnings. He was damn good at selling things.
It is correct according to most commonly used guidelines for headline capitalization. You were describing how to capitalize stuff in a paragraph, not a headline.
Demonstrating once again that tech companies really don't "get" succession planning :-) I'm kind of half joking, if you look at a bunch of 'old school' BigCorps, the progression is (CEO->Chairman, SVPx -> CEO, VPx -> SVPx) and then the Chairman of the board retires and the CEO takes on both roles Chairman and CEO, priming the pump for the next cycle.
Co-CEOs have so far been an experiment in disaster, something about not having an ultimate authority seems to really crimp organizations. I wish Oracle well but they have a lot of challenges to overcome, if I were a share holder I wouldn't be all that pleased with this arrangement as it seems to basically leave all the same people in place with all the same problems (Amazon/Google EC2/GCE, MySQL vs NoSQL vs expensive Oracle, Cheap Clusters with High Reliablity vs Expensive Servers, Etc.)
You misinterpret my comment. He is masterful at running Oracle, the problem is he is mortal. Successions are all about building institutions that are immortal. Which is to say they continue to exist even as humans come and go. That is one of the key differences between a democracy and a dictatorship. In the latter when the dictator dies the country goes into civil war until another dictator arises, but in a democracy the 'people' in the system are constantly replaced by the country continues. Same is true for corporations. Technology companies tend to be driven more by one or two individuals who don't design an institution so much as they just run the business. I am fascinated that places like Ford and IBM have been as durable as they have been.
The end of an era for Oracle that existed as a software (licensing) company. I think that Ellison stepping in as the CTO is probably more important than him stepping down as the CEO.
This move will perhaps will lay the groundwork for the next tens of billions in revenue for Oracle, in cloud based software and infrastructure.
91 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] thread[1] http://www.channelweb.co.uk/IMG/834/272834/big-ellison.jpg
You know Oracle was founded in the late 70's. And Ellison was a co-founder.
https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+ellison+age
There could be lots of reasons.
Literally Hitler
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gwillis/archive/2009/10/14/separated...
Although Hank was supposed to be something of a nice guy.
Ok I'll show myself out.
(Actually every fourth load it goes to Bluehost instead, I have to look at my BIND and Apache later...)
Interestingly Ellison will be the CTO. This could be a shit show with 3 people trying to run the show!
I mean does anyone really expect Larry Ellison to start taking marching orders. Will be interesting to watch the short interest on this company!
I think the two headed CEO is what the street expected all along as Catz has been around for ever and alot of people thought that Hurd, the former HP CEO, was promised the CEO title when Ellison resigned.
It looks like they, Catz and Hurd, will split the running of day to day operations as Hurd gets sales, marketing and strategy reporting to him, while Catz will continue to have finance, legal and manufacturing.
Its down about a dollar after the close on about a third higher trading volume than normal. So it doesn't look like anyone is "spooked" by the news.
Also your mention of his eventual death sounds insulting. There are plenty of better things to pick apart Ellison for besides his age, and he isn't all that old. There isn't a single mention of his health in the wikipedia article about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison
>During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His projects included a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".[10] In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his.
It's really not clear from the first few hits off Google what his role was in developing Oracle, the application, but he's not like, _untechnical_.
http://www.quora.com/Was-Larry-Ellison-a-good-programmer
Also, apparently Bob Miner programmed the bulk of the original product and ran engineering, but the Quora link above says Miner considered Ellison a good programmer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Miner
A received anecdote, but the thrust was that Ellison is pretty keenly interested in how it all works, as well as being a ruthless businessman.
just dreamin'...
At any rate, it definitely feels like the "end of an era" in a sense. I got my start in this industry in the mid to late 90's when Oracle, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Borland, etc. were duking it out for supremacy, and - for better or worse - you've never really been able to escape Oracle's shadow to some extent. And Ellison was Oracle, in so many ways.
Edit: It's been a while, but I think this[1] was the biography I read. I'll just say this: regardless of what you think of Ellison, he's an interesting character and reading about the history of Ellison / Oracle is quite fascinating.
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Softwar-Intimate-Portrait-Ellison-Orac...
That said, I don't think I'd like Larry Ellison if I knew him (although I could be wrong). I'm just saying that there are things about him where I can see some overlap in thinking and interests. It doesn't mean I want him sainted or anything. :-)
It's one of the best books written on him and the way he managed Oracle right from it's beginnings. He was damn good at selling things.
He will be revered, but he was behind some scandals back in the day.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/18/oracle-stock-drops-2-5-on-n...
It should be: Larry Ellison will step down as CEO of Oracle, will remain as CTO
Headline capitalization is pretty easy: Capitalize the first word, then any proper nouns. That's it.
http://www.grammarunderground.com/capitalization-of-headline...
Not really accurate. Some publications use sentence case for headlines, but most publications use (and most style guides suggest) title case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publi...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/technology/larry-ellison-s... http://online.wsj.com/articles/larry-ellison-to-step-aside-a...
P.S. The other three sites I checked (LA Times, USA Today, and Washington Post) websites do not.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/forbes-releases-2014-list-o...
https://twitter.com/dkberman/status/512700128801464320
Co-CEOs have so far been an experiment in disaster, something about not having an ultimate authority seems to really crimp organizations. I wish Oracle well but they have a lot of challenges to overcome, if I were a share holder I wouldn't be all that pleased with this arrangement as it seems to basically leave all the same people in place with all the same problems (Amazon/Google EC2/GCE, MySQL vs NoSQL vs expensive Oracle, Cheap Clusters with High Reliablity vs Expensive Servers, Etc.)
This move will perhaps will lay the groundwork for the next tens of billions in revenue for Oracle, in cloud based software and infrastructure.