Softwar : An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book about a Very Interesting Company
Review: A fascinating book. I should note that I worked at Oracle for 12 years (1989-1991), though much too far down in the hierarchy to have had dealings with Larry Ellison himself. But when Symonds writes about the people that I did know and work for and with, he hasn't struck a single false note. He has captured very accurately the Oracle culture--a lot of very bright and very driven people, with of course a few inevitable mistakes thrown in.

In this book, Ellison comes over as one of the most insightful leaders in SV in the 80s and 90s. I wasn't always able to see this side of him, as I kept hearing negative reports from those who had been subjected to his (earlier, and admitted by him in this book to have been wrong) MBR (management by ridicule) approach.

I believe Symonds has done an accurate evaluation of Ellison, and Ellison, in his footnotes, comes over as a thoughtful person able to admit where he was wrong.

Rating:
Summary: Good but not impartial...
Review: A pretty good book for Larry Ellison!! The book heaps praises on Ellison even when it is ridiculing his short sighted approach.

Everybody nowadays tries to say that they saw the internet coming. The only people who probably saw it coming were those that never wanted to make money off it. Anyway, the book gives a background on how Oracle came about and is pretty candid in some areas about how it nearly broke apart. The book certainly fires up a readers imagination and takes them back to the heady internet boom times. Some parts of the book however read more like a script.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing Read Even for Technophobes
Review: About 80% complete with this book and must say that it is a thoroughly engrossing read. Not being familiar with technology and software, I found the book very articulate, clearly written and a joy to read. One of those books that you look forward to breaking open each day to see where the story takes you. As the title says, you will feel a much more intimate knowledge of Oracle and Mr. Ellison given the tremendous access given to Mr. Symonds.

You do not have to be an expert on or even familiar with software development issues to appreciate the general business thoughts and decisions made during Oracle¡¯s development. The portions of the book describing the company¡¯s successes and mistakes, why certain decisions were made, why certain decisions were not made, the internal politics, the personality clashes, the learning from bad experiences and the maturation process of both Oracle and Mr. Ellison are compelling.

I think the direct comments made by Mr. Ellison in the footnotes are a very unique feature of this book and one that sets it apart from others in the field. It doesn¡¯t surprise me that it¡¯s the first of its kind that I¡¯ve read given that Mr. Ellison was involved. The footnotes are so informative as they are from the man himself and help to shed light on his thinking and, to some extent, his personality.

The book also provides good insight into Mr. Ellison himself. The path that Mr. Ellison took to maturation as a human being and his willingness to admit and confront all the ¡°difficult¡± things about his life that he has repressed can be learning for all willing to admit or seek some explanation of our life¡¯s purpose. His insights and reflections on his past mistakes in his personal life, their resolutions and life's continual development and exploration is very refreshing.

Given my lack of interest in technology in general, I found the portions of the book describing Sanshiba (his home) and the thoughts behind the plans for the house, the construction of his new yacht, Rising Sun, and his personal pursuits to be very interesting. You understand that it¡¯s not about having the ¡°biggest and the baddest¡± or doing the ¡°most dangerous¡± things that are important but there are real personal meanings to these things. It¡¯s hard to explain when describing one of the wealthiest men in the world but if you read you will understand the philosophies involved.

Mr. Ellison¡¯s life has been so interesting and while his path will most certainly not be the same for the everyday reader I feel that most will appreciate his lust for life and for living large. Though I have no real interest in technology or software, I certainly will be intrigued when reading about Oracle and Mr. Ellison in the future. Mr. Ellison is a truly unique individual leading a truly fulfilling life. If you are a fan of biographies this is a great read.

Rating:
Summary: One of The Most Interesting People Alive
Review: Are we any farther along in knowing the real story of Larry Ellison after this book? I think we are not but it is all very entertaining. To me he remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle ... as the saying goes.

We already knew that he had a lavish lifestyle and was fond of yachts and anything Japanese, which is quite ironic since Japan is a very submissive and bureaucratic society - the complete opposite of our American Horatio Alger Ellison. But maybe it is an appropriate association since the Japanese historically ruled by the sword and in modern times they rule their inferiors with undemocratic force and elaborate social pressures.

In any case Oracle is essentially what we knew all along. It is where one brilliant man calls the shots. It is a company run by a hard driving, energetic guy with a huge ego and extremely good in the modern business world. Anyone in his way is driven into the ground as he steam rolls over them. Even the author had to endure the imprint of Ellison's "two cents" on many pages in the book. That was a biography first.

Having said that, it is always nice to see some of the details spilled in a nicely crafted and entertaining fashion. Nobody can ever accuse Larry Ellison of not being a resounding success nor of being dull. For those reasons it is worth buying and reading and merits 4 stars. A good story but he still remains a mystery.

Jack in Toronto

Rating:
Summary: If you want to know a lot about Ellison AND Oracle
Review: For years it seems like I've heard about Larry Ellison being the complete antithesis of Bill Gates while at the same time earning almost as much money. Knowing this about him and very little about Oracle, I decided it was time to look into it. "Softwar" appears to blend a few things that I find very desirable into one book.

First, its written by an independent observer-- Matthew Symonds of the Economist. While who can say whether this is truly an unbiased account, the vast majority of the book seems to portray Oracle in good light, but contains quips that allow the reader to see where all the Oracle detractors might have a point.

Second, Larry Ellison. When Symonds writes something or quotes someone (like Tom Siebel or other former employees) and Ellison disagrees, he gets to chime in and tell his side of the story through footnotes. After looking at so many books that just don't seem to have any proximity to Ellison, I chose this book mainly because you can get Ellison's rhetoric straight from the horses's mouth.

Third, if you read this book soon, the information will be more practical than books that seem to focus on interesting, but outdated info about a companies products or strategies. I personally knew nothing of Enterprise software or hardware other than hearing people complain about SAP. Now I at least have a semblence of knowledge about a field I'll probably end up at least working with.

If you want a book that puts Oracle in a good light while displaying its bad side at times and to hear mostly about Oracle with a brief biography of Ellison and how he commands the world's second largest software company, read it! PS I loved it.

Rating:
Summary: Merry X'mas Larry
Review: I particularly enjoyed the pictures in this book -- especially the one when Larry was little holding his good brother. He continues to hold various things and people that are dear to his heart. I also like the fact that Larry starts to think about philanthropy, not just as competition to Bill Gates, but as something he wishes to take active control of. It is about time. Melanie Craft is beautiful, although I prefer her sleepy-eyed look in the past over her eyes-wide-open look nowadays. It is a gift to be able to stay by Larry's side for so long.

Rating:
Summary: Some interesting history
Review: I was intersted in the history of relational. There is one lamentably brief chapter: System R, Sybase, Ingres, two-phased commit, stored procedures, etc. Apparently 4 was the first version written in C.
By the way, what happened to Power Objects (Oracle's answer to Visual Basic)? A victim of Ellison's internet epiphany, I assume?
Most is management history: Ray Lane, Geoff Squire etc. Good if you're interested.

You'll probably want to skip the girlfriends and sailboats.

Rating:
Summary: Master of the poison, master of the cure
Review: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was an open secret that if you were what was called then "one of the freaks" and you had, perhaps, taken a few physics or math classes involving computer usage, you could get work for any number of banks, insurance agencies and other mainframe users. The boss was grateful for your work, and, you could pretty much control the conditions.

It appears that Larry Ellison was one of these early programmers, whose maturation is documented in this book. But as with any maturation, it includes the acquisition of blind spots.

For while I in general support Larry's goal of eliminating "islands" within organizations of isolated and contradictory data and code, I am more pessimistic than he as to whether it can be accomplished.

The well-known and by now well-worn theme of Derrida, that of the undecidable gap between writing and speech, means that the ultimate grand vision, of "one" data base, may never be attained.

Larry is right about the Internet: it is the Last Big Thing. This can be proven apriori. For given two or more networks, and given zero cost and high benefit in their connection, whether through a narrow gateway or broadband, then we can say that the two networks "want" to become one network and instantaneously, at warp speed, shall do so. In the late 1980s, several networks operated in academia, government and privately did just this because there is, absent security considerations, a seemingly irresistable craving on the part of networks to join other networks and indeed to become the Internet.

This is the synthetic apriori argument, for both the existence and unity of the Internet as a given. However, and as soon as it is constructed, the reverse, analytic argument against the Internet's usability by the corporation may be constructed, which will return us to Mr. Ellison: for I fail to see how the possibility, of constructing a single logical path to a single data base for the organization, means it can be actualized.

I fail to see this because this has long been an unmet promise of ultimate managerial control within organizations (the "executive dashboard" being one such foolish idea), a control which manages to dismiss the fact that an organization consists of the labor of intelligent beings all the way down...to the person who picks up the trash.

I fail to see this because as a form inescapably of writing, data systems imply their own multiplicity. The "scribe" in all societies develops his own agenda and there is no check on him available to power as such, because power as such relies on the self-interested "scribe" to transmit its will and an almost (but not quite) mathematical problem results in the self-reflexivity.

The crisis is in Mr. Ellison's genuine concern with the way in which data and human intelligence systems failed to predict September 11, a concern which I happen to share. Indeed, I believe that September 11 starkly fulfilled a dismal prophecy of the late hero computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra.

Unlike many highly-placed figures in the computer science establishment, hero computer scientist Dijkstra was concerned, all the way down, about the quality and even the basic correctness of the data systems being designed over his lifetime, and he said at one point that he feared that organizations would collapse under the cumulative overcomplexity of their unmastered data systems. The stark images of a collapsing center for symbol processing on September 11 may be the fulfillment of this prophecy.

One of the FBI field agents assigned to investigation of terrorism prior to September 11, Colleen Rowley, testified before Congress that she did not even have the capability to enter Boolean format queries in the FBI data base, for example of the form "terrorist association and attends flight school".

Of course, Oracle data bases of the sort Larry and his company provide, provide this capability in mass quantities. At the same time, their very complexity (which may be unavoidable) generates scribal bureaucracies which are in both Plato's and Derrida's sense pharmakon, poison and cure, and, in general, the hair of the dog.

It is clear that these sorts of scribal bureaucracies at the FBI felt that some sort of extension or hack to provide rapidly the needed capability at the FBI was a "hard" problem, because these scribal bureaucracies reproduce themselves by insisting that such problems are "hard", and that the CEO is too busy to involve himself with writing...in a stark, if completely unconscious, replication of Plato's account of writing.

The result today is that a great deal of social inequality, created in part by fortune-seeking by the scribal class, means that it's impossible to create a unified written "intelligence" for policy making, and the result is an out of control foreign policy which as I write is creating preconditions for further terrorism.

Symonds breathlessly notes that Larry and his wife are both big fans of Donald Rumsfeld. Bush, and Bush's war, have deep roots in the self-interest of the new, successful American elite.

This elite marched and protested its parent's war in Vietnam, and, Ellison was a supporter of Robert Kennedy's fatal bid for the 1968 presidential nomination. Rumsfeld, for that matter, was an anti-war Republican under Nixon.

However, it appears that Larry may be blind to realities in much the same way that middle-aged managers were blind to the downside of enormous mainframe computing in the early 1970s. He views the future as one of large corporations competing, especially in his own industry, for a diminishing pie.

However, large corporations are composed of intelligent agents, who act from a unique combination of self-interest and complete irrationality, and, just as Ellison's own generation constructed its own reality in the form of microcomputer and micro culture, the next generation may prove him wrong. Or, Dijsktra's prophecy may come true, in which case we'll be busy gathering firewood and not worrying about SQL.

Rating:
Summary: Larry gets the last word
Review: My first fear when I bought 'Softwar' was that Matthew Symonds would be overwhelmed by the aura of Larry Ellison, resulting in a glowing whitewash of the man and his empire. Biographers' tendency to succumb to Stockholm Syndrome is all too typical, particularly when the author is granted generous access to a charismatic subject and those who work for him. (Read 'The New New Thing' by Michael Lewis for a case study of this unfortunate phenomenon.) But Symonds manages to be reasonably balanced in this informative and entertaining portrait of Ellison and Oracle Corp.

The most interesting part of the book, to me, was the footnotes penned by Larry himself, a quid pro quo for the two years of access to Ellison's life that Symonds received. Ellison is humorous, humble and scathingly disparaging of his enemies (heads up Gates and Siebel!) in hundreds of footnotes scattered throughout the book. Sure, it's a bit frustrating that Larry always has the last word on controversial issues. And his attempts to spin the story may turn your stomach at times. But 'Softwar' would be a much drier read without Ellison's contributions. Besides, you're always free to make up your own mind when Larry's version of reality comes across as a little too convenient. At the end of the day, 'Softwar' may be the best Ellison bio out there, and a great read for folks who are interested in a classic American success story.

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: This book is a comprehensive, detailed collection of Larry Ellison anecdotes and quotes from people around him. Author Matthew Symonds occasionally interjects himself, but mostly lets his sources talk. Perhaps for fairness, he quotes many people who disagree with each other about important decisions at Oracle. Perhaps for journalistic objectivity, he generally refrains from judgment. This shows the reader every perspective, even if it doesn't define context, chronology or direction. You get all of the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, though you may want a clearer box top picture. Some of the technology coverage will intrigue only tech industry buffs, but overall you will learn a great deal of interesting information about Ellison and Oracle.
We also found that Ellison's character came most into focus when the book entered the world of yacht racing, his passion. The author also includes poignant, revealing anecdotes about Ellison's childhood and candid reports about his personal life. Larry Ellison was allowed to review the manuscript and his comments appear as counterbalancing footnotes on many pages. That guy, he always does things a new way - as you will see.