Warning to
On Monday evening, the long-time chief executive and chairman of
"Everyone looks around and is like, 'Yah! Like everything is in the cloud,' " mocked Ellison. "My objection is it's absurdity--it's nonsense ... What are you talking about? It's not water vapor. It's a computer attached to a network!"
It was classic Silicon Valley entertainment, complete with a surprise cameo appearance by the chairman of Sun,
"I have a question from the future ex-chairman of Sun," said McNealy, who was standing in the rear of the ballroom at the San Jose Fairmount when Zander opened the floor for questions. "Can you buy the San Jose Sharks [hockey team] so we can rename the rink the 'Sparc Tank'?"
"I've been trying to buy a basketball team, but they won't sell me anything," Ellison grumbled in response.
Zander set a playful tone for the evening by first lauding Ellison as probably the longest continually serving chief executive--32 years in the job--then teasing him for having 181 fans on Facebook.
"I've got 105,000 employees, and [the fan page] is only at 181? Good God," said Ellison in mock horror. (Ellison later observed he will likely have the same number of employees if Oracle gets full approval to acquire Sun. The European Commission is still reviewing the deal, which is valued at $7.4 billion)
The heart of the interview focused on Oracle's interest in Sun. By combining Sun's expertise in hardware with Oracle's software, Ellison suggested, the combined company can become a powerful "systems" company that sells solutions to businesses. The competitor that Ellison wants to beat:
"We want to be T.J. Watson Jr.'s IBM," Ellison declared. "That was when IBM was the dominant software company. And they translated that position into being a great systems company." Back then, IBM wasn't just a company--it was the "environment" in which everything else operated, Ellison recalled.
Much like
Zander asked Ellison if he would spin off MySQL, if required by antitrust enforcers.
"No, we're not going to spin it off," Ellison declared.
When it comes to
But Oracle's new role, assuming the Sun deal goes through, won't be easy: Ellison insisted that Oracle can continue to give full support to the Linux operating system, even as it gears up to promote Solaris, the operating system developed by Sun.
Zander ask if the tech sector is in an era of mass consolidation, a trend that harkens back to the 1980s when there were few computer vendors--and unhappy customers. "It's good for the customer if there are five or six companies. It's not good if there's only two," Ellison said.
Even though Ellison now positions Sun as fundamental to Oracle's future, not so long ago, he wasn't even planning to buy the company. "We made a last-minute decision to buy Sun," Ellison conceded. "We almost let that one get away."
"Cloud computing" doesn't threaten Oracle, Ellison said, because the "cloud" needs computer chips and hardware and software--namely, the very kinds of products Oracle sells. "Cloud computing isn't the future--it's the present and the past of computing," Ellison said.
He is figuring on being around to help continue to shape that evolution: He said he just recently signed up for another five years at Oracle. After that time, "We'll see how I feel.
"I enjoy competition. I think life is a series of acts of discovery," Ellison mused. "We're all interested in discovering our own limits."
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