Top Highlights

• One of the things I had noticed while covering the technology business was that many of its key players had extraordinarily little interest in even the recent past.
• Ellison doesn’t suffer from that kind of amnesia, but even though he reads history voraciously and tries to learn from it, what really interests him is not the last five years but the next five. To Ellison, the present and the near future elide so gracefully as to be almost indistinguishable. And when talking about software, last year is another co...
• Ellison is, more often than not, his own harshest and most unrelenting critic.
• His logic went like this: The arrival of the Internet meant we were now living at the beginning of the information age—“it’s the information age, not the fucking operating system age”—and Oracle, it just so happened, was the leading company for helping people to manage their information. Software was the product that made the world go round, and th...
• If Detroit ran like Silicon Valley, nobody would sell cars—just parts. Customers would have to figure out which were the ‘best’ parts—a Honda engine, a Ford transmission, a BMW chassis, GM electrical system—and buy them and try to assemble them into a working car. Good luck. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s how companies put together business sys...