Larry Ellison has agreed to step down as the chief executive officer at Oracle, ending one of the most entertaining and profitable runs for a leader in business history.
Oracle announced Ellison’s departure via a press release delivered on Thursday afternoon after the close of U.S. financial markets. The company said that Ellison will remain chairman of Oracle’s board and take on the role of chief technology officer. Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, both presidents at Oracle, will each inherit the CEO title. Catz will remain as chief financial officer as well.
The “master”mind behind the onerous and despicable Java/Android/API patent troll lawsuit versus Google, in which Oracle is trying to actively, willingly, and knowingly cause great harm to developers all over the world. Coincidentally, he is a close, personal friend of Steve Jobs.
Good riddance.
Riddance? As commenter “samanime” from Ars said:
Unfortunately, he’s still going to be the CTO. In a tech company like Oracle, that means he’s still pretty much in charge of almost everything, except some of the more typical business aspects.
I would actually suspect he did this simply to avoid having to answer the board and make it someone else’s problem. =p
Edited 2014-09-18 21:34 UTC
So he basically did a Putin. Maybe he’ll start invading nearby islands for their Botox next.
When I think Oracle and Larry Ellison I always remember this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=2000
Edited 2014-09-18 21:58 UTC
This is what I always think of whenever Larry Ellison is mentioned:
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/6/caveman.html
They are charging insane amounts of money for their software. Currently, in the line of business I am in, most of our customers are looking actively for software that can avoid the per processor cost to Oracle (1000s per CPU). That is, moving to standard edition from enterprise edition or finding a different DB (at great cost).
This is unheard of, it is like MS charging too much for their Office (certainly not in the same league as Oracle) and people abandoning it. My gut feeling is that Oracle is charging so much that people will change their software stack (slowly but surely).
The funny bit is that Oracle has become slower with every version but more expensive (but arguably with more ‘features’). I certainly would not buy Oracle shares but i have to admit Oracle has an uncanny skill buying companies required for the software stack: Tuxedo, BEA, Java, Siebel. It is really hard to avoid them these days if you are already on Oracle…
As “bad” as Microsoft is, I thought the consensus opinion is that no one is really as bad as Oracle in actively screwing customers over. Even IBM looks to be a better option than Oracle, and they’re not innocent either in the lock-in attempts in the past.
Understandable logic. How does PostgreSQL fare among the candidates to replace Oracle?
You can use EnterpriseDB’s version of PostgreSQL to replace Oracle overnight:
http://www.enterprisedb.com/solutions/oracle-compatibility-technolo…
No it is not – Oracle has been doing this for years. To build on the rest of post, this is the way Oracle works:
1. Make an attempt at creating their own product
2. If that doesn’t work out, buy the top competitor
3. End support for the failed Oracle product
4. Add new features to the purchased product, but at a slower pace than the original company and with more regressions during each release
5. Drastically raise the price and drive everyone to their competitor
6. Go to Step 2 and repeat
The simple fact is that you can’t escape Oracle. Using competitors just buys you time until Oracle buys that product and ruins it and/or charges too much, forcing you to migrate to a competitor’s product. The only plus side is that it keeps developers like me with plenty of work (I’m currently migrating many Oracle COTS due to the process I listed above). Oracle is a ravenous beast that devours everything in its path.
The solution is to use Open Source tools like PostgreSQL when you can. Oracle may buy EnterpriseDB, but it cannot buy the open source postgreSQL.
Careful, MySQL and Java are open source. Just choosing an open source option doesn’t protect you unless there’s a community around it that will keep it going despite Oracle. The MySQL forks are a good example of this. Oracle sort of kept MySQL going, but 5.6 broke a lot. I’ve had to rewrite a lot of code and decided to migrate to PostgreSQL when I could rather than stay with MySQL.
Keeping Hurd away from the money & lawyers.
During his reign, the stock has payed out awesome dividends while maintaining and increasing the stock price. I have no qualms saying that he was a good CEO in terms of market performance.
On the ethical side, i think he might have been a little coarse.
“Coincidentally, he is a close, personal friend of Steve Jobs.”
First of all, that was never true. They met personally very rarely, it was just a business deal to call each other friends.
Second, Steve Jobs is dead.
Edited 2014-09-19 07:29 UTC
…by being cheapskates and not wanting to pay for the respective licenses.
Sun did not sue because they were out of money, so instead they tried to make a pretty face.
http://www.cnet.com/news/java-creator-james-gosling-google-totally-…
So we got a VM that has worse performance than what most certified J2ME and J2Embedded offer, lack of compatibility with Java libraries that are already on Java 7 and later if we want to target all devices.
The introduction of ART will keep the language support still at Java 7 with no official plans for latter support as announced at Google IO.
On the other hand, thanks to lack of focus on mobile from Oracle, C++ is now the common language among all native SDKs followed by C# and JavaScript.
Oracle blindly proposes Mobile ADF as solution, which is a joke any developer targeting native applications.
J2ME has been around for a long time. But as you’ve mentioned, it’s not gotten any serious attention from Sun/Oracle in quite a while.
An inherent problem is that the JVM used to impose quite an overhead on tiny mobile processors (Think older Symbian or PalmOS PDA’s\mobiles with 200~300 Mhz phones, 64 MB RAM). It’s only with recent SmartPhones (1GHz+, 1GB RAM) that this overhead is no longer an issue.
Edited 2014-09-19 13:21 UTC
Sorry, but outside the mobile space there is a lot of J2ME going on. Hence why I don’t get why the lack of investment on mobiles.
There are lots of network aware devices like printers (Ricoh), temperature and electricity control, car entertainment systems, factory control systems and many others that run on J2ME or J2SE embedded.
Then there are the smart cards (e.g. SIM) running Java Card.
Back in 2004 I did a couple of J2ME games. In what concerns performance Nokia, Sony-Ericson and Sharp devices were quite good, if you knew how to program properly. For example, using fixed point arithmetic and device specific APIs for graphics.