Business magnate Larry Ellison thinks that without Steve Jobs — “our Edison” and “our Picasso” — Apple corporation is in trouble.
Larry Ellison was one of Jobs’ closest friends. Then again, this is the same Ellison who presided over one of the most idiotic and – for Oracle – disastrous lawsuits in technology history.
Update: A few new tidbits from the interview: Google is “completely evil” because of Java, and the mass surveillance by the US government is “absolutely necessary”. So, aside from being utterly delusional (the Google and Java thing), he also does not believe in civil rights, and would much rather everyone give up their privacy and right to free speech.
What a tool. No wonder nobody cares about Oracle.
what an egotistical fantasist – he even extends it to his deads friends. Let him go Larry
I’d say the opposite: Steve, come to get your buddy with you!
Larry has a point though. The proof is in the pudding, and Apple is on a downhill slope unless they pull out a rabbit very soon.
If they hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
Stringing together a bunch of idioms is a piece of cake… But you hit the nail on the head – if Apple lets the cat out of the bag (assuming the cat doesn’t cost and arm and a leg), well the rest of the tech sector may have to come to grips with the fact that they might have bitten off more than they can chew.
I hope Larry Ellison breaks a leg (in this case not an idiom).
Edited 2013-08-13 18:40 UTC
Apple won’t go away tomorrow, there is too much money in the bank.
However I don’t expect any kind of market breaking idea, as Apple used to present when it was under Jobs control both times, before and after Sculley.
Even when he was alive it was getting increasingly more difficult to hype up otherwise evolutionary changes as major revolutions/innovations. End of the day the IT sector is very much mature and the days of massive innovations (real innovations and not just novelty devices such as ‘Google Glass’) are pretty hard to come by. Most vendors I see have their focus on the cloud, services and generating re-occuring revenue through subscriptions or AppStore-like models.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the new MacBook Air is gorgeous and when the new RRAM based flash comes out or in the medium term the new flash from Samsung is made available that we’ll see a possibly hard disks being replaced on Mac across the board but something like that is evolutionary rather than having a ‘wow’ factor. With that being said I do think that us geeks over play the innovation card and ignore that end users just want things that work – allow them to do what they want to do with minimum fuss and drama.
As for Larry’s point regarding ‘history repeating itself’ – too bad he ignores all the problems that existed and the roll Tim Cook played in actually helping Steve Jobs fix the mess; is Larry so ignorant to ignore the fact that Mac OS 9 was an out of date POS when compared to Windows 95/98? the truly over priced nature of entry level Mac’s (in New Zealand the entry level model would set you back $4,500) when Jobs arrived back (before launching the iMac)? it seems that Larry is very open to mouthing off but spends little time studying the past as to find out why it all happened. It was a team effort by Steve, Johnny and Tim (not to mention all the engineers that worked at a rapid pace to get OS X ready) – to place it all on Steve’s shoulders is to belittle all the work others in the organisation contributed.
You know there are a few corporations that never had Steve Jobs lead them. I wonder how they were so successful without Jobs?
Most corporations had a founder in some way similar to him in some form.
Then it is a question how long a given corporation is able to keep existing on inertia and funds when those class of founders are no longer around.
I think you only need that innovator until the company has proven itself.
A company never stops proving itself. Just cause you got it once doesn’t mean you get it forever. See HTC, Nokia, Microsoft.
Edited 2013-08-13 15:43 UTC
Isn’t that how Radio Shack still stays in business?
By pushing second rate products.
Simple.
Copying what Jobs was doing.
Duh! Dumb luck. I mean, it’s obvious.
Are just two words that spring to mind.
Jobs was too implicated in the company – until the end – to not have the biggest effect on the company. As a long time Apple product user, I can clearly see the quality of the devices going downhill. The quality of their support is also going down. Sales of their products are going WAY down.
I can honestly say I probably won’t be buying Apple products in the next couple of years unless things change drastically. Paying overpriced products is good when the quality is in it; now Apple are just turning into Sony (ouch!).
… and I see a dark future for a world with Larry Ellison.
“Larry Ellison was one of Jobs’ closest friends.”
What a horrible thing to say about someone who’s passed away…
?
I was just realizing what the above statement really meant, considering the ‘bad’ things we know about Larry’s character. My initial response is obscure — an attempt at humour I guess…
Edited 2013-08-14 13:53 UTC
A lot of people have done very well somewhere and failed elsewhere. This includes Apple employees and even Steve Jobs. He nearly destroyed Apple on his first tour and NeXT never got anywhere.
I guess it’s a case of the right person at the right place at the right time.
NeXT did very well flogging itself to Apple.
But sure, without the Apple intervention, NeXT and OPENSTEP would have died. I wonder how the world would be now had the favorite at the time, BeOS, been snapped up as MacOS X.
Please don’t torture Thom.
On the surface you wouldn’t see any change anyway. BeOS’s kernel and internals as foundation for OS X would’ve been much MUCH faster on the same old hardware and like a Warp Drive on the new ones.
In another parallel universe somewhere, perhaps.
It would also suck a whole lot more.
You should actually spend more than 5 minutes using OSX before making statements like this…
Opening the what if box:
– Jobs wouldn’t have joined Apple again
– All the nice iDevices might not have been created
– Objective-C would be an history footnote
– I doubt effort would be spent making Mac OS X (BeOS) UNIX compatible
– Hackers might have not jumped ship to Mac OS X from GNU/Linux as UNIX support wouldn’t be available and the system language would be C++ (hated by all Linus followers).
So looking how things happened with Jobs on board, and being old enough to know the old Apple, I imagine buying BeOS instead might have lead to Apple joining Commodore, Atari, Acorn and friends.
Also known as “luck”.
If Apple isn’t careful, it’ll become the next Oracle.
What, one of the most successful IT companies on the planet?
Because seriously – people worried about the Microsoft monopoly, but the Oracle one is *far* more concerning as a developer… they own a major hardware platform, the only serious enterprise database, Java, several Java app servers (Weblogic, Glassfish), etc. The list goes on…
When I started with my current employer ten years ago, none of our techstack was owned by Oracle. Now, almost all of it is – *and* they bought one of our competitors to add to their application suite…
It seems very unwise to compare how Steve led and then left (unwillingly) Apple from 1977-1985 and how Steve led and then left (unwillingly) Apple from 1997-2011. I would hope the reasons for why this is unwise would be quite obvious but apparently not.
Yes, because it isn’t obvious. Two periods of leadership, one significantly more globally successful than the other. Obviously he’s not infallible and obviously he learned something from his mistakes. A comparison would actually be very interesting.
It’s not obvious that a kid in his twenties leading a company from a garage to attracting major corporate growth over its first seven years (the first wave of the new Silicon Valley) — and leaving in his wake control to MBA/corporate types rather than trusted, experienced, tech-focused generals — is a lot different than a much more mature man leading the same but very different company more than a decade later, after a great deal of maturing and learning experiences at new enterprises, for a decade and a half and turning it into the most profitable technology company in the world led by the same core group that Jobs has been grooming for leadership for 5-15 years?
I feel bad for the people who can’t see the obvious differences and only see similarities.
Edited 2013-08-13 20:18 UTC
I feel bad for people who don’t understand why it’s an interesting and instructive comparison.
Funny, because I feel bad for anyone who tried to parse your 120-word run-on sentence. But yes, he was clearly a different person – for example, during his first tenure at Apple, Jobs didn’t mastermind any illegal pricing-fixing arrangements with publishers.
Trolling at it’s best.
…what else is new? Remember, this is the company that more or less successfully tried to make it “illegal” for uses of their product to publish negative reviews and benchmarks.
Unfortunately people do care about Oracle though and way too many decision makers have been fooled into thinking they’re some kind of gold standard for relational databases.
big business having to be coerced into spying on the citizens.
I guess a lot of that mass surveillance systems depends on Oracle databases…
So, “he also does not believe in civil rights, and would much rather everyone give up their privacy and right to free speech” would be for the simple reason of: more spying = more money for Oracle.
This should be of no surprise. Oracle has always had massive ties with the 3-letter agency soup in the US. Even their name is derived from the original DB project their founders worked on for the CIA.
Edit: oops someone beat me to the punch.
Edited 2013-08-13 20:08 UTC
I thought it was an acronym for One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
I actually watched the full interview.
He said that it would be wrong to use the information for anything other than catching terrorists.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50152857n
Thom’s roundup wasn’t what he said at all.
He dodged the real meat of the question for sure, but at no point did he say what was summed up.
But it is easy to twist people’s words to suite your agenda.
Edited 2013-08-15 18:53 UTC
Re: the update. It’s in his DNA. Oracle got its start as a CIA project. Hey, no deep dark secret government ties there!
It kind of crazy. Without the NSA surveillance, we wouldn’t be able to stop the Boston Bombings? Well, we the NSA *was* spying on everyone, and they *still* didn’t prevent it. So I don’t buy the claim that its essential to prevent them.
“It’s essential if we want to minimize the kind of strikes we had in Boston.” – Yeah, since PRISM was already full in place at the time of the Boston bombing, and luckily we stopped those bombers before they could do any harm. Oh wait…
He said minimize, implying that he believes it would be worse.
I don’t care much for Oracle, but it’s a shame they bought Sun Microsystems. Now that was an interesting company. Oracle is rather boring.
BTW both Larry and Steve’s boat were parked illegally in front of our company (not at the same time). But when I arrived with my camera to snap Steve’s boat it had already left. Bastards.
Figures, Jobs was notorious for illegally parking his little-man-compensation-devices (AKA Mercedes) in handicapped parking spots:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Handicapped.txt
And apparently that particular emotional handicap plagued Jobs right up until the end:
http://www.cultofmac.com/2613/steve-jobs-still-parking-in-handicapp…
Edited 2013-08-14 17:45 UTC
Firstly he didn’t say Google was Evil. He said they did an “Evil Thing”.
He also didn’t say that spying was okay. He actually said that if the information was used for anything other than terrorism it would be wrong and that credit card companies already know so much more.
But I actually watched the whole televised interview rather than incorrectly summarising it.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50152857n
Edited 2013-08-15 19:19 UTC