Larry Ellison Quotes
302 Larry Ellison Quotes
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We were making a lot of money, but we were working insanely long hours.
Larry Ellison
We decided to abandon the consulting business and go into the software business. A software product offered the ultimate leverage: built it once and sell it over and over again.
Larry Ellison
The first time I heard about a relational database was some years back at a meeting with the CIA.
Larry Ellison
I thought it would be smart to avoid the very competitive and highly conservative IBM mainframe market. So we decided to build our database for the minicomputer market.
Larry Ellison
It was very cool technology.
Larry Ellison
I liked the fact it was risky. The bigger the apparent risk, the fewer people will try to go there.
Larry Ellison
We would surely lose if we had to face serious competition. But if we were all alone in pursuit of our goal of building the first commercial relational database system, we had a change to win. But we had to be first to market with the new technology…
Larry Ellison
This was the first in a pattern of apparently high-risk decisions I made throughout my life at Oracle. But I only ever picked the high-risk approach when I thought that it would increase our chance of winning and our share of reward.
Larry Ellison
Conventional wisdom had it that relational databases couldn’t be made to run fast enough to be commercially viable, so people didn’t enter the race.
Larry Ellison
IBM feared that introducing a relational database would destabilize its large IMS [Information Management Systems] database business.
Larry Ellison
Even if IBM did deliver a relational product, it would probably be for mainframes. Since we were targeting the minicomputer market, we didn’t need to worry about IBM – at least not in the beginning, when we were the most vulnerable.
Larry Ellison
[On the company they choose to model Oracle on. Cullinet at the time had a market capitalization of $100 million.] Cullinet was our role model. We never thought we could get as big as they were because they had an expensive mainframe product and we were focused on these cheap little minicomputers.
Larry Ellison
Learning how to sell to a financial guy or an HR or a sales guy or whatever is a big challenge.
Larry Ellison
I wasn’t aware of how important the consulting companies were in recommending applications, because they weren’t very important making recommendations in the database market.
Larry Ellison
I didn’t understand that building a big consulting business was making it much harder for us to sell our applications…
Larry Ellison
Building our own consulting organization was a two-edged sword. There were as many pluses as minuses.
Larry Ellison
Oracle Software Powers the Internet.
Larry Ellison
A lot of American sailors are privileged yacht club kids. Not all of them.
Larry Ellison
I was passionate about sailing and the idea of sailing… the idyllic independence… traveling with the wind… that kind of stuff.
Larry Ellison
I guess a lot of people have dreams of sailing around the world. I was one of them.
Larry Ellison
My life had been focused on work, work, and more work. Oracle had crashed in 1991, and I couldn’t rest until it was healthy again. I didn’t have any time to spend money or think about spending money.
Larry Ellison
It took me a while to learn how to spend money, but once I got started. I discovered that I have a real talent for it.
Larry Ellison
Sailing is completely unpredictable. If Mother Nature decides to make things difficult for you, it can get pretty tense, pretty fast.
Larry Ellison
[On whether sailing was relaxing.] If I want to relax, I’ll read a book.
Larry Ellison
While I enjoy spending my own money, I still hate spending Oracle’s money. I’m very cheap at the office. We have no company planes, no company cars, no company art. Etc.
Larry Ellison
[On politics.] Now I know how the game is played, but I don’t want to play it.
Larry Ellison
Just go out and sell the technology. This is great technology. Anybody could sell this.
Larry Ellison
Someone once accused me of being unnecessarily interesting.
Larry Ellison
It’s crazy for me to have this box on my desk into which I pour bits that I’ve brought home from the store in a cardboard box. I have to install the software, make it work, and back up my data if I want to save it from the inevitable hard disk crash. All this is stupid: it should be done for me.
Larry Ellison
Why should I have to go to a store to buy software? In a cardboard box is a stupid way to buy software. It’s a box of bits and not only that, they are old bits. The software you buy at a store is hardly ever the latest release. [IE needing a network computer.]
Larry Ellison
[In July 2001] How do we get from each application with its own private database to lots of applications sharing information from one big database?
Larry Ellison
[In July 2001] The middleware doesn't really do the job. It's a little like saying, 'Gee, I bought the lumber for my house, and it's done.'
Larry Ellison
[In July 2001] We're trying to change the nature of the software business and make it much less labor-intensive.
Larry Ellison
[In July 2001] Information should be stored together because then you can relate one piece of information to another.
Larry Ellison
[In July 2001] Companies make the same mistake. One company spent four and a half years to do an installation, making heavy modification to the software. Madness.
Larry Ellison
[In July 2001] The question is: 'How do I want to do business for the next 50 years with this new technology called the Internet? And can I do a better job?'
Larry Ellison
[In July 2001] The government has had some incredible failures… If they handed out medals, I don't think it would be all government winners.
Larry Ellison
[In June 2001] You watch him create Apple, then in one of the worst human-resources mistakes in the history of Silicon Valley - the only thing worse was when the French fired Napoleon - they fire Steve Jobs and Apple almost completely disintegrates. Then he comes back and he saves a company that was on life support.
Larry Ellison
[In June 2001 on Steve Jobs.] Steve's accomplishments are of such epic proportions it gnaws away at our egalitarian sense of the world.
Larry Ellison
[In September 2009] I’ve got 105,000 employees, and [the fan page at Facebook] is only at 181? Good God.
Larry Ellison
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