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CNN/Fortune talk to Ellison
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September 8, 1999: 9:49 p.m. ET
Oracle founder Ellison, the eligible billionaire loves racing and hates Gates
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Silicon Valley may be a hi-tech Oz, but there's only one place here dazzling enough to be called the Emerald City -the headquarters of Oracle Corp. And there's only one wizard who could build such a spectacle among a sea of office parks, Oracle's founder, chairman and chief executive officer, Larry Ellison.
"You can't conform in business," Ellison says. "If you adhere to conventional wisdom, if you do everything everyone else does, you're going to lose, The only way to get ahead, to really get ahead. is to be different."
And Ellison did get ahead, building a $50 billion software empire and amassing a personal fortune worth some $11 billion.
He may not be technology's wealthiest billionaire, but given the pocket-protector culture in which he thrives, Ellison is arguably the industry's sexiest CEO.
What else can you say about a technologist whose designer stubble and impeccably tailored Brioni suits landed him in the pages of Playboy magazine?
So perhaps it's no wonder then that this dashing billionaire gets more attention for the clothes on his back, than the products that put them there.
Oracle (ORCL) is the No. 1 provider of database technology, software that acts like big electronic filing cabinets. Without it, corporations and governments couldn't manage the vast amounts of information that fuel business.
Crucial, but hardly the kind of glamorous consumer product to keep a showman like Ellison glued to his executive chair.
"It's certainly true that I have periodically lost interest in the business," he says. "I've never been very interested in the business."
Ellison is seen so infrequently around Oracle, that his own employees nicknamed him Elvis. No garden-variety, hall-walking CEO when he's not out racing his yacht or breaking the sound barrier in his private fighter jet, he's usually barricaded at one of his three authentic Japanese estates.
But this tech exec with a confessed disinterest in the business, is actually devoting most of his time these days to running Oracle.
"I have been working more," Ellison adds. "That's true, and the reason I'm working more is this is an extraordinary opportunity. My industry and in fact, every industry soon is going through this tectonic change."
He is talking about the explosion of e-commerce over the Internet, a business paradigm that creates major opportunities for Oracle. You go to eBay to bid on Furby or a Corvette, or you go to Amazon.com to buy a book, in all cases you're accessing the Oracle database. The top 10 consumer web sites and 9 of the top 10 corporate sites use Oracle databases.
But Ellison sees Oracle's stronghold in databases as more than a mere e-commerce play. He wants to challenge the software industry's undisputed heavyweight Microsoft with something called Internet computing.
"Well, about four years ago I made a provocative statement saying that the PC was a ridiculous device," Ellison says. "You have to add software to your PC to make it work sometimes. The whole idea of putting a floppy disk into a PC and loading software is ridiculous. The whole idea of backing up the data on your PC is ridiculous."
Ridiculous perhaps, but its the way most business is done today -- lots of PCs using lots of Microsoft operating systems, running even more Microsoft software.
"Its all wrong," Ellison notes. "Lots of little computers are a terrible idea, you can't see the big picture because it's been you know, sliced and diced and it's stored in so many different locations. We've fragmented this information. It's impossible to know what's going on."
What Ellison wants to do is simplify move all the software off the PC and onto a big computer called a server which consumers access using nothing but an Internet browser.
A new way of computing that conveniently renders Microsoft's windows operating system moot.
"There's only one program that's really important on your PC and that's an Internet browser. Once you have access to the Internet, you have everything computing has to offer," Ellison says.
If the idea behind Internet computing sounds familiar, it could be because not so long ago, Ellison peddling the same vision, only under a different name, the network computer or NC.
"Larry predicted that the whole world would one day do its computing on very simple, computer boxes without hard drives and without other gadgets on them," investigative journalist Mike Wilson says. "And these things would sell for two, three, four hundred dollars and people didn't need all this complex software that Microsoft was selling them for you know, a hundred and ten dollars every two years."
Wilson authored an unofficial biography about Ellison and rise of Oracle.
"Larry got a lot of criticism for the NC idea, the network computer wasn't really a terrible idea," Wilson says. "The reason it didn't happen was that the price of a real computer, a Windows-based computer, fell so sharply that you could get a lot more for $500 than what you could get from Larry's NC."
If Ellison seems reluctant to concede defeat that's probably because he has a successful record wrestling 800 pound gorillas to their knees.
Back in the mid-seventies, Ellison, with a only $2000, took on the then seemingly unstoppable giant of computing -- IBM -- by beating big blue to market with its own idea, the relational database.
"When I first came into this industry I was told that IBM was not someone against whom you would compete," Ellison says. "That IBM was not a company. They were more like a country and a great country at that, and that I shouldn't even think of competing with IBM."
But compete he did, and today, Oracle controls roughly 40% percent of the database market, IBM is playing catch up with 29.
Ellison is not only preaching Internet computing he's making it standard practice at Oracle -- reorganizing entire departments over the Web. And all of Oracles products, from databases to procurement software are tied to the Internet.
"If I'm wrong? Were toast. We're out of business," says Ellison.
"Oracle wont be toast if Internet computing fails because it has too much invested in its core business of selling people databases and setting up databases and servicing databases," Wilson says. 
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