Softwar

visiting royalty and then some. Whenever his entourage arrives, flunkeys (Location 426)

“Once I’m finally certain of the right direction, I pick a fight, as I did with Gates. It helps me make my point, and it makes it impossible to do an about-face and go back. Once a course has been plotted, I sail a long way off and burn my boats. It’s win or die.” (Location 882)

Dallas without having given (Location 1910)

She might as well have said that analysts and technology journalists are professional cynics and that someone like Larry Ellison, who is relentlessly optimistic, calculatedly contrarian, and shamelessly devoted to hyperbole, brings out the absolute worst in them. (Location 5141)

When I declined, he asked me to reconsider, arguing that I would find it interesting “because there are a lot of very smart people at Microsoft.” I told him that was exactly why I didn’t want to go. He had expected me to show up and show off by explaining how clever Oracle’s ideas and plans were. Many of Microsoft’s competitors fell into that intellectual vanity trap. Not us. We want to get paid for our ideas. (Location 5578)

If I wasn’t doing this, I’m not sure what else I would be doing with my life.”7 It seemed like a far cry from Ellison’s original motivation of founding Oracle—to have enough control over his own life not to have to spend time with people he didn’t like or doing things he didn’t like. (Location 5882)

It has nothing to do with courage; I just can’t accept defeat until I’ve been carried dead from the field. I’m one of those chess players who will stare at the board for as long as it takes to find a winning line of play. I have a lot of endurance: intellectual, emotional, physical. (Location 5893)

I’d mentioned to Ellison a few days earlier a theory I had that people who had very intense work lives often found relaxing difficult and that the best they could do was to find some alternative stress that so fully engaged their attention that it drove everything else out of their mind. Ellison said, “That’s certainly true for me. I’d never heard the expression ‘alternative stress’ until you said it, but it immediately struck me as a perfect explanation for all my hobbies. Sailing and flying are definitely alternative stress activities. Driving the boat or the plane demands total concentration. Playing classical guitar is not stressful, exactly, unless I do it in public, but it requires one hundred percent of my attention.” (Location 6142)

So I say, ‘Fine, honey, you carry the fucking pack.’ I adjust the pack’s shoulder straps and belt and latch this huge thing onto her. The pack begins below her butt and ends a foot over her head. I figure she won’t last a hundred yards before she falls on her face, but off we go. We’d taken no more than ten steps before we see these three guys descending the trail. Then they see us. And what they see is this cover girl in hot pants and a tank top carrying this huge backpack up a very steep trail. Not a bead of sweat on her. They see me soaked with sweat—carrying nothing all. They just stared at us mouths agape. They didn’t say a word, but as they passed us they turned around and stumbled backward still staring. I thought they were going to fall over the trailside cliff. When they disappeared around the bend, I took the pack back and carried it the rest of the way.” (Location 6905)

Not only did Ellison continue to ask Craft out, he would even ask her fiancé as well, on one occasion inviting both Melanie and her fiancé to his annual garden party at Atherton to celebrate the cherry blossoms. At the party, Ellison introduced him to Steve Jobs. Afterwards Jobs asked, “Larry, did you say that guy was Melanie’s fiancé? What’s going on? What do you think you’re doing?” “It’s all part of the strategy,” explained Ellison. “Strategy?” said Jobs. “You call this a strategy?” Ellison says, “It became sort of a long-running joke. Every time Steve saw me, he’d ask, ‘How’s the Melanie strategy going?’ Then he’d laugh at me. He never missed an opportunity to tell someone we both knew all about it. (Location 7168)

Ellison dreads the kind of relationship in which two people almost merge into one: “The happier you are with your separate and independent life, the better your relationship is likely to be. Our relationship is best when her writing is going well and things are good at Oracle.” (Location 7210)

At its heart was a supreme paradox: heightened naturalness is the result of hugely disciplined contrivance. (Location 7286)

“We’ll give you all our E-Business Suite software for free; we’ll give you the computer hardware for free; we’ll give you the network for free. Our consultants will upgrade your entire company to the E-Business Suite for free. We’ll pay for everything. In return, you pay us your existing IT budget, and we’ll guarantee to reduce it by five percent per year for the next five years. We’ll sign a contract and guarantee it. And we have $7 billion in cash in the bank to back it up. You’ll get a single global customer database. You’ll get secure e-mail. You’ll get the whole E-Business Suite. And you’ll get it all for a lot less than you’re spending now. There’s no up-front cost. Your IT expenses go down immediately. We make the investment, we take the risk—you get a fixed, predictable bill.” (Location 8161)

A product can be bug-free and still generate too many service requests because it’s difficult to install or difficult to use. We decided that our primary measure of product quality would be the number of service requests, not the number of defects or bugs. Once we got the metrics right, the squabbling between support and development ended, the number of service requests started trending downward, and customer satisfaction went up dramatically. Daily Business Intelligence is a powerful tool for changing behavior, but be careful of what you measure. If you measure the wrong things, behavior will change the wrong way. (Location 8492)