Bill Gates, drugs and the internet: Top 10 Larry Ellison quotes When it comes to soundbites, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison is a pro. Reporters show up not just to hear what he says, but how he says it. Bill Gates, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, cloud, yachting, his own phenomenal success – all have been subject to Ellison's barbs and meditations. Scheduled or off-the-cuff, his words turned a …
I don't have an earlier citation (and a Google Books search was unhelpful), but yes, it's a well-aged saw. Google turns up variations for a number of public figures and professions (lawyers, actuaries, fighter pilots, surgeons...).
It's pretty tired, in any case. The bon is off the mot.
Not earlier, but tangentially related:
Bernard explains the abbreviations for various Foreign Office honours.
Bernard: “Of course, in the service, CMG stands for Call Me God. And KCMG for Kindly Call Me God.”
Hacker: “What about GCMG?”
Bernard: “God Calls Me God.”
> I first heard this in the 70s about Berlin Philharmonic conductor
> Herbert von Karajan. Anyone got an earlier citation?
What's the difference between Jesus and God?
God doesn't think he's Jesus...
So, probably a couple of thousand years ago (not in modern English obviously).
On the internet, in 1998: If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden.
On the Network Computer (NC), which was intended to dislodge the PC, Windows and Microsoft's market dominance (it failed): The NC is clearly part of our strategy to dethrone Microsoft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer
The failure of the NC: Idea could simply have been ahead of its time, as at the NC's launch in 1996, the typical home Internet connection was only a 28.8 kbit/s modem dialup. This was simply insufficient for the delivery of executable content. The world wide web itself was not considered mainstream until its breakout year, 1998.
RESULT:
It was incompetence of Larry himself that he could not make calculations during 1996 and 1998. He himself is proven stupid through his own quotes. If you have seen Wolf Of Wallstreet ,,, "Sell me this pen" .. you make ur product needed by masses to shove down the throat of masses. Larry failed to sell that pen!!! simple as that. Where as MS had only DOS vs GUI of IBM but M$ made u buy that pen!!! simple as that !!!...
Incompetence is the last charge you levy against a CEO who for the entire duration of his leadership kept the 800lb gorillas of IBM (DB2) and Microsoft (SQL Server) at bay, clearly behind his product (even if not by much), as the bespoke data warehousing solution of choice for the Enterprise...
Oh, and one quotation that was missed out here, by far his best and most hilarious given the jitters it sent down Microsoft's spine at the height of the anti-competitive scrutiny of the US Government:
"It's Humanity versus Microsoft..."
Sayonara, Samurai-Sama.
Question: What do you call the Oracle management after the departure of their long-serving supremo?
Answer: Ronin...
Its just too bad that what he does is a blight on the internet... Much like Oppenheimer, et al. and the atomic bomb: excellent work, but it all went to the worst things in their fields.
He's a great CEO, excellent public speaker and has a knack for seeing the direction things are going; its just that is too bad that its been with Oracle and not something that complies with standards and hasn't become a gigantic bloated elephant...
Apple, Google, and Yahoo! all scream foul and get anti-trust regulators involved. 2 years later, after the investigation determines there's no reason for an investigation, Ellison is finally able to assume the position, at which point he forces the rest of the world to assume the position.
Well, I'll miss old Larry. His products are, in my opinion, shit. But that doesn't matter.
With Balmer/Gates moving from Developers! Developers! Developers! to Retirement! Retierment! Retirement!, Bob Diamond proving that Diamonds aren't forever, Steve Jobs leaving us for real, and now Ellison hanging up his spurrs, there's really not many CEOs with any character left. Warren Buffet and Michael O'Leary are the only exceptions that spring to mind.
The current crop are mostly dull, mostly identikit, and mostly out of their depth. So enjoy retirement, CEOs of yesteryear, you'll be missed.... just not for the reasons you might have thought.
Bill Gates in the 1980's and 1990's absolutely thought of himself as being clever. I shouldn't be spending time on citing the sources, so I won't...
Bill Gates claimed that Microsoft was going to beat IBM because Microsoft was run by smart 20-somethings. He wanted to surround himself with more smart 20-somethings when his mind inevitably declined with age. Of course, when he did reach 40, he changed his mind.
Bill Gates liked people to know about the times he would take a week off to do some intensive reading before announcing major strategies for Microsoft. His most important memo being the Internet memo of 1995.
The culmination was when he wrote The Road Ahead, which Bill Gates used to try to shape the future of technology. It didn't turn out much like the book.
I think the real turning point was during the antitrust case, when Bill Gates decided that he was too special to show up in court, but had to deliver his deposition in a video call where he visibly appeared to be dismissive. Though, I wonder if it were not actually very clever, because he managed to enrage the judge so much that the judge was taken off the case.
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