Everyone Else Must Fail

ElectricAnt writes "First of all, I should mention that this book is complementary to Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle reviewed earlier here. Everyone Else Must Fail has not been approved, endorsed or edited by Oracle or Larry Ellison, so it could be that many things were said out loud for the first time. Karen Southwick is a journalist who has covered many technology subjects, and written three previous books about Silicon Valley's business side. She wrote this book, at least partially, based on the interviews with former Oracle executives who were either fired by Larry (as Ray Lane) or left Oracle to start their own business (Tom Siebel)." Read on for the rest of ElectricAnt's review.

Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison
author	Karen Southwick
pages	320
publisher	Crown Business
rating	6/10
reviewer	ElectricAnt
ISBN	0609610694
summary	The way you shouldn't run your business

My first impression was that this book was a former employee's act of revenge against the big bully boss, but as you read along you see that Southwick kept a neutral point of view, presenting only the facts without jumping to the conclusions.

As you would expect, there is more business than technology in the book, not to say that this is bad, but you'll find only the top slice of Oracle's business: sales, marketing, consulting etc. You won't find many discussions on how, why and which technology has been created or adopted by Oracle -- it's mostly how this technology has been sold to customers, and what happened afterwards.

Southwick covers nearly all of Oracle's history, starting with 1979 and up to mid-summer 2003 when Oracle launched its campaign to acquire PeopleSoft. The book's starts with a quote attributed to Genghis Khan ("It is not sufficient that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.") which Larry Ellison obviously likes and uses quite often. After a start like that, it's all downhill from there.

Larry Ellison is portrayed as a natural leader: visionary, extraordinary productive and effective. At the same time, he is the "supreme dictator," "extreme narcissist," "most controversial CEO," all this is combined to make "a grandiose, deeply flawed, yet extraordinary, human being." My favorite quote in this book belongs to Rich Hagberg (a management consultant). When he drives by Oracle's towers, he says, "I tell my kids that's where Darth Vader lives." This is not the book's only harsh definition of Ellison. If Softwar is an "intimate" portrait of Larry Ellison then Everyone Else Must Fail is definitely an "intimidating" portrait of him.

Oracle's culture is defined as "brutal, draining, and filled with potential pitfalls." The relationship between Larry and his subordinates, and what's equally important, with Oracles customers (the Oracle mindset is described as "use 'em and dump 'em.") Everyone is expendable, success must be achieved by all means, and everything is measured by how useful a person is to help Ellison implement his vision.

The list of dumped Oracle executives includes Tom Siebel of Siebel, Craig Conway of PeopleSoft, Greg Brady of i2 Technologies, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, Gray Bloom of Veritas, the list goes on and on. As soon as Larry Ellison feels that an executive gains popularity with customers, employees, and can, potentially, outplace him, he will find a reason to get rid of that person. Due to Ellison's personal "insecurity" to deliver the news face-to-face, many of those execs were fired "remotely," usually over the phone, and while on vacation. Coincidentally, almost all of them were fired just before the next portion of their stock options vested. Some of the discharged workers filed wrongful termination suits, but few of them won: none of them have talked to Larry since.

Only Bob Miner, Oracle's co-founder, top developer of Oracle's DB, and later head of development, is shown as a friend. Unfortunately, Bob Miner died in 1994 of lung cancer and Larry was left in the void. Over the last three years, Ellison fired all key members of his management team and concentrated all power in his own hands, leaving Oracle without much a needed counterbalance to Ellison's whimsical desires. With increased competition from IBM and Microsoft, unhappy customers, and flawed leadership, Karen Southwick questions the future of Oracle but leaves the question open.

The customers of Oracle DB were technology experts and didn't mind the need to fiddle with the product until they got it working; the real problems started when Oracle began to release ERP and CRM applications. These applications use the technology and don't invent it. In Ellison's eyes, though, the technology is "cool"; he likes to create technology and respects engineers, he doesn't like to perfect it. If something goes wrong with the product, the company attitude seems to be that it's because customers did something stupid.

I found the comparison between Oracle, Microsoft and IBM very interesting: both Oracle and Microsoft are seen as "technology" companies, both have core technologies (database and operating system) and everything else revolves around them, "you better buy everything from us or you're out." It's a sink-or-swim approach.

By contrast, IBM has marketed itself as a "solution" company that brings whatever customer asks for, the best-of-breed approach. However, in positioning .NET as an enterprise system, Microsoft makes one step forward to the solution approach. Oracle still hasn't make any steps in that direction.

A few things in the book are very entertaining -- for example, the story of Rick Bennett, who single-handedly served Oracle as an advertising agency from 1984 to 1990, the most aggressive ads Oracle ever ran were created by him. When Ingres was acquired by ASK Computer Systems Oracle ran a full page ad: "WE KICK ASK." This and some other examples of Oracle's ads from that era can be found on Bennett's website.

If you're looking for a recipe how to piss off your customers, screw up your employees, alienate your partners this book is for you: it has a detailed description how to achieve all that based on Larry Ellison's extensive experience.

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You can purchase Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit a review for consideration, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Previous Book was "semi" unauthorised

[fastdecade]

It must be said the previous book, at least according to the publisher's claims, wasn't just a spew of marketing from Oracle ---- it was supposed to be written independently, with Ellison having the right only to add footnotes, and NOT to modify the text.

That's the theory anyway. Who knows what sort of political games go on in actually agreeing to get a deal like this --- is there an unwritten rule that the author must play ball? Haven't read either, so I'm not sure ...

are CEO's and dictators synonamous?

[Anonymous Coward]

forget Larry for a second. For a CEO to succeed, does it require that person to be a dictator?

What do you expect?

[Ars-Fartsica]

Do you expect a succesful CEO in a cut-throat business to be a cheerful guy? Ellison is paranoid (San Jose airport out to get me), arrogant (we're going to take on Microsoft) and often clumsy (Peoplesoft), but he is also still the king of database software (for the time being).

The only thing that separates Larry from the other ones is the neato cars he buys for Oracle employees who happen to be his ex-girlfriend.

If he needs a hobby

[Otter]

In Ellison's eyes, though, the technology is "cool"; he likes to create technology and respects engineers, he doesn't like to perfect it. If something goes wrong with the product, the company attitude seems to be that it's because customers did something stupid.

It sounds like he'd fit in quite nicely in the open-source world. In fact, his philosophy would make a nice introduction for the Mplayer FAQ. (Q: Why are .avi files are playing with the colors reversed? A: Bite me.)

If you're looking for a recipe how to piss off your customers, screw up your employees, alienate your partners this book is for you: it has a detailed description how to achieve all that based on Larry Ellison's extensive experience.

And yet, somehow Ellison is a billionaire with a MiG and an America's Cup campaign and ElectricAnt is writing reviews on Slashdot...

Re:So what happens...

[Dastardly]

have a certain amount of respect for Ellison (purely down to his PR image, of course :-) but if he's manipulated power into his own hands as much as the review makes out, Oracle is doomed. No one man can provide the needs of a gigantic company like Oracle over the long term - it has to be a collabarative effort ...

So, you read "Good to Great"? Basically, it looks like Larry has put Oracle into the position where the second he leaves they will be screwed. But, they may still do well while he is around. He sounds like the architypical CEO that creates companies that self-destruct when he leaves.

Re:Larry and Oracle

[EvilTwinSkippy]

2 Words: Network Computer.

Piss off customers?

[nsxdavid]

I think the idea that he goes out of his way to piss off customers sounds a bit one-sided.

We use Oracle for our back office / billing systems for our MMPOGs; have for about 10 years or so now. Indeed Oracle has been rather obnoxious to us on two occasions; one when they wanted to audit us (being a pretty small fry compared to their other customers, it was bizzare enough but turned out okay because we were in compliance as usual) and when they refused to negotiate on support fees even though we seldom if ever used it (but wanted it just in case something really bad went on).

I'm not sure, however, that if you totally alienate your customers you'd be doing quite as well as Oracle has.

Personally, I think Oracle's DB products are amazingly stable. We had our billing system running, under constant heavy load, for 3 years straight on an NT box. Only shut it down because we wanted to do some system changes. And even that was optional.

I think their tools are antiques though. SQL Server, as a competing commercial product, is much easier to administrate and so forth.

But, like many things, we have Oracle in house experience. Switching would not really be desireable unless they went nuts on us in some way.

I have yet to read the book, but I think I should to get some insight even if it is pretty one-sided.

Not sure about Ellison but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what to think of Ellison. However, I have to say that most of the people reviewed control companies (Siebel, Peoplesoft) that produce products I find to be vastly overcomplicated and overhyped. I have to say that Oracle is probably a better place without them, and I think more highly of Ellison as a result of his getting rid of them...

Haven't you every thought, sometimes, that a number of high level execs from your company should just go? Yet no-one will every git rid of them. At least Ellison has the guts to rid upper management of people that do not belong, even if the reason for that is in his head. Whose to say some of those firings were not actually good ideas?

Re:Microsoft too

[t0ny]

I know people who work for Microsoft. They have nothing but good things to say about the work environment, pretty much to the point where they couldnt envision working for another company.

On another note, the only thing I see in the press regarding Oracle is Ellison whining about Microsoft, or some other non-technical related subject. The man is just a troll, plain and simple. He needs to focus on making his product better, rather than saying how bad their competitors are. The title "Everyone Else Must Fail" is a very good summation of the attitude Ive seen from Ellison.

Compare this with things Gates says in the press- he is always looking at better ways of applying technology, ways to make things easier, etc. He (correctly, IMO) wants computing a simple human experience, something people dont need five years of experience to do. Much like using a hammer or screwdriver: an experienced carpenter will still be able to use the tools more effectively, but a newbie can still drive a nail or screw into a wall with the same tools.

Note to self: prepare to be modded down for saying something good about Microsoft.

Re:If he needs a hobby

[Just Some Guy]

Good Lord, I'd never actually read that before. From a section of the FAQ [mplayerhq.hu]:

Q #132: I can't see any picture, only hear the sound
A: you are blind

Q: #133: I have configured and compiled mplayer, how do I use it?
A: try sticking it up your ass.

Thanks for the tip. I'd read about unpleasant dealings with the MPlayer group, but didn't realize how obnoxious they really were. That was an eye-opener.

Re:So what happens...

[I8TheWorm]

There are plenty of alternatives to Oracle as both a DB and an ERP. As a matter of fact, on the DB side, many customers realize this as Oracle's marketshare is still dropping, which you can find here [ecommercetimes.com] and here [about.com].

SAP is still crowned victorious in the ERP solutions market. And quite frankly, DB2 and SQL Server are much easier to admin than Oracle, both with an extremely rich set of features, with SQL Server beating Oracle in benckmarks for some time now (until the recent release of 10g where Oracle beats SQL Server in the cluster market) seen here [tpc.org]. Unfortunately for IBM, DB2 doesn't rank very well in either clustered or non-clustered.

Then there's the issue of licensing....

Ellsion Was defined by Negative Space of Gates

[leoaugust]

One thing that the Review did not bring out, which I think the Book might have, is the total fixation that Ellsion has on Gates. It is almost like a fetish. The significant parts of his career can almost said to be defined more by Gates that by his ownself. Gates ain't my favorite, but Ellison is less so.

The Big Fight: Oracle vs. Microsoft [morochove.com] "In this corner is challenger Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and the NC (Network Computer). In the opposite corner is reigning champion Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and the NetPC. The low-cost computing fight has begun. This fight between Ellison and Gates isn?t solely about low-cost computing. It also concerns who?s in charge of the computer industry and mixes in the personal animosity between the two software rivals. Referring to Microsoft, Ellison said, ?The idea the world could be controlled by one company is shocking and unacceptable.? "

There was a time when Oracle's Ellison Closer Than Ever To Richest-Man Title [forbes.com] "Larry Ellison may spend some quality time with his calculator this week. His net worth hasn't been this close to that of rival Bill Gates since 1986--that is, figuring in only their stakes in Microsoft and Oracle. While Oracle's stock has held up well this month, Microsoft shares have fallen dramatically because of renewed speculation that the government will break up the company. As of today's market close, Microsoft Chairman Gates' stake in Microsoft is worth $49.4 billion. Oracle Chief Executive Ellison has $48 billion worth of Oracle stock."

But then it so happened Ellison was reduced to Dumpster Diving into M$ trash [theregister.co.uk] "Ellison maintained his company did nothing illegal in commissioning the investigation, which was revealed earlier this month after the detective agency Oracle had retained, Investigative Group International, was caught trying to buy from dustmen the office rubbish of the Association for Competitive Technology, a Microsoft-funded industry front group. To demonstrate his apparent belief that all's fair in Love, War and Corporate Public Relations, Ellison challenged Microsoft to investigate his own company in return. "We will ship them our garbage," he joked. "We will ship our garbage to Redmond, and they can go through it. We believe in full disclosure.""

Characteristically Ellison told a Forbes reporter in 1996 [forbes.com] that he was about to purchase a T-38 Supersonic jet fighter. "Maybe I should fire a few Maverick missiles in his [Gates'] living room," he joked.

His fixation was apparent when he said ""The only software company we care about a lick ... is Microsoft [wired.com] Oracle is second only to Microsoft in terms of operating margin strength. And while much of Oracle's advertising is focused on its database battle with IBM, Ellison conceded that Microsoft remains his main focus. "The only software company we care about a lick ... is Microsoft," said Ellison, who also fielded questions regarding analysts' and investors' major concerns: executive departures and competition in Oracle's key database market."

In keynote speeches, informal gatherings and private interviews [nwfusion.com], "the Oracle chief slips easily into long rants on what he sees as Gates' quest to dominate everything Microsoft touches. One favorite Ellison refrain is that Gates wants a world of "Microsoft English." Ellison in recent years has built a public image around pointed attacks on his competitor Microsoft, often singling out its Chairman, rich-man Gates, as a villainous copier of technology with a misguided vision of the computer industry."

Other nice juicy Larry_Speak

Re:Microsoft too

[cavemanf16]

"Microsoft is strategy, Ellison is just plain psycho. Think of the villian in the movies who cuts down his own henchmen with a machine gun to make a point."

Read any of the Chinese classic military works, such as "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. You'll find that hacking off the head of an insurgent who threatens to throw the army/citizenry/etc. into a panic can be an effective tool to keep the entire rest of the army following orders.

Oracle and Microsoft are just sacrificing a few lambs now and then to keep the rest of the sheep in line.

But you'll also notice in those works that a smaller army can easily defeat a numerically superior and more powerful army through smarter use of the resources at their disposal. Much like how open source software methodologies have been cutting into Microsoft and Oracle more and more for the past 10 years.

Saw Ellison Speak

[love2hateMS]

He is worse in person than portrayed here. Arrogant, smug, obnoxious, unrepentant.

Took plenty of digs at Microsoft. One could argue they are both evil, but I suspect Larry is not so much against Bill Gates as jealous of him. Imagine Larry with Bill's monopoly...

If I wasn't an "Oracle Certified Professional" I'd probably badmouth his RDBMS as well... but I need to protect my marketability.

Larry isn't a narcissist

[dmuth]

I'm not a shrink, but I've dealt with a couple of narcissists in my time. The big thing with narcissists is that they go around with this big chip on their shoulder, thinking that they are perfect and better than everyone else. It's so severe that they are unable to form many friendships or do much of ANYTHING, since their personality is so abrasive that it alienates most people who come into contact with them. (Lots of good info on narcissism is available at the Malignant Self Love [tripod.com] website)

Like I said, I'm not a shrink, so I don't know what Larry's particular dysfunction may be, but I don't think it's narcissism.

Sorry if I sound like I'm nitpicking. :-)

Open Source Oracle

[randall_burns]

The real way to handle the Larry Ellison problem is to produce Open Source versions of key Oracle products. Postgresql and MySQL are good steps in that direction. The key though to Open Sourcing the Oracle database engine though is creating enough compatibility that folks that have developed in-house products using Oracle can easily port their products to an open source platform. That means a high level of compatibility in the area of interfaces(i.e. OCI) and SQL language variant.

I personally think that Oracle is much more vulnerable to an Open Source attack than is Microsoft. A lot of pro-Oracle managers justify their support based on benchmarks [tpc.org]. As Open Source database offerings surpass Oracle in those key areas, we'll see the case for Oracle dramatically weakened. We have already seen that open source companies like JBOSS [jboss.org] are beating Oracle in key markets.

Re:Microsoft too

[JK Master-Slave]

Contract employees are generally treated that way at any company. You want a good job, you get hired. You want a quick-and-dirty job, you contract.

The Mutant Theory of Leadership

[serutan]

Based on the review, I would say this book illustrates my theory that many people we think of as "great" are actually aberrant personalities, driven by abnormal extremes of ambition, greed, insecurity, resentment, etc. Whether we shower them with riches or hunt them down and kill them depends mostly on whether their behavior happens to produce side effects that we like.
A Larry Ellison and a Saddam Husseins aren't fundamentally very far apart.

Re:The way you shouldn't run your business

[pipingguy]

None of this would happen if leaders would learn contentment. Once you have a working business model, a strong staff, and a steady stream of customers, it is time to sit back and let your investors profit.

Support privately-owned companies with your investment dollars instead. I'd rather trust a rigidly-held private company than a wishy-washy one that panders to flighty market whims based on percieved shareholder demands.

As someone said, the current malaise is due to boomer investors wanting NOW NOW NOW.

Ironically, this is the generation that "had it all" as a result of the post WW2 boom, but now they want more.