For those who don’t get the lawnmower reference, take 5 minutes and have a hearty laugh: https://youtube.com/watch?t=1980&v=-zRN7XLCRhc
(Start at the 33 minute mark if it doesn’t jump you there.)
(Start at the 33 minute mark if it doesn’t jump you there.)
Combine the two of them and you get a recipe for people to give Larry Ellison the benefit of the doubt, taking a "well we're adults, let's handle this more maturely than immediately doubting our counter party" stance, even as people who by their own accounts had heard otherwise. Ultimately in this case, Cantrill's experience proved "the internet" right, but I think even that might not prevent someone else repeating the same situation in the future.
People take gossip as "gossip"- an unrealiable approximation and gross-oversimplification of an individual. Thus give people with poor reputations the benefit of the doubt, believing themselves to be open minded. (which is true).
When they are shown just how 1-dimensional some people can actually be, and that the gossip depicts people precisely, it can be jarring. Especially as, like you mention, many people are very personable, charismatic, charming etc;
He could talk to a family, leave them smitten and hopeful, then whisper "Kill them" to the guard, on his way out.
You don't rise to the top of the food chain without having some really sociopathic/narcisisstic traits.
But, you also don't rise to the top of the food chain solely by being terrible all of the time. And IMO/IME lot of those "good traits in bad people" honestly are genuine, not just facades.
This is not to excuse the bad people of the world. It's just... honestly, as a middle-aged person myself... it has been the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around as an adult. The rest of the stuff, I was prepared for, on some level.
I was rolled up into Oracle through a series of acquisitions a few years before Sun.. it all went down the same way. You know what's going to happen but it's still a shock when a manager you knew before you joined Oracle and wouldn't have behaved the Oracle way instructs you to lie to a customer cause "that's how it's done here and we're going to have to go along with it."
You also don't realize how shocking it's going to be to see the office re-decorated until they come in and rip everything down and put up pictures of Larry's boats and airplanes and other toys.
When we were acquired Larry Ellison got on a big conference call we were all allowed to join and we could raise a virtual hand and ask questions. To his credit he answered everything 100% truthfully and transparently, and the questions were answered exactly the way the Internet expects he would answer.
I can’t recall, did the feds block that option?
Oracle was interested in hardware too, and offered more money.
IIRC, reports were that IBM negotiated the price down with a stinky "who else is ever going to buy you" attitude, and were blindsided once Ellison came into the picture offering more cash.
Cantrill and friends just worked there, but the board presumably knew what they were doing.
There was a Wired article that told me everything I needed to know about Larry, the way your blind date being mean to the waiter tells you not to make a second date. It was about the best smart homes. It came out during the DotCom boom, before Sun folded. Larry had one of the smartest homes in America. It had a remote control. One Saturday evening, the article reports, he got furious with the system because it wasn’t working, so he threw the remote and smashed it.
Then he called the company and demanded a new one. Someone had to drive, 45 minutes if memory serves, to his house to deliver a new remote, on their Saturday night, because some petulant man-child had a temper tantrum and couldn’t wait until Monday.
Fuck that guy.
How much of a pain in the ass you have to be in the interview process for a writer to drop that anecdote into the article? You know we are only getting part of that story.
Whatever you think of Oracle and the One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, IBM as a company are likely worse. Sun had a "west coast wheeler-dealer" vibe, as did Oracle. IBM had an "east coast button-down shirt" vibe. IBM had first dibs and Sun said "no, I may be desperate but I'm not that desperate"
If Sun had to be sold (which it did because it was consistently losing money hand over fist) and there was a choice of IBM, HP and Oracle to sell it to, and only those three, which would you pick?
If you've never experienced the IBM culture, this is a great essay about Don Estridge (father of the IBM PC) which will give you a good flavour of the company: https://every.to/the-crazy-ones/the-misfit-who-built-the-ibm...
Oracle needed two things from SUN: Java and hardware.
Nobody else had the money or the inclination to buy the company. Going with Ellison was the least-worst option.
I just find it funny how people who very obviously had it coming (i.e. Solaris, various opensource projects, etc - stuff that very obviously wasn't making money and would likely never make money), didn't see it coming.
Funniest thing I've heard in a while!
I named my lawnmower Larry.
And then there’s Sarah Winchester, who instead of becoming the psychologist, became a case study in psychology.
Direct links pointing closer, and the transcript are available in this thread. (At the bottom, for some reasons.)