Larry Ellison Will Step Down as CEO of Oracle, Will Remain as CTO | Hacker News Reader

Larry Ellison Will Step Down as CEO of Oracle, Will Remain as CTO

recode.net

271 pointsjhonovich89 comments

Interesting that they name Co-CEO's in Catz and Hurd. I wonder how that will work, especially given Hurd's "tough to work with" reputation.

Interestingly Ellison will be the CTO. This could be a shit show with 3 people trying to run the show!

I mean does anyone really expect Larry Ellison to start taking marching orders. Will be interesting to watch the short interest on this company!

I think the two headed CEO is what the street expected all along as Catz has been around for ever and alot of people thought that Hurd, the former HP CEO, was promised the CEO title when Ellison resigned.

It looks like they, Catz and Hurd, will split the running of day to day operations as Hurd gets sales, marketing and strategy reporting to him, while Catz will continue to have finance, legal and manufacturing.

Its down about a dollar after the close on about a third higher trading volume than normal. So it doesn't look like anyone is "spooked" by the news.

Oracle has been run by the three of them for awhile now. This is most likely a reduction in the responsibilities for Larry (ie. not getting flak for skipping out on earnings calls/keynotes when he wants to watch his boat race) and thus mostly a change in title without significant change to operations (other than messaging to the Street what the succession plan is).

Yeah, I think Ellison is heading for a "phased" retirement. Eventually, he'll give up the CTO role and just be Chairman. Then he'll give up the Chairman role (perhaps when he dies).

I don't see becoming CTO as heading for retirement. If he wanted to semi-retire he could adopt some other title like Chief Software Architect.

Also your mention of his eventual death sounds insulting. There are plenty of better things to pick apart Ellison for besides his age, and he isn't all that old. There isn't a single mention of his health in the wikipedia article about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison

I didn't read it as an attack so much as saying that Ellison may very well never step away from the company, short of being forced to by death.

It's odd that you would see a reference to someone's eventual death as an insult. For a 70-year-old man, death looms large, whatever Wikipedia has to say on the subject.

I think you're right. At first I thought it would be to bring out a knife fight. In reflection, it seems like they're going towards a triumvirate similar to Google. Larry wants to be Eric Schmidt, but can't be if he's got the CEO title. Everyone would defer to him for everything.

Safra has been the driver of this car for a long time now anyway. Larry is more of a figure. Hurd is an asshole.

Ellison will still be around? This sounds like when Putin and Medvedev swapped being president and prime minister of Russia.

That was to avoid running afoul of term limit rules.

I believe his point was that it sounds like a situation where Ellison will be retaining de facto control despite giving up the 'top title'.

The thing that is weird to me is that Ellison is CTO. I don't really think he's a highly technical person, or is he?

Why do you think that a CTO has to be highly technical? Does a CTO at a big technology company write code? Line level engineering managers don't even write code a lot of the time. You just deal in the high-level abstract.

He's got to be on top of all the industry trends. Say what you will about Larry, he is on top of this.

Really? That isn't obvious to me by what Oracle has done over the past 10-15 years.

Their course corrections have been as good as any large company. Even if the product wasn't there, they caught many of the biggest trends. Even Microsoft didn't see the internet coming.

Not to dwelve too far into Oracle hagiography but,

>During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His projects included a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".[10] In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his.

It's really not clear from the first few hits off Google what his role was in developing Oracle, the application, but he's not like, _untechnical_.

Relevant Quora question:

http://www.quora.com/Was-Larry-Ellison-a-good-programmer

Also, apparently Bob Miner programmed the bulk of the original product and ran engineering, but the Quora link above says Miner considered Ellison a good programmer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Miner

Someone I spoke to after the Sun merger said one of the adjustments Sun engineers had to make was Ellison wandering around desks in Oracle talking about what people were working on, and asking "That looks cool. What could you achieve if I gave another $x million in funding?" if the technology looked interesting to him.

A received anecdote, but the thrust was that Ellison is pretty keenly interested in how it all works, as well as being a ruthless businessman.

It will be like herding cats.

If you want to read about Larry Ellison's personality and his management style, you should read - "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: Inside Oracle Corporation; God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison". (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/181369.The_Difference_Bet...)

It's one of the best books written on him and the way he managed Oracle right from it's beginnings. He was damn good at selling things.

Very good book.

He will be revered, but he was behind some scandals back in the day.

Not really sure what to say about this. I don't know Ellison, nor do I own Oracle stock, or have any particular interest in Oracle per-se. But nonetheless, I've always seen Ellison as an important character in our industry, and after reading a biography about him, I felt a sort of kinship with him based on some shared interests.

At any rate, it definitely feels like the "end of an era" in a sense. I got my start in this industry in the mid to late 90's when Oracle, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Borland, etc. were duking it out for supremacy, and - for better or worse - you've never really been able to escape Oracle's shadow to some extent. And Ellison was Oracle, in so many ways.

Edit: It's been a while, but I think this[1] was the biography I read. I'll just say this: regardless of what you think of Ellison, he's an interesting character and reading about the history of Ellison / Oracle is quite fascinating.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Softwar-Intimate-Portrait-Ellison-Orac...

I'm not sure that you want to be finding kinship with sociopaths.

I don't really buy that line of thinking. Nobody is perfect, and I don't see denying "a certain sense of kinship" with a fellow human being, which is based on certain shared interests, just because I might dislike or disapprove of other aspects of that person's character.

That said, I don't think I'd like Larry Ellison if I knew him (although I could be wrong). I'm just saying that there are things about him where I can see some overlap in thinking and interests. It doesn't mean I want him sainted or anything. :-)

I'm guessing he wants to spend more time wringing extortionate license fees out of his family?

Demonstrating once again that tech companies really don't "get" succession planning :-) I'm kind of half joking, if you look at a bunch of 'old school' BigCorps, the progression is (CEO->Chairman, SVPx -> CEO, VPx -> SVPx) and then the Chairman of the board retires and the CEO takes on both roles Chairman and CEO, priming the pump for the next cycle.

Co-CEOs have so far been an experiment in disaster, something about not having an ultimate authority seems to really crimp organizations. I wish Oracle well but they have a lot of challenges to overcome, if I were a share holder I wouldn't be all that pleased with this arrangement as it seems to basically leave all the same people in place with all the same problems (Amazon/Google EC2/GCE, MySQL vs NoSQL vs expensive Oracle, Cheap Clusters with High Reliablity vs Expensive Servers, Etc.)

Larry Ellison may "get" more about running a Fortune 100 tech company than you give him credit for.

You misinterpret my comment. He is masterful at running Oracle, the problem is he is mortal. Successions are all about building institutions that are immortal. Which is to say they continue to exist even as humans come and go. That is one of the key differences between a democracy and a dictatorship. In the latter when the dictator dies the country goes into civil war until another dictator arises, but in a democracy the 'people' in the system are constantly replaced by the country continues. Same is true for corporations. Technology companies tend to be driven more by one or two individuals who don't design an institution so much as they just run the business. I am fascinated that places like Ford and IBM have been as durable as they have been.

Someone in The Verge's comment section noted that this Forbes list will now need to be updated:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/forbes-releases-2014-list-o...

The final Larry Ellison scorecard: Oracle stock is up 89,640% since he took the company public in March 1986.

https://twitter.com/dkberman/status/512700128801464320

Co-CEOs? I only know one company that had co-CEOs, and that didn't work out well for them.

Which company was that?

My guess is BlackBerry/Research in Motion.

RIM

Probably RIM.

Probably RIM/Blackberry.

SAP did pretty well under co-CEOs.

It worked pretty good for MySpace... oh wait

Yep, it's like Hurding Catz.

Ok I'll show myself out.

Ellison, Hurd and Catz. It does sound like Groucho Marx should be playing at least one of them.

No no, you can stay.

well done. LOL someone voted this down??? I never understood the anti-humor folks on HN.

Wow, and it continues. Let's see how long you losers will keep this up?

That's beautiful. So Ellison is Hurding Catz now?

Very good. I'm pointing http://hurdcatz.com and http://hurdingcatz.com to MariaDB's web site...until I get a legal letter from Oracle.

(Actually every fourth load it goes to Bluehost instead, I have to look at my BIND and Apache later...)

I will be very disappointed if a Register subeditor isn't cutting and pasting this for a headline.

It had to be done.

120+ points, and who says HN has no sense of humor :)

hahah, apparently the people that down-voted my positive response to his comment. sheesh.

And the guy that downvoted that ^^

I started digging into companies with Co-CEOs and found this: "Research by consulting firm Mercer found that as of the end of 2008, just 34 of 6,487 public firms, or 0.5 percent, had co-CEOs."

Do you have a link?

Atlassian is also run by two CEOs

samsung has 3 CEOs: http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/14/samsung-now-has-3-ceos-with...

Samsung is one of the most complex companies around. Check out their ownership structure: http://qz.com/223755/samsungs-bizarre-byzantine-ownership-st...

Sapient?

Workday did it for about 8 years. Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri did pretty well, with Dave just stepping down a few months ago.

Are there any more details into why he's doing this?

Cause he's going to be CTO instead.

Maybe it has something to do with him being 70?

Wow, I never knew that he is 70. I thought 40-something. But he looks really young. In this picture he is 69! [1]

[1] http://www.channelweb.co.uk/IMG/834/272834/big-ellison.jpg

> I thought 40-something

You know Oracle was founded in the late 70's. And Ellison was a co-founder.

His face looks great. I think you can see his age in his arm skin.

Well he's obviously had some "work done". Which I think is great, why not? Money is surely not the problem, life's too short to look crap.

Most of Larry Ellison's charitable contributions have been to a foundation he set up with the goal of reversing aging in Larry Ellison.

Indeed I thought he was mid 50s, I was kind of shocked when I read 70. I am surprised I never knew this considering.

Wow. Even after you said it I didn't really believe it, but googling confirms it - born in '44. And I thought he was younger than Gates - not 12 years older.

https://www.google.com/search?q=larry+ellison+age

A 70-year-old starts a new career as a CTO? If only other high tech companies were this open-minded about employing seniors.

He was already doing the CTO job, in effect. He's just retaining that post as well as becoming Executive Chairman, where he will still be in charge....

Busy producing an Iron Man suit? Running Oracle is getting in the way of being a Bond level supervillan?

There could be lots of reasons.

What is it about Ellison that makes people say Bond villain, beyond the yacht and such? You're not the first person I've heard say that. (I'm not critiquing, I think it's amusing.)

He doesn't seem to like free software and Oracle charges a lot for their software.

Literally Hitler

The problem is not that it's expensive. What is wrong with Oracle's software is that people buy it mostly because migrating away is more expensive. And Oracle works hard to ensure that things will stay that way, even if that requires reducing the quality of their software.

Wow doesn't like free software equates to killing millions in gas chambers?

He owns an island. The beard.

Well he looks like one ...

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gwillis/archive/2009/10/14/separated...

Although Hank was supposed to be something of a nice guy.

He owns an island.

Pressure from the board maybe..?

Oracle's stock has already dropped 2.5%.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/18/oracle-stock-drops-2-5-on-n...

The end of an era for Oracle that existed as a software (licensing) company. I think that Ellison stepping in as the CTO is probably more important than him stepping down as the CEO.

This move will perhaps will lay the groundwork for the next tens of billions in revenue for Oracle, in cloud based software and infrastructure.

Will Oracle then become better? Maybe as good as Sun used to be?

just dreamin'...

I doubt this'll happen. I wish this would happen. But I sincerely doubt this will happen. Sun really felt like a once in a life time company. I think the best thing we can hope for is board room infighting will just kill Oracle.

What is with the capitalization on the headline on Recode? I read it and thought, who is "Will Remain"?

It should be: Larry Ellison will step down as CEO of Oracle, will remain as CTO

Headline capitalization is pretty easy: Capitalize the first word, then any proper nouns. That's it.

It is correct according to most commonly used guidelines for headline capitalization. You were describing how to capitalize stuff in a paragraph, not a headline.

http://www.grammarunderground.com/capitalization-of-headline...

Well, I stand corrected. Dang.

>Headline capitalization is pretty easy: Capitalize the first word, then any proper nouns. That's it.

Not really accurate. Some publications use sentence case for headlines, but most publications use (and most style guides suggest) title case.

Still pretty popular in newspaper land. Despite your protestations, both the NYT and the WSJ websites still use title case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publi...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/technology/larry-ellison-s... http://online.wsj.com/articles/larry-ellison-to-step-aside-a...

P.S. The other three sites I checked (LA Times, USA Today, and Washington Post) websites do not.

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