When I started Oracle, what I wanted to do was to create an environment where I would enjoy working. That was my primary goal. Sure, I wanted to make a living. I certainly never expected to become rich, certainly not this rich. I mean, rich does not even describe this. This is surreal. And it has nothing to do with money. I mean, you buy clothes with money, and cars. But I really wanted to work with people I enjoyed working with, who I admired and liked.
If an innovative piece of software comes along, Microsoft copies it and makes it part of Windows. This is not innovation; this is the end of innovation.
I love sailing. I like it more when I am winning.
I have hobbies. I do all sorts of ridiculous things.
I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, 'We're going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.' Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.
To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, 'I'd like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?'
The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
We saw — we conducted the experiment. I mean, it’s been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we’re gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.
We will still be enormously profitable and by far the most profitable enterprise software company.
I greatly admire GE, their utterly ruthlessly focused management, to get the cost out and get this integration done.’ Okay, we may make a few mistakes along the way but we are not going to waste any time.' They make decisions; they are incredibly disciplined and focused.
I have run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering. I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middle ware team, the applications team. I run engineering and I will do that until the board throws me out of there.
I wish HP nothing but the best. I think HP is an icon. Those of us who had their careers in the Valley think of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett as role models. We would love to be half as good as they were.
I think you might see us growing much deeper into banking. You might see us acquiring companies in the banking area. You might see us acquiring companies in the retail area. I think you might see us acquiring companies in the telecommunications. I think you will see us getting stronger in business intelligence.
I hate the PC, with a passion.
I think about the business all the time. Well I shouldn't say all the time. I don't think about it when I am wakeboarding. But even when I am on vacation, or on my boat; I am on email everyday. I am always prowling around the internet looking at what our competitors are doing.
Being first is more important to me [than earning money]. I have so much money. Whatever money is, it's just a method of keeping score now. I mean, I certainly don't need more money.
Both my mother and I were determined that we weren't going to stay on welfare. We always worked toward doing better, toward having a better life. We never had any doubts that we would.
In order to grow at this pace, there will have to be a couple of acquisitions along the way. The tricky thing is to grow at this rate and maintain a 40 percent operating margin.
If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden.
I saw that we needed to grow but our top line wasn't growing, so we had to find other ways to grow the business. We had to reshape our business and acquire share in a non conventional way. But most tech leaders don't come out of a business background. They really have a parochial point of view. All they know are the go-go years of Silicon Valley. That's the environment in which they were raised.
What can a sales person say to somebody to get them to buy a product that they already use every day if they don't like it? Nothing.
All you can do is every day, try to solve a problem and make your company better. You can't worry about it, you can't panic when you look at the stock market's decline. You get frozen like a deer in the headlights. All you can do is all you can do.
It's my job for Oracle, the number two software company in the world; to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one.
Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020.
I was vehemently against acquisitions. Now let's buy everything in sight. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. We are a little more strategic than that. But everything was on sale.
