Ellison’s Impatience Over Sun
Posted on September 23, 2009 |
Toward the end of Larry Ellison’s freewheeling talk in San Jose on Sept. 21, host Ed Zander got into a spat with a fellow in the back of the room who insisted he wanted to ask Ellison two questions, not the allotted one. By the time the hotel ballroom looked back, they realized the dogged questioner was none other than Sun Microsystems chairman Scott McNealy.
“Do you have any idea what future ex-chairmen can do?” McNealy, dressed in old jeans and a blue T-shirt, asked Ellison, who was on stage being interviewed by Zander, who once served as Sun’s president. (McNealy’s second question was about hockey’s San Jose Sharks).
The ex-chairman line got some laughs from the audience, but Ellison also made clear during his talk that he, too, wants some fast answers about the fate of Oracle’s $7.4 billion bid to acquire Sun. The deal, announced in April, has now dragged on for five months as the European Union conducts an antitrust probe into Oracle’s potential power in the database market as a result of buying Sun.
Sun is losing $100 million a month “so we’d like to get this thing done,” Ellison said. “The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose.”
Ellison, being interviewed on stage at the Fairmont hotel by Zander, who was also once Motorola's CEO, held forth on his vision for making Oracle as powerful a company as IBM was in the ‘60s, said he’d work at Oracle at least another five years, and skewered the tech industry’s embrace of the term ‘cloud computing’ as marketing fluff.
