The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison*: Inside Oracle Corporation; *God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison
Mike Wilson · ★★★★★ · 400 pages · 1997
I didn’t know what to expect with this book and was frankly surprised by how interesting the history of Oracle was. For what seems like a boring database company the history is littered with made for tv bigness in its over the topness. The history includes stealing from IBM, gold bars, murder suicide, having the DoD be their QA department, crazy ex girlfriends, rivalry with Microsoft, and yachts.
However, Larry Ellison was prescient in regard to database, enterprise applications, portability across architectures, that marketing and sales are important for tech, and the Network Computer. Though the Network Computer failed at the time, Sun Microsystems’ CTO Eric Schmidt eventually created one with ChromeOS a decade later. The Network Computer’s hardware partner was Sun.
All in all an entertaining book that shows that work at all cost isn’t the way forward.