Larry Ellison Quotations

To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, 'I'd like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?'

It's surreal to think that I own this beautiful island. It doesn't feel like anyone can own Lanai. What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.

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 think a modern cloud lets you decide when you want to upgrade. We don't decide for you.

I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.

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'm in two modes when I'm on Lanai: In engineering mode, I'm trying to find the right place for the reservoir and the desalination plant, and looking at designs for new hotel rooms. The rest of the time, I'm in decompression mode. I'm on Hulopoe Beach, going for a swim, or on my paddleboard surrounded by 100 spinner dolphins.

They don't call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I'm no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.

We'll continue to expand our footprint... Oracle's Fusion cloud applications for HCM, CRM and ERP all have a new simplified user interface and an integrated social network that makes our enterprise applications as easy-to-use and familiar as Facebook, while enabling better collaboration and teamwork among your employees and your customers.

We think we're going to be especially strong in platform where we have our two platform brands: our database brand is the Oracle Database 12c, and our programming language brand is this thing called Java.

What is Oracle? It's people. We rely on our HR department to build this organization, to help find those people, to help grow those people.

When you write a program for Android, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything, and at the very end, you push a button and say, Convert this to Android format.

What is Oracle? A bunch of people. And all of our products were just ideas in the heads of those people - ideas that people typed into a computer, tested, and that turned out to be the best idea for a database or for a programming language.

One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water.

Be careful about virtual relationships with artificially intelligent pieces of software.

The social network is the paradigm of the modern service application.

Oracle's latest database, version 12c, was specifically designed for the cloud. Oracle 12c makes all your Oracle applications multitenant applications without you having to make any changes whatsoever to your applications.

I believe people have to follow their dreams-I did.

It's Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.

When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts.

We have an ideal location for a couple of organic wineries on the island. But the reintroduction of commercial agriculture to Lanai is 100% dependent upon increasing the available water on the island. So we're going to use solar energy to convert seawater to fresh water.

A corporation's primary goal is to make money. Government's primary role is to take a big chunk of that money and give it to others.

Bill Gates wants people to think he's Edison, when he's really Rockefeller. Referring to Gates as the smartest man in America isn't right... wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence.

Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who's going to build.

I am so disturbed by kids who spend all day playing videogames.

When I was a kid a long time ago, when the sun rose, I was outside on my bike. If my parents were lucky - poor parents! - I would be home before it got dark.

Taking care of your employees is extremely important and very, very visible.

Autonomy was shopped to us. We looked at the price and thought it was absurdly high.

Game-playing is more fun when it's virtual because you're more successful. ... in reality, only one person gets to be LeBron.

Maui reminded me of San Diego: beautiful, but crowded.

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.

Lanai at one time grew 98% of the world's pineapples. But the world's pineapples are now grown in two places, Costa Rica and Panama, because no one wants to spend $45 for a pineapple from the United States.

People really criticize professional athletes going into the Olympics. People don't like change. A bunch of people don't like the Olympics now because we've added skateboarding... We're modernizing the sport.

I own a home in Kyoto, Japan actually on the temple on grounds in Nanzenji that is going to become a Japanese art museum.

Our goal is very simply to become the desktop for e-businesses.

We have most of the software industry running Autonomy.

I'm going to start these art museums that are basically converted homes, and I have one for modern art, and I have one for 19th century European art, and one for French impressionism. I've got Japanese.

My favorite museums are things like the Frick Museum in New York and the Huntington Hartford in Pasadena where it's someone's home that you walk through.

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've announced an Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, a bunch of low-cost commodity servers running Linux, integrated in our case, with InfiniBand - connected with InfiniBand vs. the traditional Ethernet.

We believe that our growth and PeopleSoft's decline resulted in part from an increase in our competitive win rate over PeopleSoft, and the fact that we are beginning to replace PeopleSoft at a number of major accounts,

There is no more important platform for Oracle than HP and Itanium.

We're missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.

What they're doing is not the least bit subtle. The result of all the innovation will be bankruptcy for Netscape,

We have no large acquisitions in mind right now.

The real highlight of our most recent quarter was the 57 percent growth in our applications business, and this merger is going to make that applications business bigger and stronger,

We had a very, very large CRM development organization, so there are some moves there. We had more people than we need to develop CRM.

We 're not changing our strategy. We have an Internet strategy; we decided that four years ago.

Siebel's 4,000 applications customers and 3,400,000 CRM users strengthen our number one position in applications in North America and move us closer to the number one position in applications globally.

Most people want to search private data much more often than they need to search public data.

My impression is that we're gaining share, ... More and more people are using Oracle.

My first reaction is not if I live to a thousand years. But who knows?

No one has ever done this before. We think it will be a huge market and we think it will help drive database growth for years to come.

If we had made less than 12 cents in operating income, we would have had to warn. We didn't warn.

I have been working more, ... That's true, and the reason I'm working more is this is an extraordinary opportunity. My industry and in fact, every industry soon is going through this tectonic change.

I am grateful to Ray for all of his efforts,

If I'm wrong? Were toast. We're out of business,

Four years ago at Telecom 95, I made some people very angry when I said the PC is a ridiculous device. Now the Internet has pushed the PC off stage, and will eventually change, not just the industry, but our economies and cultures.

I don't think Oracle and IBM want another Microsoft in Red Hat.

Greg has told us he's looking at a terrific professional opportunity. We wish him well.

What Microsoft is doing is patently illegal. Think about it. If you want to build computers, you've got to ask Bill's permission, ... If Bill wanted to triple the price on Windows, what would you do? You'd pay; you wouldn't have any choice.

We are fairly early on in consolidating enterprise software, ... It is early on, but it is a short game.

Guys were knocked down time and time again, but kept getting up to do what had to be done to keep us alive. It's a tough crew, but the guys were choked up. We were learning of people dying.

Joe brings perspective and experience not commonly found in Silicon Valley companies, ... In the last few years we have transformed Oracle Corporation into the leader in e-business. Joe will help us clearly and broadly communicate the benefits of e-business and e-government.

It also strengthens our No. 1 positions in the application business in North America. And it moves us closer to our goal of being No. 1 in applications globally.

It is absolutely true that we set out to expose Microsoft's covert activities,

I think the applications space will be diverse and complex five years from now,

I think that's going to be difficult to achieve,

Last quarter we got through it with record profitability record margins, ... In light of Sept. 11, it will be very difficult for us to do that again this quarter.

Our target has been low double-digit growth for databases, so we were not that far off.

Oracle's database and e-Business applications have become the software standard for the Internet, ... All 10 of the world's biggest Web sites use Oracle, as do 93 percent of the public dot.com companies. The faster the Internet grows, the faster we grow.

Oracle applications are ideally suited for rapid implementations because our e-business suite is complete and integrated -- no application customizations are required,

People like you are supposed to expose this stuff, ... People like us are just trying to help. I never knew that we were doing any of this stuff, but if Microsoft is creating front organizations, I feel very good about bringing that information to the public.

Well, about four years ago I made a provocative statement saying that the PC was a ridiculous device, ... You have to add software to your PC to make it work sometimes. The whole idea of putting a floppy disk into a PC and loading software is ridiculous. The whole idea of backing up the data on your PC is ridiculous.

My biggest concern is the stock market coming down,

Microsoft is already the most powerful company on earth, but you ain't seen nothing yet,

Microsoft is welcome to come investigate us and so are you guys,

Microsoft isn't good at security. We're good at that and I don't think sending a memo is going to help,

You'll see us controlling our costs, and one of the ways we control costs is by managing headcount, ... I don't think there is any company out there now that is not being asked to do more with less.

You'll see it in the newspapers. Oracle's strong preference is to do everything hostilely.

While BEA is a less attractive candidate, it doesn't mean we are running out of targets,

While that may underscore our database growth in the fourth quarter, it bodes extremely well for database sales in the first quarter, and the second quarter and the third quarter, ... It's because we didn't sweep the table in the fourth quarter and we will never sweep the table again.

When I first came into this industry I was told that IBM was not someone against whom you would compete, ... That IBM was not a company. They were more like a country and a great country at that, and that I shouldn't even think of competing with IBM.

We have a very close relationship with Dell.

We are optimistic about becoming number one in the middleware business,

We don't know, ... The fact is that the buying climate remains very tough. There aren't so many big deals around anymore.

We used to be friends a long time ago, ... a good deal of social time with Bill. Less so recently.

We are clearly not No. 1 in middleware. You will see us do a number of things in that space, including acquisitions.

We think this year, this wonderful year, was our period of adjustment, ... We think that transition is behind us and top-line growth will look a lot better this coming year. Our pipeline is just over the moon.

We will have more than 4,000 engineers supporting PeopleSoft customers all over the world, and they can stay on PeopleSoft applications or migrate to Oracle applications at their discretion, ... It's entirely their choice. We will not shut down PeopleSoft products.

You can't conform in business, ... If you adhere to conventional wisdom, if you do everything everyone else does, you're going to lose, The only way to get ahead, to really get ahead. is to be different.

The Oracle salesperson gets credit for the Sun sale. I think the Oracle salesperson will appreciate the help of the Sun sales force in making quota.

Those that believe this is merely a cyclical downturn are mad. Our industry is going to mature and, as something matures, the rate of innovation does slow.

Twenty minutes compared to never, that's a lot. Our customer, the (U.S.) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), would get very upset (if) somebody looks in their database,

We highlighted 10 of our more than 450 customers that are currently live after just one year of the e-business suite.

We're very excited about this product. It's one of our biggest announcements for many, many years. It's the result of years of innovation and hard work.

We think that's a very important asset and we want to preserve and invest in it.

We think of Microsoft as our major competitor in the database business, not IBM,

We think Microsoft is a very serious competitor going forward in the applications business. It's not simply going to be Oracle versus SAP.

Based on our current pipelines the entire management team believes that the overall year should be very strong, ... Specifically we expect that Oracle's software sales will grow faster this year than last. And margins should continue to improve as well.