Larry Ellison Quotes

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.

Think of it as you want it, not as it is!

I'd prefer people read about Churchill and how he wasn't overwhelmed by Nazi Germany. Amazing; that the morale of a country rested on one person's shoulders. Extraordinary people carried that country through its darkest hours; truly inspirational. I suppose that's my theme. Whether it's a biography or a movie; whether it's fictional or true, I'm inspired by people doing great things.

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.

I have had all of the disadvantages required for success.

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

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

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.

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.

There's a wonderful saying that's dead wrong. 'Why did you climb the mountain?' 'I climbed the mountain because it was there.' That's utter nonsense ... You climbed the mountain because you were there, and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like.

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.

If I see Danny Hillis quoted as an expert on MPP one more time, I'm going to puke.

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.

Once the business data have been centralized and integrated, the value of the database is greater than the sum of the preexisting parts.

Because software is all about scale. The larger you are, the more profitable you are. If we sell twice as much as software, it doesn't cost us twice as much to build that software. So the more customers you have, the more scale you have. The larger you are, the more profitable you are.

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.

If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you're going to lose. The only way to really be ahead, is to 'be different'.

I think after a certain amount, I'm going to give almost everything I have to charity. What else can you do with it? You can't spend it, even if you try. I've been trying.

Don't mistake any of this for altruism ... Fear and greed just doesn't work. If you want to be successful, quality and service just works better.

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'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.

I enjoy the competition and the process of learning as we compete. The whole thing is just fascinating. I don't know what I'll do when I retire. When I go sailing, I look around ... anyone want to race? I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.

I know some people are offended by the fact that I'm spending a lot of money trying to win the America's Cup. I could have given all that money to charity.

The things that caused problems for me in school are the same things that help me succeed in the world.

Oracle's got 100+ enterprise applications live in the #cloud; today, SAP's got nothin' but SuccessFactors until 2020.

Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.

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 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.

Everyone thought the acquisition strategy was extremely risky because no one had ever done it successfully. In other words, it was innovative.

You have to act and act now.

When you find errors in conventional wisdom-when everyone says A and A is not true-you gain competitive advantage. Only a few times do you have to find errors in conventional wisdom to make a living.

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.

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

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.

Right now, 70 percent of the people don't have computers. And where they're needed most, people don't have them. We think this will enable anyone to own a computer. We're aiming at everybody who uses a computer as an information access device. The original idea was to build one cheaply enough to put one on every desk.

It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."

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.

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.

I hate the PC, with a passion.

You cannot innovate by copying.

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.

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

When you're the first person whose beliefs are different from what everyone else believes, you're basically saying, "I'm right, and everyone else is wrong." That's a very unpleasant position to be in. It's at once exhilarating and at the same time an invitation to be attacked.

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.

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

You have to take a broader view and realize this is an industry like any other - telecoms, Railroads; they went through consolidation. Why shouldn't the computer industry be any different? This shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody but it seemed to be, and a lot of people thought I was nuts when I said these things. And that's why they are alone as a consolidator.

Five years from now, I don't know how I'll think.

In some ways, getting away from the headquarters and having a little time to reflect allows you to find errors in your strategy. You get to rethink things. Often, that helps me correct a mistake that I made or someone else is about to make.

If your cash is about to run out, you have to cut your cash flow. CEOs have to make those decisions and live with them however painful they may be. You have to act and act now; and act in the best interest of the company as a whole, even if it means that some people in the company who are your best friends have to work somewhere else.

The most important aspect of my personality as far as determining my success goes; has been my questioning conventional wisdom, doubting experts and questioning authority. While that can be painful in your relationships with your parents and teachers, it's enormously useful in life.

I love sailing. I like it more when I am winning.

Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about.

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.

All you can do is all you can do.

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.

Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. Sure, there's the talent, but there also has to be the will. Give me human will and the intense desire to win and it will trump talent every day of the week.

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.

If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden.

Act confident, even when you're not.

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.

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.

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.

When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.

You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand your own mortality can change and how quickly things could change.

We have most of the software industry running Autonomy.

Winning is not enough. All others must lose.

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.

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

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

You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.

Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane.

I have hobbies. I do all sorts of ridiculous things,

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