The Blog

  • September 19, 2014
  • Larry Ellison

    LarryEllison_2255331bNOTE: This has been edited to correct the spelling for Safra Catz’ name and to remove a ‘not’ that completely misled my meaning.

    I was going to write a post about Larry Ellison leaving Oracle after he announced his retirement on Thursday but it is probably pre-mature. Ellison will become the executive chairman while Safra Catz and Mark Hurd run the shop as co-CEO’s and I have a lot of doubts.

    It’s not that Safra and Mark are competent executives because each has held down significant positions for a long time. Recall Hurd was CEO of HP a while ago and Catz has had significant responsibilities at Oracle. But two things strike me. First Larry isn’t going anywhere. If he said he was going sailing or going to live on the island he bought in the Hawaiian Islands that would be a good indication for retirement. But as executive chairman, Ellison will still be heavily involved in the day-to-day operations so I am not sure what if any difference this will mean.

    Second, I am leery of two riders on the same horse, which is what you have with co-CEOs. It’s not a good idea — heck sometimes one CEO is too many. By keeping Catz and Hurd in the same relative positions they were in when Larry was CEO we run the risk of losing steam, credibility, innovation, and creativity.

    I see this situation as an analog to Microsoft. When Bill Gates retired, Steve Ballmer was waiting in the wings. He was one of the original team and he was a continuation of Gates possibly without Gates’ smarts. In the event, Ballmer stayed the course, rewriting Windows every few years and living off the cash cows and that was exactly what Microsoft didn’t need.

    The list of markets that Microsoft plays in but does not lead as a result of a drowsy decade of following Ballmer’s script include cloud computing, phones and tablets, and CRM. We’ll see about the Internet of Things (IoT). I fear that something similar could happen to Oracle. The company has bought a lot of other companies recently and knitting them together is a big job that has to be done but I am not sure that constitutes a vision of where business computing should go and I am not sure the new team has that vision.

    Perhaps the vision exists in some of the people who came into the company from the acquisitions, an iffy proposition to be sure. Very often when a company gets bought, the founders and lead talent make enough money to leave. They work through a transition period and then depart for some beach to contemplate their next moves. Some stay. Anthony Lye was a great case in point. He came with the Siebel acquisition and turned Oracle’s CRM group into a real money maker. But he’s gone along with many others.

    So the question is what’s next. How long will the transition of Larry all the way out of the organization take? The answer will manifest itself when Larry really does retire and more visibly when we see some new blood in the corner office driving a new vision of Oracle.

    Published: 10 years ago


    Discussion

    • September 19th, 2014 at 3:52 pm    

      Hi Denis,

      I was thinking, it may be a good thing for Oracle to use its cash and buy up Salesforce, and then stick Benioff at the helm. What do you think?

      Cheers,

      Mark

      • September 25th, 2014 at 10:25 am    

        Hi Mark,

        Wow, this is a whole book not even a blog. Would Mark agree? What would Zach say? What would the SEC say or do? ORCL has a big legacy business and might be too big to merge. At the end of the day, they need to hire or use some people with modern web and mobile first ideas. They exist. Not to take anything away from Mark Hurd or Safra Catz, I don’t think they are the revolutionaries Oracle needs to reinvent itself. On the other hand, Larry is still very involved and I half expect there is a search going on to hire the next person. Mark and Safra have a title now but it is probably not much more than a gold watch from the boss.

        Here’s a thought: ORCL might need to become a holding company for some companies that more or less go their own way to compete in the market. I can see a hardware company, a legacy software company, a new wave software company that is aggressively platform based, a services company, and a IaaS company. That could work because it would inject a lot of competition and cooperation into a tired monolith. Also as Executive Chairman, Larry is perfectly positioned to do this. If so, we could see the current company whittled down and the co-CEO’s go their own ways as well. Hurd could go to the hardware division, Catz might best be used as CFO, and who knows? Tom Siebel or Craig Conway could run the legacy business. They’d need real revolutionaries in the other divisions. What do you think?

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