Ellison: The sales staff was compensated based on deal size, not profit. So the commission on a $1 million sale that generated $500,000 in profit was the same as one that cost the company $100,000, he said. "The sales force could care less if they sold things that lost money because the commission was the same in either case," he said.

Meanwhile, I've never encountered an organization with more perverse sales incentives than Oracle had when I used to deal with them, back in the early 90s. Salesman were fired if they missed their sales quota for a single quarter, so we used to get phone calls at the end of each quarter begging us to buy something, anything, and return the item and cancel the invoice after the first of the month. Et cetera.

Full interview here: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034

I quite dislike Ellison (read about his excesses in The Silicon Boys). He's one hell of a pusher, tough, which is what you need in times of distress.

From the article linked from the post: >In typical Ellison fashion, he took a hands-on approach to the integration, choosing to meet directly with technical managers at Sun as often as four days a week to diagnose its problems, rather than delegating the work to underlings.

Exactly! I've seen some CEO's who don't know the location of their R&D Lab better than the janitor closet. This is how it needs to be done. Dictatorships are awful, except when the dictator knows the right direction to go in hard times.

Ellison is an arrogant douche but he's absolutely right about Schwartz. Schwartz's high-level corporate strategy, as near as I could determine it, was to try to get people to like him by giving everything his company used to sell away for free and by doing "cool" things like blogging. The problems started before his stewardship, but he greatly accelerated them. Schwartz and his fellow execs should be ashamed at how much money they lost sitting atop one of the world's most valuable repositories of technical talent and intellectual property. An Ellison enema is exactly what Sun needs, or needed. Unfortunately it's about 5 years too late.

Ellison: "The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed. 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."

Good big picture stuff. Clicky to the print version of the five page article the blog leads into: http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=10630034

Couple of quotes/notes:

Schwartz declined comment as did Sun co-founder and former Chairman Scott McNealy.

Probable translation: signed a gag clause forbidding any comment on acquirer's management. Expensive money.

... Ellison was known to mock advisers who recommended that he consider acquisitions, saying "we write software, we don't write checks." But he changed gears ....

They're also investing in Linux (pushing btrfs, etc - http://oss.oracle.com ). Smart enough to figure it's shared infrastructure they can leverage profitably.

P.S. Ironically, just noticed the 'Blogs' section in that OSS page, e.g. Virtual Box blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/virtualization/ (Hey, good news: "May 10, Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.1.8 released ... Supporting new platforms such as Ubuntu 10.04 ...")

Larry Ellison might not be a role model for anyone on the Technology side but he is one hell of a Salesman.

Interesting, though, that so many of Sun's software engineers are leaving Oracle.

"His first [hardware] appliance was developed as engineers found that hardware bottlenecks slowed the pace at which computers could process information stored in Oracle's database software."

Are they sure it wasn't the poorly written software?

Is it really easier to design hardware nowadays than to optimize a huge mess of enterprise software?

"Help me beat Oracle" blogs James Gosling who apparently doesn't like Oracle salesdroids much.

http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/forgerock

There's a lot to dislike about Oracle and Larry Ellison (especially as a person) but there's something to be said of a CEO who used the word "permgen" (in reference to HotSpot's generational garbage collector) at the first speech after an acquisition.

Having been at Yahoo at the times of Terry Semel, it's incredibly refreshing to see a CEO of company take a hands-on approach to technology (even if Oracle is primarily a sales rather than engineering company).

But pursuing the America's Cup wasn't.

Well of course Tony Stark can do everything better.

What an asshole. I don't have a huge objection to discontinuing unprofitable products, but bad-mouthing the previous management because they had a different philosophy of R&D is beyond the pale.

Ellison will definitely make more money than SUN did with its own assets.He is going to put price tag to anything that boots. But SUN represent something much much bigger how many open source projects do oracle supports? none!!!