The World's Most Competitive Manhttp://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/23/60II/main601722.shtml
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It’s an exciting game that’s going on right now. And it to some degree ,it is a game. Microsoft’s in first place. We’re in second place. We’re trying to catch them. They’re not making it easy," says Ellison.
"They’re an extraordinary company. They’re the most important company on earth … We’re far behind. They’re three times bigger than we are. They have a monopoly. We don’t. Darn it.”
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Ellison was a college dropout, working at various jobs in the computer business, when he read a report by IBM’s research department that described software that could analyze data.
IBM’s management had not acted on the idea.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly what we need to do. We can beat IBM to market with IBM’s own technology,’” recalls Ellison. “Because IBM didn’t believe in their own idea.”
From that, Oracle was born.
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Japanese culture fascinates Ellison, who owns a priceless collection of 16th century Samurai armor -- fitting for a businessman whose favorite saying comes from the warrior Genghis Khan: “It’s not sufficient I succeed. Everyone else must fail.”
“That quote I actually got when I was working in Japan,” adds Ellison. “And a Japanese executive was describing a competition in Japan and how they take competition in Japan and the pursuit of market share. And this guy said, ‘Anything less than a 100, you know, a 100 percent market share was not enough. Every time we lose a deal, we feel that rice is being taken out of the mouths of our children.’”
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I suppose you can say to anyone who wants to win so badly, who am I winning for? Am I winning for Oracle shareholders or is this simply a matter of personal vanity? I admit to it, mea culpa. An awful lot of it is personal vanity. I think we are curious about ourselves,” says Ellison.
“We’re curious about our own limits and we try to discover our own limits. And a lot of what keeps me going and keeps my drive is I’m curious as to how far I can go, how far Oracle can go. They’re inextricably linked.”
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But does Ellison sometimes go too far? For instance, he flies his own planes, and sometimes, as the story goes, without good judgment. There is a story that he once flew a plane under the Golden Gate Bridge – but Ellison wouldn’t acknowledge if he actually did it.
“That would be against aviation rules,” he said. "So, of course not."
However, he admitted that – if he had done it – he would have taken one of his fighter planes out for the ride.
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