You realize that life is short and fragile; and when you are facing walls of water, you understand how quickly your own mortality can change and things can change.
I have run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering. I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middle ware team, the applications team. I run engineering and I will do that until the board throws me out of there.
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.
I think I am very goal oriented. I’d like to win the America’s cup. I’d like Oracle to be the No 1 software company in the world. I still think it is possible to beat Microsoft.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft is already the most powerful company on earth but you ain’t seen nothing yet.
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.
Bill Gates is the pope of the personal computer industry. He decides who is going to build.
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 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.
It’s Microsoft versus mankind, with Microsoft having only a slight lead.
Everyone thought the acquisition strategy was extremely risky because no one had ever done it successfully. In other words, it was innovative.
When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.
Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane.
Most companies don’t want their data co-mingled with other customers. Small companies will tolerate it.
Now, most people hate to admit they’re wrong, but it didn’t bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That’s what makes Bill very, very dangerous.