Leisure Suit Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison 1978

So at 70 years of age, the man who's been heading Oracle since before I was born is stepping down.

While I admit I'm far removed from the reality of the situation, I find it a little amusing how it's been deemed as a 'shake up' when a few paragraphs before he's quoted as saying this (referring to new co-CEOs)

“I am going to continue to do what I have been doing the past several years and they are going to continue doing what they have been doing the past several years,” 

So I bet he's probably going to be working in the same office, just the title under his name on the door will read "CTO". So for us at the coal face, surely this means he will spend more time directing the nature of the beast and leave operations to those who specialise. That sounds to me like a good thing.

I enjoyed this New York Times article, but writer Quentin Hardy made me read one of the last paragraphs a few times

Mr. Ellison does not leave his company entirely untroubled. Besides continuing challenges in cloud computing, including acquisitions and new competition, the company faces a raft of new types of databases, first developed inside Google and Yahoo, that also threaten the dominance of the relational database.

I've been thinking recently what the next generation of databases will be like. The relational model was revolutionary at the time, but bigger data and intelligent networking will surely one day reach another punctuated equilibrium. No doubt it will come from somewhere like contemporary giant Google.

If I was a passionate billionare I think I would have left the business behind long ago, along with the suit.

Circa 1993 - no eyebrows then either