 | | |
| Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison | 
| Author: Karen Southwick
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $27.50
Buy New: $1.75
You Save: $25.75 (94%)
Buy New/Used/Collectible from $1.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  (7 reviews)
Sales Rank: 795099
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.1
ISBN: 0609610694
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.7610053092
EAN: 9780609610695
ASIN: 0609610694
Publication Date: November 11, 2003
Release Date: November 11, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Karen Southwick?s unauthorized account provides the full story of Larry Ellison?s brilliant, controversial career. Ellison?s drive and fierce ambition created Oracle out of the dust and built it into one of America?s great technology companies, but his unpredictable management style keeps it constantly on the edge of both success and disaster. The hostile bid for PeopleSoft is just the most recent example. With one clever strategic move, Larry Ellison threw much of the business software field into play.
The saying ?It?s not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail? has been so often used by or associated with Ellison that most people think it originated with him. It?s actually attributed to Genghis Khan, but it?s a dead-on way to describe not only the way Ellison thinks about competitors but the way he runs Oracle. His weapons are not marauding hordes, but Oracle?s possession of database technology that is crucial for keeping mission-critical information flows working at thousands of organizations, corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies.
Inside Oracle, Ellison has time and again systematically purged key operating, sales, and marketing people who got too powerful for his comfort. Most notable was Ray Lane, Oracle?s president for nine years, who was widely credited with bringing order out of the chaos that was Oracle in the early nineties and growing it into a ten billion dollar company. Ellison got rid of the one key person who was building confidence with Wall Street, business partners, and customers that Oracle was no longer flying by the seat of its pants and had its act together. Ellison?s mania for absolute control and his inability to coexist with the very lieutenants who bring much-needed stability to the company have brought Oracle to the brink of collapse before, and may well do it again.
Ellison is a throwback to an earlier, much more freewheeling version of capitalism, the kind practiced by the nineteenth-century robber barons who ran their companies as private fiefdoms. Larry Ellison is one of the most intriguing and dominant leaders of a major twenty-first-century corporation, and Everyone Else Must Fail raises the question of whether Oracle?s products and the reliance placed in them by so many are too important to be subject to the whims of one man. While giving credit to Ellison?s brilliance and devotion, the book sounds a warning about an ingenious man?s tendency to be his own company?s worst enemy.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Read it, you will like it!! June 15, 2005
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Everyone else must fail" by book by Karen Southwick is a must read if you want an example of how the goddess of luck favors those who grab their opportunities. When Oracle cofounders Ellison, Miner and Oates land a consulting assignment to feed themselves they know they can spend some time building a relational database without having to worry about their bread and butter.
A few decades later 98 of the top 100 companies in the world would use Oracle software in their businesses. This well researched book gives us inside glimpses of a company which overcame the growing pains of crossing the billion dollar mark, faced bankruptcy, shot itself in the foot with insensitive customer support and successfully completed the largest acquisition in the enterprise software industry. The author also tracks the maturing of the relational database, middleware and enterprise application business. If you want to understand technology trends especially those in the enterprise application industry, grab this opportunity to educate yourself. This is one of the best I've seen on Oracle thus far. I wonder whether anyone will have the energy to write another!!
 Adventures in LarryLand February 18, 2004
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
If you haven't figured out that Larryland is run like a private empire and the founder has an ego to match his billion dollar bank account, then this book is a good place to start. Karen Southwick, a former Forbes ASAP editor has written this book without any direct access to Ellison. Ok, at least it's not the softball co-authored love letter that SoftWar is, but unfortunately, not by much. The book covers the history of Oracle from its development of the first commercial relational database (written for the CIA based on published articles by IBM) to its present day situation as a multi-billion dollar behemoth that is hated by both competitors and, in Southwick's views, customers. The book covers the rise of Oracle in the go-go 80's when it paid sales reps in gold coins to sell software that wasn't ready, to its adolescent financial crisis, the unceremonial firing of every known Oracle executive other than Ellison himself, and finally the resurgence of Oracle as a major industry force. Unfortunately the book has less drama than the average hair-band "Behind the Music" episode on MTV. I admit when I read excerpts, I had high expectations for the rest of the book. There may be an interesting story about Larry Ellison and Oracle, but this isn't it. On the other hand, if you're eager to compile a who's-who list of fired Oracle execs (Bennioff, Bloom, Conway, Jarvis, Lane, Nussbaum, Scholes, Siebel, Sumner...) and you want to hear them dish, hey it's cheap.
 Unbalanced yet interesting January 17, 2004
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I was expecting a more balanced account of Larry Ellison and the rise of Oracle as a software giant. As an unauthorized biography, I expected the author to dish some dirt. However, other than praise for being a technical visionary, Ellison is portrayed as the Darth Vader of Silicon Valley. That being said, the text is a compelling read. On the business side, the text focuses on problems and solutions within sales and customer service. Very little was presented on Oracle's development practices.
 Hard-hitting and fast-paced January 10, 2004
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
The book seems to accurately portray Larry Ellison's strengths and weaknesses, especially his arrogance in dealing with other people. Too bad the author couldn't have gotten Ellison himself to say more.
Ray Lane January 10, 2004
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
Ray Lane is a great business man.
Larry Ellison is a bad person.
That about sums up this book.Very onesided book. She repeats herself a lot. On the plus side you can learn some of the history about the world's greatest database company.
|
|
|
Powered by: Dknc, inc. and Amazon.com | | 
For your safety and security, orders are processed through amazon.com
|
|
|
|
