Friday, December 24, 2010

Great unverified Larry Ellison quote

"The only way the ORACLE RDBMS will ever be delivered to Russia is in the nuclear warhead of an ICBM."
When MIke Wilson was interviewing me for his book The Difference Between God And Larry Ellison, he asked me to corroborate the above quote. I couldn't, since I'd never heard Larry say such a thing. But I told Mike that it sounds exactly like something Larry would have said. Mike never corroborated the statement, so it didn't find its way into his book.

For the past few months, I've written to a lot of old friends, trying to confirm whether or not any of them heard such a pronouncement from Larry, and all but one have responded that they could not verify it. As for the one, well, he's been ducking me ever since. No return emails. No return calls from my voice messages. So I can't say for sure that such words ever left Larry's lips. But to use a line from one of my all-time favorite western movies, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, "Maybe this isn’t the way it was…it’s the way it should have been."

I believe Larry said those words—even though Oracle is now penetrating Russia just as it is the rest of the world—because Larry is the master of the calculated overstatement. Perhaps he was trying to land a big defense department license sale for Oracle. Who knows? Spending as much time as I did with him over the six years I created ads for him, I heard many equally flabbergasting prophecies. Which is why I named Larry Ellison to be the leader of my Cyber Privateer Fantasy League team.

Maybe Larry didn't say that the only way the ORACLE RDBMS will ever be delivered to Russia is in the nuclear warhead of an ICBM. But he should have.

QUOTE VERIFIED BY ONCE SOURCE IN MY POST ON JANUARY 29, 2011

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Implementation suggestions for THE MORGAN DOCTRINE are most welcome. What are the "Got'chas!"? What questions would some future Cyber Privateering Czar have to answer about this in a Senate confirmation hearing?