LarryE: smartest man in Silicon Valley?
This weekend's Barron's comes with LarryE face plastered on the cover with this title " The smartest man in Silicon Valley". LarryE reminds me of Zoolander. It's the face, the expression, the same old mock turtleneck. This man has only one facial expression and it is called "blue steel".
The other thing zoolanderish about him is some of the things he says. When I met him, surely one of the highlights of my short career, he dropped "you know, second place is the first loser". I was young, impressionable and I wanted to be impressed. I thought: "wow, a deep thought from Larry". I was ready to cherish it for the rest of my life, like others keep a relic from a pop-star, until someone pointed out the line was straight out of "Top Gun". I felt cheated.
As he watches the floating cherry blossoms and feeds the remains of his dismembered enemies to the koi in his zen garden the great man reflects:
"I'll never forget the expression: "He just doesn't get it", Well, somebody didn't get it. And it wasn't me. It just cracked me up".
Yup, you don't make up shit like that. It's vintage Larry alright. He didn't lift that from Top Gun, maybe Rambo? But let's give credit where credit is due, the article is about the success of Oracle at integrating companies and growing the top line and the profitability at the same time. Blah, blah, blah read the article.
And finally, I have news for you Larry: you are not the smartest man in SV... I AM!
Comments
Yeah, totally, Will Farrel could be Larry E. If Larry was actually funnier I am sure they could do a spoof of his life and have silly quotes like that one.
"What the hell does that mean? There's second place, third place, fourth place--hell, there's even fifth place!"
From Talladega nights.
i think Chuck Phillips first came up with the idea of consolidating and sold it to Larry, but that doesn't make such a good story, at any rate, Oracle is huge and will eventually buy SpringSource and compete head-head with JBoss and Glassfish....
they can do open source at the development level, such as with Eclipse, but never do the run-time, so they got to let this S2AP thing from Sping play-out, but everyone ultimately needs a home, and especially when u r playing for ubiquity, as SpringSource is doing, u need a systems vendor sponsor...
as for Oracle, i just wonder what it will take to get WebLogic to run those apps...
Good question on Oracle. Tough job to integrate Fusion and BEA, but will be done, needs to be done and when it is done, I would put ORA right back in the lead for MW domination. Where SAP arrogantly failed with their efforts at MW and everyone passed, ORA may succeed. SUN doesn't have that apps installed base. JBoss is still a dark swan in terms of "who will be this installed base runtime".
I don't think Spring necessarily needs a sponsor. They are making sure they piss off their partners to see if someone buys them out? Tough challenge that will need to play itself out over 2 years at least. Spring is a development environment, what is there to buy? OSS is tough to "buy out", what are you buying out ? people? brands? installed bases? Knowing Larry he probably would prefer to take the code and be done with this instead of paying out top dollars... Actually Larry probably wouldn't give a frak but the indian dude may just pull the trigger on including.
But let me ask you... assume JVM 7 includes dependency injection (meaning it is a feature of Java, which it should be all along). Where does that leave Spring? log4j 2002 anyone? Apache 2008 anyone?
What good is ubiquity if you can't monetize it?
Is that why you gave up in your race and gave the baton to Red Hat while he still is taking his company forward?.
Actually, you are right in one thing, he is wrong when he said,
>>the the second place guy is not the >>first loser
The first loser is the guy who runs a race and doesn't know what the hell he is doing in the middle and feels lucky that he came this far and gives up his dream for a few peanuts.
I still think he wants to buy Red Hat.