James, Henry:Turn Of The Screw, The
- Paperback 2003, ISBN: 9780393096699
Hardcover
Simon & Schuster. Very Good. 7 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches. Hardcover. 2003. 528 pages.<br>A history of the computer company Oracle chronicles its rise to become one of the industry… More...
Simon & Schuster. Very Good. 7 x 1.5 x 9.75 inches. Hardcover. 2003. 528 pages.<br>A history of the computer company Oracle chronicles its rise to become one of the industry's most powerful and profi table companies, noting its penchant for reinventing itself in pu rsuit of new goals. Editorial Reviews Review Softwar is a biography of Larry Ellison and his company, Oracle. As such , it's simultaneously a portrait of a clever and driven man, a ca se study of a successful software development company, and a tabl eau of the commercial software industry from its beginnings, thro ugh the dot-com craze, and into the present era. Matthew Symonds, who began this project while working as the editor of the excell ent technology section of the Economist, has done a great job wit h all three elements of his project, thanks in no small part to t he tremendous access he was given and to his close collaboration with Ellison. Collaboration is very nearly the right word, as El lison reviewed Symonds' manuscript before publication and, while he did not alter it, he did make a large number of comments, whic h appear in the book as footnotes. As Symonds is a good journalis t who attributes most of his material, Ellison is able to take is sue immediately with statements other people make about him and h is company. The overall effect is hypertextual, and represents an important new biographical technique that other writers should i mitate. Softwar succeeds because Ellison has a fantastically inte resting life, tremendous experience, and carefully considered opi nions, and because Symonds communicates them with clarity and sty le. --David Wall Topics covered: The life, times, acquaintances, tastes, toys, and opinions of Larry Ellison, the database entrep reneur and CEO of Oracle Corporation. From Publishers Weekly Sy monds was technology editor at the Economist when Ellison invited him to collaborate on a book about e-business, but the journalis t decided he would rather write a profile of the software tycoon, one of Silicon Valley's most notorious figures. Oracle's databas e programs have become integral to the Internet and other network ed computer systems, and Oracle's head is convinced that he can s urpass Microsoft as the industry leader. But he's also developed a reputation for his aggressive corporate tactics and personal fl amboyance. Ellison agreed to cooperate with the project, but as p art of the deal, he reserved the right to respond, which he does in a series of running footnotes. Sometimes he only uses the oppo rtunity to mouth business platitudes, but he also refutes stories , cracks jokes and even argues with other sources. Although the b ook deals extensively with Oracle's efforts to promote a new soft ware package, it comes to life most when it follows Ellison outsi de the office-prepping his sailboat for a run at the America's Cu p or overseeing the final touches on a Japanese garden complex. S ymonds's near-total access to his subject leads to intimate obser vations that verge on personal advice, as when the writer suggest s how best to handle a top Oracle executive or comments on the re lationship between Ellison and his two children. But he remains o bjective enough to point out several mistakes in the past managem ent of Oracle (many of which Ellison acknowledges or clarifies). Even without its unusual counterpoint, the book would stand as a compelling portrayal of one of the computer industry's most influ ential leaders. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Publishers Weekly Symonds was technology editor at the Econo mist when Ellison invited him to collaborate on a book about e-bu siness, but the journalist decided he would rather write a profil e of the software tycoon, one of Silicon Valley's most notorious figures. Oracle's database programs have become integral to the I nternet and other networked computer systems, and Oracle's head i s convinced that he can surpass Microsoft as the industry leader. But he's also developed a reputation for his aggressive corporat e tactics and personal flamboyance. Ellison agreed to cooperate w ith the project, but as part of the deal, he reserved the right t o respond, which he does in a series of running footnotes. Someti mes he only uses the opportunity to mouth business platitudes, bu t he also refutes stories, cracks jokes and even argues with othe r sources. Although the book deals extensively with Oracle's effo rts to promote a new software package, it comes to life most when it follows Ellison outside the office-prepping his sailboat for a run at the America's Cup or overseeing the final touches on a J apanese garden complex. Symonds's near-total access to his subjec t leads to intimate observations that verge on personal advice, a s when the writer suggests how best to handle a top Oracle execut ive or comments on the relationship between Ellison and his two c hildren. But he remains objective enough to point out several mis takes in the past management of Oracle (many of which Ellison ack nowledges or clarifies). Even without its unusual counterpoint, t he book would stand as a compelling portrayal of one of the compu ter industry's most influential leaders. Copyright 2003 Reed Bus iness Information, Inc. From Booklist There has been a war brewi ng in the software industry that most computer users don't even k now about. Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, wants to supplant th e current Windows-based client-server network architecture with a totally Internet-based solution that would simplify computing an d make Microsoft's server software obsolete. Even now, Oracle is the dominant software in business; every time you do a Google sea rch or buy something on , you are using it. Anyone who craves a play-by-play account of Ellison and the evolution of the number-one relational database in the world can really sink thei r teeth into this. There is a slightly bizarre twist to this high -tech tale: Ellison himself gets to throw in running commentary a t the bottom of many pages, augmenting and often contradicting th e author's text in his own brash style. Beware if you 're not up on your geekspeak, though, as the casual reader will get lost in all the IT systems acronyms thrown around, such as CRM, ERP, HR a nd TPC-C. More entertaining than the technical jargon is the ruth less backstabbing that goes on between Ellison and big-name compe titors such as Microsoft, Seibel Systems, PeopleSoft and i2 Techn ologies. David Siegfried Copyright © American Library Association . All rights reserved Review Alan Goldstein The Dallas Morning N ews Thank goodness for Larry Ellison. The chairman and chief exec utive of Oracle Corporation always keeps things interesting. -- R eview About the Author Matthew Symonds is currently political ed itor of The Economist, but before that was the magazine's technol ogy and communications editor for nearly four years. He has also been a founding editorial director of The Independent and strateg y director of BBC Worldwide Television. Symonds lives in London w ith his wife and three children. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permiss ion. All rights reserved. Chapter One: Larry and Me I first met Larry Ellison in his office at Oracle's Redwood Shores headquart ers on December 8, 1997. I had recently become The Economist's te chnology and communications editor, and this was the first of wha t became regular visits to Silicon Valley. I had just completed t wo days of meetings at Microsoft's campus at Redmond, Washington, 800 miles to the north, where an array of impressively on-messag e executives had been wheeled out for my benefit -- though unfort unately not Bill Gates himself. I would see him on my next visit, I was assured. But there was a strong hint that face time with B ill was conditional on The Economist's taking a more sympathetic line toward Microsoft in the antitrust case that the Department o f Justice was preparing against it. After a similar turn involvin g Oracle's most senior managers, I had been promised time with El lison himself. It turned out I'd picked a bad afternoon. I didn 't know it at the time, but Oracle was about to issue its first e arnings warning since the firm had nearly gone under in 1990. The economic crisis in Asia had taken its toll, and in North America , slowing license sales of Oracle's most important product, its a ll-conquering database, seemed to support the argument of some an alysts that Oracle was dominating a market that was getting close to saturation. The following day, the stock lost 30 percent of i ts value. As I waited, I could see Ellison through the glass do ors of the eleventh-floor boardroom, huddled in conversation. He was already an hour and a half late for his interview with me and I knew he had to fly to New York later in the day to deliver a k eynote speech at an Internet conference. I had heard stories abou t Ellison's lateness and didn't believe the press flak's distract ed excuses about an emergency being the cause of the delay. Let's leave it for another time, I suggested grumpily. But at that mom ent, I was suddenly ushered into Ellison's handsome office with i ts expensive Japanese artifacts and panoramic views across the ba y. Despite the strain he must have been under, Ellison was cour tesy itself. After apologizing profusely for his lateness, he beg an to talk about technology. His theme was the failure of the pre vailing computer architecture of the day, known as client/server (because the job of running software was shared between server co mputers in corporate data centers and their desktop PC clients). He believed client/server was an evolutionary dead end that was d istributing complexity with disastrous consequences. The answer w as a new model of computing based on the Internet, in which the c omplexity and the computing would be hidden in the network. Users would be able to access everything they needed through a web bro wser that could be run by a machine much less expensive and canta nkerous than a PC -- a network computer. There was nothing unex pected in this. It was a drum that Ellison had been beating for s ome time, and conceptually it was little different from Sun Micro systems's famous slogan that the network is the computer. Ellison had first declared the PC a ridiculous device at a technology co nference in Paris more than two years earlier. The speech, at the height of the hoopla surrounding the release of Windows 95 and i n front of an audience that included Bill Gates, caused a minor s ensation. Ellison ran through a well-rehearsed routine, but the re was nonetheless something extraordinarily compelling about his argument. He seemed to be speaking directly to the problems that anyone who depended on computers at work knew all too well: the crash-prone PC with its incomprehensible error messages; the incr edible effort of maintaining thousands of PCs across a company; t he apparently insurmountable difficulties of getting reasonable p erformance and scalability across wide-area networks. The argumen ts seemed utterly rational and commonsensical, while Ellison hims elf was passionate and funny. ??? Over the next three years, Ellison was proved to be far more right than wrong. The network c omputer itself proved to be a dazzling digression: Ellison had be en right about how the Internet would change the way computers we re used, but most people still reckoned that the best way of gett ing to the Internet was through a PC. A few network computers wer e made by Oracle and a loosely knit coalition of Microsoft's enem ies, such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, but tumbling PC prices and the limitations imposed by slow dial-up connections quickly cond emned them to irrelevance. Microsoft crowed; Ellison was made to look a bit foolish. But the PC versus the NC was a sideshow that stole attention from the real struggle for the future of computin g. What mattered was that Ellison had understood better than anyo ne the potential impact of the Internet on enterprise computing i n general and on Oracle in particular.* While the technology an alysts in the investment banks and the consultancies confidently predicted the maturing of the database market, Ellison realized t hat the Internet would exponentially increase both the number of database transactions and the number of people who would interact with Oracle's databases. That would mean more license growth tha n the analysts had dreamed of. Every time someone looked for a bo ok on , bought stock through E*TRADE, or put something up for auction on , that person was using an Oracle database. Ellison believed that the database would be the essential platfo rm for Internet computing, effectively displacing the once all-im portant operating system. Within companies, the same thing woul d happen. Instead of business software being used by only a handf ul of specialists, Internet-based applications could be extended to anyone with authorization and a browser. Every time one of tho se applications was used, there was a good chance that it would q uery the database that the application ran on. When the networkin g giant Cisco Systems talked of having a URL for everything we do , it was another way of saying that everybody they employed was c onstantly using the firm's Oracle database. In a client/server wo rld, less sophisticated databases, such as Microsoft's SQL Server , might have become good enough for many businesses, but with Int ernet computing came the need for databases that could support mi llions of users at once. With the coming of e-business, Oracle's databases became at least as much an essential element of infrast ructure as Cisco's routers or the big server computers made by th e likes of Sun that were also back in fashion. It was no coincide nce that in early 2000 those three companies -- the three superst ars of the Internet -- had a combined market value of nearly a tr illion dollars. If that was a stroke of luck for Oracle, what w asn't was Ellison's decision, to the horror of many colleagues an d customers, to abandon all further development of client/server- based applications and concentrate the firm's entire engineering effort on building for the new computing architecture of the Inte rnet. While rivals in the apps business, such as the German power house SAP and PeopleSoft, talked up the Internet and put a web fr ont-end on some of their products, Ellison went much further. Ora cle was the first established software firm to risk everything on the new paradigm. His rationale was simple: Oracle could never hope to be number one in enterprise applications as long as clie nt/, Simon & Schuster, 2003, 3, W W Norton & Co Inc. Very Good with no dust jacket. 1966. Paperback. 0393096696 . Trade paperback with scuffing to the covers and edgewear, light corner bumping. In good condition with previous owner's name written on the half title page. "In THE TURN OF THE SCREW, an innocent, impressionable young governess takes over the education of two delightful children, Flora and Miles, at an isolated country estate. She becomes convinced that the children's former governess and a valet once employed on the estate--both now dead--have returned and are trying to gain control of the children's souls." ; 0.6 x 8.1 x 5.1 Inches; 276 pages ., W W Norton & Co Inc, 1966, 3<
