Oracle Open World Keynote
November 12th, 2007 by Lou
At the Oracle Open World keynote, Larry Ellison reminisced about 30 years of Oracle history.
I have never seen him speak before, and Larry was nothing like I expected. He was disarmingly frank about Oracle’s, hapless early days, and frequently reinforced a picture of Oracle as a company of geeks, growing over the years to learn the wierding ways of the balance sheet and field sales and
operations.
The keynote and entertainment seemed to strain to be something slick, that in its heart of hearts Oracle is not, at least at the reflection of 30 years of history, and in the company of customers and partners. This was not a keynote for Wall Street sharks.
I left with a sense of Larry giving us something more than Oracle itself over the years. He has given all of us geeks one of the first and most lasting examples of the ultimate revenge of the nerds: a company envied by MBA’s, marketing machines and traditional corporations that had presumed that geeks can’t be killer business people, at least before Oracle happened.
larryellison, oow07, oracle, oracleworld07