Those "Charles & YaVaughnie" billboards around New York belong to the co-president of software company Oracle, Charles Phillips. Did living in the shadow of Oracle's high-profile CEO Larry Ellison leave Phillips hungry for attention?
Oracle laid off hundreds of employees this year, and is expected to lay off thousands more. But that won't keep the business software company's CEO from taunting workers about his yacht. Don't you wish you had one, you broke-ass poor?
Larry Ellison threw a fantastic tantrum against the mindless cult of "Cloud Computing," a fascination of "nitwit" Silicon Valley investors, as Ellison calls them. But the Oracle CEO was himself once a "nitwit." Just look:
We took flak earlier this month for saying Oracle appeared to be, yet again, making wild advertising claims without any evidence. The business software company was just fined over those claims, since —go figure — it had no evidence.
Here's how Oracle hypes its business software: Write an ad claiming it's exponentially better than the competition. Then, mold the facts to fit the hype. CEO Larry Ellison's done this for decades; today he got caught. Click through for evidence.
There is a certain type of accident that really only happens to rich guys, and the founder of Siebel Systems just had one: Gored by an elephant while on photo safari in the Serengeti, he now needs reconstructive surgery.
• Stocks are down in early trading today as investors brace for disappointing earnings as well as signs the recession is getting worse. [WSJ, BN]
• Bank of America reported first quarter profits totaled $4.2 billion and revenues almost doubled, not that any of that will do much to soothe angry investors, who are…
For years, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has maintained a loony crusade against Wall Street traders, claiming there was a conspiracy to sell his company's stock short. (He may well have been onto something — but then again, a stopped clock is right twice a day.) CIO reveals a far more serious problem affecting…
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn't really live in his multimillion-dollar house in San Francisco; he mostly keeps it around for parties, like the rager of a dinner party PR schemestress Brooke Hammerling threw for the 10th anniversary of NetSuite, an online-software company which Ellison has backed since it was a…
We hear there's some kind of party happening tonight at the Pacific Heights mansionette of Larry Ellison, Oracle's multibillionaire CEO. He's not in town, so it should really be a rager. The occasion: The 10th anniversary of NetSuite's founding. Our invite was lost in the mail, but we're glad to hear Ellison's still…
At today's annual meeting, Oracle's top dog told shareholders, "Acquisitions that we have been looking at for some time may now be more attractive." He wasn't any more specific than to say he meant small, growing companies rather than large, public ones. Ooh, I know this great little blog network. Does Oracle have…
PBS pundit Robert X. Cringely says he realized at last week's MIT Technology Review conference that cloud computing means, in short, "No database." Cringely sees it as the end of Oracle's dominance of information technology. I expect Oracle Cloud any day now. Here's a summary of Cringely's long article, plus the joke…
"The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion." So says Larry Ellison, who told analysts yesterday that "other than change the wording of some of our ads," the company has no plans to make any actual changes to its business in order to jump on the cloud-computing…
Please welcome back ConFonz, the man who goes to technology trade conferences so Valleywag doesn't have to. The Conference Fonzerelli, a veteran of many OpenWorld conferences, thinks Oracle has pumped up its image this year. The show is much more huggy-touchy-feely-bloggery. Despite the fact that most Oracle employees…
At yesterday's Oracle OpenWorld conference, CEO Larry Ellison donned his best tan and announced a new partnership with Hewlett Packard to sell a hardware and software to speed up databases. A rack of eight devices will include 168 terrabytes of storage and a total of 64 processing cores on 16 Intel microprocessors and…
Can't afford one of the "obviously scalable" ladies hanging out in the lobby of the W hotel during this week's Oracle convention? The Market Street Cinema has you covered — or, should I say, no-covered. Think up a better headline, leave it in the comments, and maybe you can dethrone actionhero11 who won for the…
Larry Ellison didn't provide escorts for attendees at this week's Oracle OpenWorld at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Well, certainly not for all of them. But with 45,000 geeks — the kind of geeks who can afford Oracle's software — in town, it's bonus week for local working girls. "Jet-setting adventuress" Kimberlee…
The canned marketing script says, "Oracle Beehive provides a complete range of collaboration services including conferencing, instant messaging, email, calendar, and team workspaces." Translation: It's a competitor for Microsoft Sharepoint. More cynically: Oh boy, an Oracle wiki. Beehive's unveiling was supposed to…
Larry Ellison's database peddler saw profits in the most recent quarter jump to $1.08 billion, up 28 percent from the same period last year. As recently as 2006, Oracle got 12 percent of its revenues from banks, brokers, and insurers. Some of its best customers are bankrupt, while others are merging, a move which…
When it became obvious over the weekend that investment bank Lehman Brothers would finally fail and that no one was going to rescue it, Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain realized the market's reaction today would tank his company as well. So Thain met with Kenneth Lewis, CEO of Bank of America, and the pair reached a…
