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T A B L E__T A L K

Microsoft vs. the feds -- who'll come out on top in this clash of the titans? Place your bets in Table Talk's Digital Culture area

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R E C E N T L Y

The empire clicks back
By Andrew Leonard
"Age of Empires" lets you run your own civilization
(12/17/97)

Upgraded memories
By Jack Mingo
Inside UC-Berkeley's treasure-trove of historical photos
(12/16/97)

Survival of the chicest
By Thomas Lewis
A review of Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works"
(12/15/97)

21st briefing
By Scott Rosenberg
Feds 1, Microsoft 0 -- but the game's only started
(12/12/97)

License to code
By Greg Lindsay
Universities experiment with ways to cash in on software research
(12/12/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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Inside Intel
The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison
Apple: The Inside Story of Intrique, Egomania and Business Blunders

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Today Oracle's databases efficiently maintain corporate America's "information warehouses," but in the company's early years, its products were a mess. An engineer describes the very first version of its software as "the roach motel of databases: the data went in; it didn't come out." Later versions were regularly released long before they were bug-proofed; cross-platform "ports" of programs would be promised long before they could be delivered. Oracle wasn't the only software company peddling "vaporware," but it perfected the art of actually selling products that didn't yet exist. Sometimes, Wilson reports, Oracle would respond to customers' frantic demands by deliberately shipping them blank or unreadable computer tapes to win a few more days' time.

These practices did not emerge in a vacuum: As Wilson tells it, they sprang straight from the personality of Ellison himself. The Oracle founder was himself "extravagantly and remorselessly late." (He'd have merited a long chewing out from Andy Grove.) Ellison "habitually said things that were provocative or demonstrably untrue," from fudging his college record and exaggerating the toughness of his childhood Chicago neighborhood to selling customers products and features that his engineers hadn't started working on.

As the CEO, so his sales force: Wilson piles up tales of questionable practices salespeople used to meet their constantly doubling quotas -- everything from secret side-deals with big accounts to inventing fictional companies as clients. As such deceptions multiplied to make good on Ellison's vision of infinite growth, Oracle headed for a disastrous fall in 1990. By this time, the firm -- a database company! -- had utterly lost track of its own numbers and was "flying blind," as one exec put it. The "fucking plodding finance guys," as Ellison called them, finally had to be brought in to reform Oracle's business practices and restore its profits.

One thing Oracle never lost through all the turmoil was its share of the market. The choice of database software was a once-a-decade decision, and once a company settled on Oracle, it had little choice but to wait for problems to sort themselves out. The cost of switching software was simply too high.

Wilson's portrait of Ellison in "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison" is not nearly as scathing as the book's title implies (it's the first half of a joke that concludes, "God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison"). Wilson strives for fairness, offering a sympathetic account of Ellison's ordeal by sexual harassment suit beginning in 1993 (he eventually prevailed in court, proving that the woman who sued him had forged an incriminating e-mail). Ellison emerges as a man who wants to behave like a tough S.O.B. and be loved at the same time. Though Wilson's effort to portray him as "the Charles Foster Kane of the technological age" is a little overblown, the book offers a complex vision of Ellison, not the caricature of the high-tech playboy familiar from business-magazine covers.

Wilson asks Ellison's friends and admirers (Steve Jobs is one) to explain the man's penchant for stretching the truth:

They believed that Ellison lived in the future. When he exaggerated the number of his employees, he was not really lying; he was just getting ahead of himself. "He had a problem with tenses," [Oracle co-founder Edward] Oates said ... Jenny Overstreet, Ellison's longtime assistant, summed things up this way: "There's so much wishing he could make it so ... He doesn't live in today, because there are problems today and there are solutions tomorrow."

If Intel's is a cult of control, Oracle's, plainly, is a power-of-positive-thinking religion -- a revival-tent meeting in the grip of Ellison's optimistic chutzpah. Ellison is like the New Age gurus who peddle "visualization," only instead of picturing personal growth, he chose to visualize a multibillion-dollar software firm -- and delivered.

Ellison is ridiculously wealthy today, and as his fortune has ballooned, his ambitions have evolved. He dabbled in the business of interactive television during the 1994 "information superhighway" bubble. More recently, he has pursued his get-Bill-Gates obsession by propounding the gospel of the network computer. In both cases, he has seemed to embrace the notion that Oracle can do more than just make piles of dough. Ellison has caught Apple fever -- he, too, wants to change the world. (He has also pondered buying Apple itself on more than one occasion; today he sits on its board.)

Ellison's revolutionary spirit remains, at this point, so much vaporware. You can't help thinking his desire to change the world is more a display of ego than a passion for ideas. Of all the computer-biz wizzes and moguls, Gates included, only Steve Jobs can credibly claim any sort of revolutionary mantle: In its early days, Apple was the first company to demonstrate the reach and potential of personal computing, and with the Mac it was the first company to create a computer that was not only useful but artful.

Jim Carlton's "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania and Business Blunders" chronicles how Apple's revolutionary mantle grew tattered through a decade of arrogance and mismanagement. Carlton is a dogged Wall Street Journal reporter who has assembled a trove of scoops, including a 1985 memo from Gates to Apple outlining a strategy to license the Mac that might have changed personal-computing history. Apple, of course, clung to high profit margins instead, and sunk those profits into one extravagant research project after another, few of which would ever see the light of day. While Apple fiddled, Microsoft and Intel burned up the marketplace. Once again, good marketing beat out good technology.

The Apple saga, well known as it is, remains a true business tragedy. Carlton, alas, fails to give it the dramatic shape it demands: His book is repetitive, a morass of clichés, marred by occasional technical misinformation and hobbled by a narrow focus on Apple's constant executive re-shufflings. Carlton's "Apple" is like a 400-page news story: Though it competently compiles Apple's problems -- paralyzing decision-making by consensus, technically unskilled bosses who gave engineers too much rein, a smug belief that coolness conquers all -- it never finds its way inside the company's soul to discover what went wrong.

One clue can be found in the book's structure. "Apple" begins with Jobs' 1985 departure from Apple and ends with his recent return to the company's helm. When Jobs got forced out by Sculley, the sugar-water magnate he'd hired, Apple experienced the ultimate cult disaster: It lost its leader.

Whatever the merits of Sculley's power play -- and given Jobs' reputation for arrogance, there were doubtless many -- it left Apple adrift. None of the company's other leaders -- from Sculley to Michael Spindler to Gil Amelio -- could replace Jobs in the company mind, even as each had to grapple with the myths he'd created, myths that still governed Apple's behavior. Jobs' celebrated "reality distortion field" held sway over Apple's collective consciousness long after his departure. Sculley himself admits this in retrospect: "Apple always had the DNA of Steve Jobs, even after he was gone ... It was much more of a cult than a real company."

Jobs is back now, but his grand re-entrance is unlikely to rekindle Apple's change-the-world fervor. It may well be too late for him to do anything but put a brave face on disaster. Whether he pulls off some last-minute miracle or goes down with his followers in flames, though, he is achieving something none of his hapless successors at Apple ever managed. He's playing out his role in Apple's mythology, closing a circle, giving the bedraggled cult what it wants.

Whatever happens to Apple from now on, rebirth or annihilation, will have the satisfyingly symmetrical proportions of a religious fable. That's just what today's technology business wants, and what the public expects, from a computer-industry captain.
SALON | Dec. 18, 1997