As a former technology editor of The Economist, a founding editorial director of The Independent and a smart guy overall, Symonds is well suited to explain how Ellison boot-strapped his way into the power spot in the arcane world of enterprise database and applications software. We learn how Ellison has successfully navigated Oracle through several generations of technology, despite buggy releases and a sales force focused on making quarterly quotas even if that results in less-profitable long-term contracts.
Ellison, through Symonds, makes a good case for why his current Internet computing strategy can be a winner. And Symonds’s backstage pass to “Larryland” provides plenty of fodder for an account of how Ellison is working to make Oracle the world’s most important corporate force. But Symonds, clearly an adherent of the “core dump” theory of nonfiction writing (i.e., spilling all the contents of notebooks and tapes onto the page), has little sense of how to tie everything together in a compelling fashion. For hundreds of pages he prattles on about obscure internal struggles at Oracle and long-forgotten versions of the company’s database.
Eventually we get a lot of new detail about Ellison’s fascinating personal history (an adoptive father who said Larry would never amount to anything, a colorful and sometimes litigious love life, a passion for sailing, an abiding contempt for Bill Gates), but without a strong narrative drive, “Softwar” is a war of attrition, daring you to get to the finish line.
In contrast, “Everyone Else Must Fail” (Crown. $27.50. To be published in November), by Karen Southwick, is pithy. (The title refers to Ellison’s fondness for a Genghis Khan quote.) It’s also the book to read if you want to find out exactly why some people can’t stand Ellison. But since much of it takes the point of view of Ray Lane, the onetime second-in-command at Oracle whom Larry cut loose a couple of years ago, there’s a sour-grapes quality to this tome. Those who want a deeper account of what Ellison is up to will have to plow through Symonds’s book, which gives the story from the mogul’s mouth.
