That rant is famous, but I always wonder at the naivety of Cantrill and friends. Ellison was already known for being a shameless shark since the '80s, 20 years before the SUN acquisition. Believing he would leave your little blade of grass untouched was always going to be fanciful - particularly when they were a loss-making part of the company with no-future already.
I think there's plenty of people who the internet or gossip circles hate where that hate is unjustified. At the same time, a lot of the worst people are initially quite personally charming and keep that face even as they screw you over. And I think when people come into contact that they've only heard about in gossip in person, there's quite often an attempt to be like "well that's the caricature of Larry Ellison, maybe he's not actually that bad". Face to face contact can weight quite heavily compared to "people on the internet".
Combine the two of them and you get a recipe for people to give Larry Ellison the benefit of the doubt, taking a "well we're adults, let's handle this more maturely than immediately doubting our counter party" stance, even as people who by their own accounts had heard otherwise. Ultimately in this case, Cantrill's experience proved "the internet" right, but I think even that might not prevent someone else repeating the same situation in the future.
This is extremely well articulated, and is exactly true in my experience.
People take gossip as "gossip"- an unrealiable approximation and gross-oversimplification of an individual. Thus give people with poor reputations the benefit of the doubt, believing themselves to be open minded. (which is true).
When they are shown just how 1-dimensional some people can actually be, and that the gossip depicts people precisely, it can be jarring. Especially as, like you mention, many people are very personable, charismatic, charming etc;
Just think about the exceptionally gifted "10x" engineers we all meet from time to time. There are people equally gifted in charisma and manipulation, they can predict what people are feeling and steer them where they want them with high success rates. This is what I think of whenever I see a politician on video or meet one in person.
I joke that Larry is from that evil Star Trek universe and somewhere in the multiverse a clean-shaven, teddy bear of a man is trapped in a universe full of assholes because he was tricked into swapping with this Larry.
It's a funny joke, but I think it downplays how much of our world is led, run, and inhabited by assholes. It's more likely that we are living in the Asshole Universe and there is a parallel universe out there where being the asshole is an outlier.
From murders to politicians to CEOs, nearly every impactful predator has a lot of positive qualities as well.
You don't rise to the top of the food chain without having some really sociopathic/narcisisstic traits.
But, you also don't rise to the top of the food chain solely by being terrible all of the time. And IMO/IME lot of those "good traits in bad people" honestly are genuine, not just facades.
This is not to excuse the bad people of the world. It's just... honestly, as a middle-aged person myself... it has been the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around as an adult. The rest of the stuff, I was prepared for, on some level.
Yah.. it was well known but when it happens to you it's hard to really not try to be open minded. That is why his rant is so famous.
I was rolled up into Oracle through a series of acquisitions a few years before Sun.. it all went down the same way. You know what's going to happen but it's still a shock when a manager you knew before you joined Oracle and wouldn't have behaved the Oracle way instructs you to lie to a customer cause "that's how it's done here and we're going to have to go along with it."
You also don't realize how shocking it's going to be to see the office re-decorated until they come in and rip everything down and put up pictures of Larry's boats and airplanes and other toys.
When we were acquired Larry Ellison got on a big conference call we were all allowed to join and we could raise a virtual hand and ask questions. To his credit he answered everything 100% truthfully and transparently, and the questions were answered exactly the way the Internet expects he would answer.
It would have made so much more sense to sell to IBM though, and I don’t even like IBM. I respected their R&D at the time, but their global services division is a blight on society.
IBM was only interested in Java and lowballed the price.
Oracle was interested in hardware too, and offered more money.
IIRC, reports were that IBM negotiated the price down with a stinky "who else is ever going to buy you" attitude, and were blindsided once Ellison came into the picture offering more cash.
I thought Sun was just a little misguided and naive and then they sold to Ellison and I realized they were a bunch of fucking morons. WHY? WHY DID YOU DO THIS??
Cantrill and friends just worked there, but the board presumably knew what they were doing.
There was a Wired article that told me everything I needed to know about Larry, the way your blind date being mean to the waiter tells you not to make a second date. It was about the best smart homes. It came out during the DotCom boom, before Sun folded. Larry had one of the smartest homes in America. It had a remote control. One Saturday evening, the article reports, he got furious with the system because it wasn’t working, so he threw the remote and smashed it.
Then he called the company and demanded a new one. Someone had to drive, 45 minutes if memory serves, to his house to deliver a new remote, on their Saturday night, because some petulant man-child had a temper tantrum and couldn’t wait until Monday.
Fuck that guy.
How much of a pain in the ass you have to be in the interview process for a writer to drop that anecdote into the article? You know we are only getting part of that story.
> I thought Sun was just a little misguided and naive and then they sold to Ellison and I realized they were a bunch of fucking morons. WHY? WHY DID YOU DO THIS??
Whatever you think of Oracle and the One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison, IBM as a company are likely worse. Sun had a "west coast wheeler-dealer" vibe, as did Oracle. IBM had an "east coast button-down shirt" vibe. IBM had first dibs and Sun said "no, I may be desperate but I'm not that desperate"
If Sun had to be sold (which it did because it was consistently losing money hand over fist) and there was a choice of IBM, HP and Oracle to sell it to, and only those three, which would you pick?
I wonder if Dell’s story arc would have been different if they bought Sun. And I wonder how different the Cloud would be if they had. Did they even have the cash then?
Oracle needed two things from SUN: Java and hardware.
Nobody else had the money or the inclination to buy the company. Going with Ellison was the least-worst option.
I just find it funny how people who very obviously had it coming (i.e. Solaris, various opensource projects, etc - stuff that very obviously wasn't making money and would likely never make money), didn't see it coming.
PSA: it’s a link to Bryan Cantrill ranting about the Sun / Oracle acquisition. I couldn’t make it through 5 minutes of his ranting to get to an accurate summary of the joke though.
> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.
> "Oh they wanted to kill OpenSolaris!" No, the lawnmower doesn't care about OpenSolaris, the lawnmower doesn't think about OpenSolaris, the lawnmower _can't_ care about OpenSolaris. The lawnmower can't have empathy.
You grow up an Ellison, I figure you either end up just like daddy, a social justice warrior with means, or like Mary Trump, a psychologist. Just so you can unpack your fucked up family and help others.
