Larry Ellison’s emails, from lawsuits and leaks

The H.P. board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago [...] That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn't come back and saved them. [...] In losing Mark Hurd, the H.P. board failed to act in the best interest of H.P.'s employees, shareholders, customers and partners [...] The H.P. board admits that it fully investigated the sexual harassment claims against Mark and found them to be utterly false.

Within the year every analyst will agree that best of breed is dead -- except at dog shows.

OK. I want all escalated customers to belong to development managers. Mark B. will own Papa John. Mark, I need daily reports until the customer is happy. I need a list of the other escalated customers and I need it now. And I need support to resurrect the reports grading whether products are within the agreed quality parameters. Mike R. is responsible for delivering the reports. We will meet on this on Wednesday to review every escalated customers and every product quality rating. Until further notice every Thursday applications meeting will begin with a review of all escalated customers and application product quality. The only allowed topics will be demo status and internal implementation requirements. larry

Oracle Team, Following Friday's announcement of Oracle's more flexible approach to where and how we work and the relocation of our corporate headquarters in Austin, I've received a number of inquiries about whether or not I will be moving to Texas. The answer is no. I've moved to the State of Hawaii and I'll be using the power of Zoom to work from the island of Lanai. Mahalo, Larry

Team Oracle, It's been a hell of a week. But then it's been a hell of a year. At the start of fiscal year 2000, we announced that Oracle would become an e-business, and in doing so, save one billion dollars. In other words, we would use our own application software - the Oracle e-business suite - to put every aspect of our business on the Internet. The success of our move into the new-economy would be measured the old-economy way - would our move to the Internet improve margins enough to save a billion? The answer turned out to be no. We're going to save a lot more. A billion dollars in annual savings translates to a 10 point improvement in our margins. But by the fourth quarter our operating margins were up almost 14 points to over 41%. For the full year, net income without investment gains increased 59% to over $2 billion, or 69 cents per share. Net income including investment gains was over $6 billion. Cash increased from $2 billion to $8 billion. Sales topped $10 billion. The stock was up 400%. Oracle's market capitalization approached a quarter of a trillion dollars. It was a good year. I know that some of you are concerned with the management changes at Oracle. Changes at the top are highly visible to the public, and that's resulted in a good deal of comment in the media this past week. But Oracle has been going through massive organizational and management changes throughout the entire year. This has been largely invisible. This note is a review of some of those changes, and an explanation of why they were necessary. Five years ago we decided to move all of our products to the Internet. Over one year ago we started the process of transforming Oracle into an e-business. We had to put every aspect of our business on the Internet because the world was about to change. And if we didn't move fast we would miss by far the biggest opportunity in business history.