What Did Larry Ellison Bet Oracle on?

David Senra reads Larry Ellison's decision to abandon all further development of client-server applications and concentrate Oracle's entire engineering effort on the computing architecture of the internet. When Ellison believes in something, he acts on it in a big way, and he likes to burn the boats. He realized Oracle was in the wrong business, and if the company stayed there, it was dead.

The decision horrified many colleagues and customers. His mantra, repeated over and over, was that the internet changes everything. He went all in early by getting to the internet first, assuming the software could be made to work, so Oracle's competitors would become followers. He saw the internet as a platform for a completely different and infinitely superior kind of computing, beyond a way to get information or go shopping.

From the outset, he believed the internet really did change everything. A lot of parallels sit between what he was seeing in the late 90s and early 2000s and what is going on in AI today.