Why Did Larry Ellison Pick Microsoft as the Enemy?

David Senra reads Larry Ellison's reason for picking Microsoft as the enemy: he set out to stop people talking about Oracle and other database companies and to get them talking about Oracle and Microsoft. A smaller database company would have put Oracle in the wrong category. Ellison told people to compare Oracle with IBM and Microsoft, the class he wanted. He gets attention by picking a fight, and he is most focused when he has something to beat.

Once a customer committed to a database vendor, the customer was pretty well locked in for the next 10 years or so, and Ellison understood the lock-in right away. With a winning system like Oracle's database, he did what Jeff Bezos did at Amazon in the early shareholder letters: invest heavily in introductions to new customers, because a won customer stays. Media sat alongside sales as the other way in.

Oracle was then perceived as a software heavyweight ranked just behind Microsoft and IBM. Customers who bought Oracle products could trust the company would be around for a long time. The same could not be said for Sybase and Informix. If customers do not believe a company will survive, it will not. Ellison wanted to knock out Sybase while Sybase was technically behind and vulnerable, even while sacrificing profits in the near term, because success would bring greater profits in the long run.