Book Reco - Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle by Matthew Symonds
10th October 2014

Its been a while since I enjoyed a good book on the software industry. Although this book is by no means recent and some of the stories are now a bit outdated, I still found it relevant and interesting. Oracle and Ellison have always intrigued me and digging into their history and culture was facinating.

The author has presented a pretty balanced view of Ellison and it does not suffer from the narrative fallacy many such? books are prone too. The auther goes into great detail about the decision making, politics and larger than life personality of Larry Ellison. Everything from pricing issues to personality conflicts are covered in detail.

A special part of this book are the side bars by Ellison himself, clarifying, defending or just adding to the story. So its a partial autobiography of sorts.

Overall I found it a very interesting and lots of learnings from this one.

Enjoyed it a lot. Recommend it definitely.

Cheers,

Ron