I started a software company with a couple other folks. It went public. We made plenty of money. And I thought it was this incredible mission, but in fact, we sold software to Haliburton; we sold software to Frito-Lay and Pepsi and all these companies that didn't necessarily do good things.
It's my job for Oracle, the number two software company in the world; to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one.
In the early days of the software industry, people cared about copyright and didn't give a damn about patents - they copied each other willy-nilly.
We didn't grow up in a jock household. In fact, my dad is an entrepreneur. He was a computer programmer; he was a professor of actuarial science at Wharton for 13 years, then started his own company that was software-based.
There are people who don't like capitalism, and people who don't like PCs. But there's no-one who likes the PC who doesn't like Microsoft.
If there could've ever been a magical time to build an enterprise software company, now is absolutely that time.
Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.
Just like the Internet has transformed the media industry or the e-commerce industry, the software industry is also being affected dramatically by the Internet.
Maintaining a consistent platform also helps improve product support - a significant problem in the software industry.
Most of the largest software companies in the world today are based on Oracle, and they were once startups.
I don't believe in government regulation of the software industry.
IT companies in Bangalore are a reliable engine of development for India.
We can't defend French culture without a [computer] software industry.
A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.
When we started off we didn't know how to spell software.
There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'.
We will still be enormously profitable and by far the most profitable enterprise software company.
Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer, I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.
I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.
My best decision was to choose to go to Wall Street over law. I learned a lot and focused on the expanding software industry at a time when the independent software industry was just beginning.
Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.
The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
I think I am very goal oriented. I'd like to win the America's cup. I'd like Oracle to be the No 1 software company in the world. I still think it is possible to beat Microsoft.
Mult-Tenancyi is really the future of our industry.
Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.
