John A. Barry is a former managing editor of InfoWorld and former editor-in-chief of DBMS Magazine. He also worked for Sun Microsystems in the late 1980s, and is the author of Technobabble, the definitive guide to the use (and misuse) of language in the IT industry.
In what the two companies billed as an "employee town hall," Oracle and Sun
put their respective CEOs on stage January 10 to talk about the companies'
relationship and future directions.
The "town" in this case was Redwood Shores, CA, or, more specifically,
Oracle's Oz-like campus within that city's confines. The "hall" was Oracle's
conference center.
Because the presentation was pitched primarily at employees of Sun and
Oracle, the two chiefs, known for their aggressive stances, were in a jovial,
frequently joking mood. Oracle's Larry Ellison (pictured) came off as the
funnier and more amped up of the two. Sun's Scott McNealy seemed
uncharacteristically subdued, perhaps because he wasn't on his own turf. He
even joked that Sun lacks a capacious venue like Oracle's conference center,
which was why he was in Redwood Shores.
Watch McNealy and Ellison on SYS-CON.TV
Emplo... (more)
John A. Barry is a former managing editor of InfoWorld and former editor-in-chief of DBMS Magazine. He also worked for Sun Microsystems in the late 1980s, and is the author of Technobabble, the definitive guide to the use (and misuse) of language in the IT industry.
David Lucas
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