Friday, November 07, 2003

WSJ.com - Wonder Boy (Larry Ellison book reviews)

WSJ.com - Wonder Boy (Larry Ellison book reviews) "The denizens of Silicon Valley, joined by a peanut gallery from Wall Street and elsewhere, have long held two divergent views of the man who runs Oracle Corp. Call them Larry the Bad and Larry the Good.
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For anyone who enjoys playing "Who's Larry?" two books have arrived to help answer the question -- or confirm familiar prejudices. The slimmer of the two, Karen Southwick's "Everyone Else Must Fail," is a determined case for the prosecution, a jumble of sour grapes and horror stories starring Ellison's embittered former number two, Ray Lane. She goes looking for Genghis Khan and, although finding him some of the time, is honest enough to admit when she comes up short. Matthew Symonds's brick of a book is more elegant and overtly admiring. It is dominated -- surprise -- by the endlessly talkative Mr. Ellison himself, who cooperated right down to providing running footnotes to the narrative. So together we get yin and yang, which may be about right for one of the high-tech world's true samurai."

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