Larry Ellison: Sun CEO Blogged While Company Burned

In a rare interview, Oracle CEO dishes on Sun acquisition

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison had some choice words for departed Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz in an interview with ABC News.

Ellison, who's Oracle bought Sun earlier this year, had kind words for Sun's engineers, but not for their blogger-in-chief:

The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed. Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales.

After the acquisition, Ellison reportedly ditched Schwartz's pet processor project, codenamed "Rock," calling it slow, hot and "just madness to continue that project."

Oracle also set out to double Sun's sales force and fix the commission system. Apparently, Sun salespeople earned the same commission whether or not the deal was actually profitable in an effort to boost revenue at all costs.

In March, Schwartz took to (what else?) a blog to dish on lawsuit threats and intimidation from Apple CEO Steve Jobs and current and former Microsoft CEOs Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.

Jackson West loves it when tech titans fight in the press.

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