Oracle has been run by the three of them for awhile now. This is most likely a reduction in the responsibilities for Larry (ie. not getting flak for skipping out on earnings calls/keynotes when he wants to watch his boat race) and thus mostly a change in title without significant change to operations (other than messaging to the Street what the succession plan is).

Yeah, I think Ellison is heading for a "phased" retirement. Eventually, he'll give up the CTO role and just be Chairman. Then he'll give up the Chairman role (perhaps when he dies).

I don't see becoming CTO as heading for retirement. If he wanted to semi-retire he could adopt some other title like Chief Software Architect.

Also your mention of his eventual death sounds insulting. There are plenty of better things to pick apart Ellison for besides his age, and he isn't all that old. There isn't a single mention of his health in the wikipedia article about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison

I didn't read it as an attack so much as saying that Ellison may very well never step away from the company, short of being forced to by death.

It's odd that you would see a reference to someone's eventual death as an insult. For a 70-year-old man, death looms large, whatever Wikipedia has to say on the subject.

I think you're right. At first I thought it would be to bring out a knife fight. In reflection, it seems like they're going towards a triumvirate similar to Google. Larry wants to be Eric Schmidt, but can't be if he's got the CEO title. Everyone would defer to him for everything.

Ellison will still be around? This sounds like when Putin and Medvedev swapped being president and prime minister of Russia.

That was to avoid running afoul of term limit rules.

I believe his point was that it sounds like a situation where Ellison will be retaining de facto control despite giving up the 'top title'.

The thing that is weird to me is that Ellison is CTO. I don't really think he's a highly technical person, or is he?

Not to dwelve too far into Oracle hagiography but,

>During the 1970s, after a brief stint at Amdahl Corporation, Ellison began working for Ampex Corporation. His projects included a database for the CIA, which he named "Oracle". Ellison was inspired by a paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks".[10] In 1977, he founded Software Development Laboratories (SDL) with two partners and an investment of $2,000; $1,200 of the money was his.

It's really not clear from the first few hits off Google what his role was in developing Oracle, the application, but he's not like, _untechnical_.

Relevant Quora question:

http://www.quora.com/Was-Larry-Ellison-a-good-programmer

Also, apparently Bob Miner programmed the bulk of the original product and ran engineering, but the Quora link above says Miner considered Ellison a good programmer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Miner

Someone I spoke to after the Sun merger said one of the adjustments Sun engineers had to make was Ellison wandering around desks in Oracle talking about what people were working on, and asking "That looks cool. What could you achieve if I gave another $x million in funding?" if the technology looked interesting to him.

A received anecdote, but the thrust was that Ellison is pretty keenly interested in how it all works, as well as being a ruthless businessman.

Why do you think that a CTO has to be highly technical? Does a CTO at a big technology company write code? Line level engineering managers don't even write code a lot of the time. You just deal in the high-level abstract.

He's got to be on top of all the industry trends. Say what you will about Larry, he is on top of this.

Really? That isn't obvious to me by what Oracle has done over the past 10-15 years.

Their course corrections have been as good as any large company. Even if the product wasn't there, they caught many of the biggest trends. Even Microsoft didn't see the internet coming.

Safra has been the driver of this car for a long time now anyway. Larry is more of a figure. Hurd is an asshole.

It will be like herding cats.