Book: Softwar

[ Mini-rant: Amazon.com provides members of their Affiliate Program with the ability to create "Product Links," which consist of a picture of and link to an item on Amazon.com, the title, and the current price. Members then get a cut of any revenue generated from sales resulting from someone following that link. I'm not an Amazon affiliate, nor do I care to be. But why, oh why, do they not provide me with the ability to easily create a similar link? Earth to Amazon! Just like one of your affiliates, I want to drive traffic to your site. The only difference is, I want to let you keep the share of revenue you'd normally give to an affiliate. Without a "link to this item" button on all your product pages, you're making it harder for me to send people to your site. I have to manually create a link to a vanilla cover of the book that's the right size and link it back to amazon.com. I know I'm not the only one that does this; fix it! ]



I just finished reading Softwar, which is sort of an unofficial biography of Larry Ellison and Oracle, the software company he founded in 1977. It contained a lot of Larry's perspective on the history of his company (probably around 75-100 combined pages of sizable quotations from him), which I found to be pretty interesting. Larry was able to respond to the author's perspective with footnotes, which added nicely to the experience. He was very straight-forward in his comments about previous decisions he made and whether in retrospect he thinks they were right or wrong. He bet (what was probably) the entire future of his company, usually in the form of a complete re-write of their main product, on his vision of the state of the industry a number of times and came out ahead for it. It also covers some of his sailing experiences, including his involvement in the America's Cup and his experience sailing into the eye of a hurricane in the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race.

Larry has a reputation of being a real jerk, but I came away from the book with a lot of respect for him. I think it's easy to confuse uncompromising determination and an almost infinite desire to win with being mean, and in this book, I thought he came off as being the former and not the latter. Overall, a good book.