外國(guó)人最想和你聊的名人話題：勞倫斯·埃里森

　About Ellison　關(guān)于埃里森
     Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison is an American business magnate, co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation, a major enterprise software company. As of 2011 he is the fifth richest person in the world, with a personal wealth of $39.5 billion.
     Larry Ellison was born in New York City to Florence Spellman, an unwed 19-year-old. Ellison graduated from Eugene Field Elementary School on Chicago's north side in January, 1958 and attended Sullivan High School at least through the fall of 1959 before moving to South Shore.
     Ellison and his partners won a two-year contract to build a relational database management system (RDBMS) for the CIA. The project's code name: Oracle. They finished the project a year ahead of schedule and used the extra time to develop their system for commercial applications. They named their commercial RDBMS Oracle as well. In 1980, Ellison's company had only eight employees, and revenues were less than $1 million, but the following year, IBM itself adopted Oracle for its mainframe systems, and Oracle's sales doubled every year for the next seven years. The million dollar company was becoming a billion dollar company. Ellison renamed the company Oracle Corporation, for its best-selling product.
     Today, Lawrence Ellison has his principal home in Woodside, California. He served as President of Oracle from 1978 to 1996, and undertook two stints as Chairman of the Board, from 1990 to 1992, and again from 1995 to 2004. Since its founding, he has been Oracle's only Chief Executive Officer.
     他的公司Oracle專注于關(guān)系數(shù)據(jù)庫(kù)和企業(yè)軟件等，現(xiàn)為世界上僅次于微軟的第二大的軟件公司，是SAP的直接競(jìng)爭(zhēng)者，自2010年甲骨文成功收購(gòu)Sun公司以來(lái)，甲骨文整合了java和Sun的硬件，正邁向"軟硬"結(jié)合的發(fā)展之路，2011年埃里森甚至公開(kāi)表示甲骨文將公開(kāi)與IBM和惠普進(jìn)行硬件市場(chǎng)的競(jìng)爭(zhēng)。
     埃里森在32歲以前還一事無(wú)成，讀了三個(gè)大學(xué)，沒(méi)得到一個(gè)學(xué)位文憑，換了十幾家公司，老婆也離他而去，開(kāi)始創(chuàng)業(yè)時(shí)只有1200美元，卻使得Oracle公司連續(xù)十二年銷售額每年翻一番，成為世界上第二大的軟件公司，他擁有的Oracle是世界上最大的數(shù)據(jù)庫(kù)軟件公司。埃里森以不擇手段的經(jīng)營(yíng)手腕和強(qiáng)力甚至欺騙的市場(chǎng)競(jìng)爭(zhēng)，擊敗了一個(gè)又一個(gè)的對(duì)手，埃里森要打倒的最后一個(gè)目標(biāo)就是軟件帝國(guó)之王微軟的比爾·蓋茨。