The state of the Net
By Wylie Wong and Jeff Pelline
Staff Writers, CNET NEWS.COM

Larry Ellison has an incredible knack for making headlines.

This year alone, the avid yacht racer steered his 80-foot vessel through a ferocious--and deadly--hurricane to win a contest in Australia. Then the rich, jet-setting bachelor infuriated San Jose International Airport officials as his new private jet routinely broke curfew, landing at all hours of the night. And most recently, he publicly pondered a future run for California governor.

The limelight--or notoriety--results from the position he's best known for: the Microsoft-bashing, Internet-touting leader of Oracle.

But love him or hate him, Ellison is a visionary.

For years, his mantra was the network is the computer. He pushed the network computer, a $500 device with no hard drive that ran the operating system and applications off of a main server. The threat of the low-cost device compelled PC makers to drive down the cost of computers. And as a result, the NC itself mostly fizzled, but the concept of the network as the computer has begun to take hold with the Internet's emergence.

Ellison, who founded Oracle in 1977, has used the network model for his own company, moving human resources information and employees' email onto the Internet, making them accessible through Web browsers. He's also Web-enabled every Oracle product, from its market-leading database to applications.

In a recent interview with CNET News.com, Ellison said he wouldn't presume to tell Microsoft--the "richest, most successful company"--how to run their business, but he couldn't resist. He discusses his strategy if he were Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and shares with us his dream outcome for the Department of Justice antitrust trial against Microsoft. He also talks about Oracle's and Apple's future and denies any interest in running for political office.

CNET News.com: The network computer failed, but your idea of the network as a computer is coming true. Your thoughts?
Ellison: Everyone grabbed onto the idea of the NC, the appliance. What I said was what the world needed would be $500 computers with Internet browsers. What astonished me was how quickly the personal computer mutated into a network computer.

My guess was your television will become a network computer--and it will be. Your telephone will become a network computer. You'll have Internet access on your telephone. But the very first device that became the primary access to the Internet was the PC, and we've seen the price drop from $2,500 to now under $1,000. So what I never guessed was the PC industry would flip over and drop their prices. But it is network computing, Internet computing, that is happening.

For the first time, computing looks like all the other networks: the electric, telephone, and television networks. They work exactly the same. A low-cost appliance gives users access to the wealth of that network. Centrally managed. Therefore, electricity is cheaper than if everybody had a generator. And the Internet makes computing much cheaper. You wake up and "My Yahoo" has changed a bunch, but you never installed a floppy disk.

Imagine if Amazon.com adopted the client/server model and sent out floppy disks with their book-buying program. They would have to have people help you install the book-buying program. It sounds ridiculous. That's still how most corporations do most of their computing, but not for much longer. Corporations will start mimicking the Internet with their corporate networks.

If you were president and chief executive of Microsoft, how would you run the company?
Microsoft thinks their future popular operating system is Windows NT. I think their future popular operating system is Windows CE. People want simpler. So I would aim NT totally at the very high end and stop worrying about NT on the desktop. They need to worry about Windows CE for low-cost appliances, because the world is going to be made up of big servers and low-cost, easy-to-use appliances.

NEXT: Advice for the Department of Justice and Apple.