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Oracle's Larry Ellison slams Google's Larry Page as person behind 'evil' decisions

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Larry Ellison, chief executive of Oracle, had harsh words on Google CEO Larry Page in a new interview, calling him the primary decision maker responsible for "evil" actions taken by the search giant.

Ellison spoke about his company's ongoing lawsuit against Google in an interview with Charlie Rose of CBS News. Rose asked Ellison about whether he has trouble with Page and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Ellison responded that his issues are "specifically" with Page.

"He makes the decisions over there," Ellison said of Page. "He runs that company. Nobody else runs that company."

Rose then asked Ellison whether what Google did was evil. America's third-richest man said yes, but stopped short of calling Page himself evil.

"It makes what he did evil, which is quite different," Ellison said. "And I know his slogan is 'Don't be evil,' and I think he slipped up this one time. This really bothers me. I don't see how he thinks you can just copy someone else's stuff."

In an ongoing legal dispute, Oracle has accused Google of stealing its code without permission. And according to Ellison, the blame for that falls squarely on Google's CEO.

"When you write a program for the Android phone, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything," the 68-year-old said. "And then at the very end, you press a button and say, 'Convert this to Android format.' We don't compete with Google. We don't do anything Google does. We just think they took our stuff, and that was wrong."

Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had similar feelings on Android, declaring it a "stolen product" in interviews with biographer Walter Isaacson. Jobs and Ellison were close, and in his interview with Rose, Ellison referred to Jobs as his "best friend for 25 years."

In an excerpt from the same interview revealed on Monday, Ellison suggested that Apple will not be as successful in the post-Jobs era. He told Rose that the world had already seen the company Apple without Jobs once, and it did not go well.

76 Comments

gatorguy 14 Years · 24708 comments

[quote name="Tallest Skil" url="/t/159022/oracle-ceo-slams-googles-larry-page-as-person-behind-evil-decisions#post_2379454"]Wouldn't he be a touch biased? [/quote] Ya think? He's got a pretty long history commenting about what he thinks of other people in the tech industry. One of my favorites was his comment that cloud services were like a roach motel( discussing SalesForce). You get in but you don't get out. LOL!

daveinpublic 13 Years · 633 comments

This guy was kind of a downer in this article.

philboogie 16 Years · 7669 comments

[quote name="Tallest Skil" url="/t/159022/oracle-ceo-slams-googles-larry-page-as-person-behind-evil-decisions#post_2379454"]Wouldn't he be a touch biased? [/quote] More than a touch, but he won't be the only one.

disturbia 12 Years · 506 comments

Suddenly, Larry E. has become my hero! But Larry P. is not evil .... he's just a moron running the most useless tech company in the history of humanity. P.S. Larry E., you are wrong though believing Apple would go down without SJ. Very VERY wrong!