The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion.

Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane.

If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it - a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all - you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source.

We have been doing things that are contrary; the things that people tell us won't work from the beginning. In fact, the only way to get ahead is to find errors in conventional wisdom.

When you find errors in conventional wisdom-when everyone says A and A is not true-you gain competitive advantage. Only a few times do you have to find errors in conventional wisdom to make a living.

I enjoy the competition and the process of learning as we compete. The whole thing is just fascinating. I don't know what I'll do when I retire. When I go sailing, I look around ... anyone want to race? I just love competing as opposed to just going out and watching the sunset.

I started NetSuite. NetSuite was my idea. I called up Evan Goldberg and said, 'We're going to do ERP on the Internet, software-as-a-service.' Six months later Marc Benioff, finding out what NetSuite was doing, and kind of copied it.