So what makes me happy? I was really happy to build this house. That's it; building things. The trouble with software is that it's very hard to show your aunt in Florida what you've done.

You have to take a broader view and realize this is an industry like any other - telecoms, Railroads; they went through consolidation. Why shouldn't the computer industry be any different? This shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody but it seemed to be, and a lot of people thought I was nuts when I said these things. And that's why they are alone as a consolidator.

If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we're toast. But if it is, we're golden.

When I do something, it is all about self-discovery. I want to learn and discover my own limits.

I have run engineering since day one at Oracle, and I still run engineering. I hold meetings every week with the database team, the middle ware team, the applications team. I run engineering and I will do that until the board throws me out of there.

We saw — we conducted the experiment. I mean, it’s been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now, we’re gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs.

If you do everything that everyone else does in business, you're going to lose. The only way to really be ahead, is to 'be different'.