What can a sales person say to somebody to get them to buy a product that they already use every day if they don't like it? Nothing.

It's fascinating as we continue to innovate and lead the way in both the application space and the database space. In the very beginning, people said you couldn't make relational databases fast enough to be commercially viable. I thought we could, and we were the first to do it. But we took tremendous abuse until IBM said, "Oh yeah, this stuff is good."

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.

I believe people have to follow their dreams-I did.

I hate the PC, with a passion.

Most companies don't want their data co-mingled with other customers. Small companies will tolerate it.

I know some people are offended by the fact that I'm spending a lot of money trying to win the America's Cup. I could have given all that money to charity.