An Attention-Grabbing Idea 💾
Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, didn’t really get much attention outside the tech press—that is, until he tried pitching the world on Networked Computers.
Happy Friday! Here’s another edition of Lesser Tedium, a version of Tedium that reminds you of the moonshots of already rich people. Want more content like this? Subscribe over this way.
In a normal world, you wouldn’t know Larry Ellison’s name. He was a rich guy who worked in a part of the technology world, relational databases, that the average person doesn’t really need to care about.
But Ellison, already immensely rich and powerful, took a stab at something in the mid-’90s, and while it didn’t work out, it made him significantly more famous among normal people overnight.
That idea he experimented with was the Networked Computer, which Ellison formulated in a meeting at the White House with a number of other Silicon Valley executives. Ellison had suggested pushing the sale of sub-$500 computers. The idea didn’t win over Clinton and his fellow execs, but it gained momentum within Oracle, especially as the internet became more prominent.
But Ellison knew how to get attention, and at an event in Europe in 1995, Ellison took direct aim at the complexity of traditional computers.
“A PC is a ridiculous device; the idea is so complicated and expensive,” Ellison was quoted as saying at the time. “What the world really wants is to plug into a wall to get electronic power and plug in to get data.”
This was an interesting time to make this pitch—as Windows 95, which did not work this way, had just come out—and overnight, it gave Ellison the mainstream profile that had eluded him for decades.
Teaming with companies like Sun Microsystems (a later Oracle acquisition) and Acorn, Oracle had hoped to make network-connected devices that didn’t require information to exist outside the network. (Interestingly, the technology—down to the Java programming language at the center of the device model—was reconstituted work for the interactive television revolution that didn’t come.)
At times, it was believed that Larry Ellison would try to push the Network Computer concept through Apple—Steve Jobs was his good friend, after all—but ultimately, just like interactive TV, the Network Computer went nowhere.
But the idea eventually caught on under a different name: The Chromebook. Ellison never succeeded at building Network Computers himself, but Google’s device—which became famous just as Oracle was suing Google over the Java programming language—was very much a spiritual successor.
Hey, at least it made Larry Ellison famous.
» Wanna learn more? Check out our 2018 piece on Ellison, “The Oracle That Spoke Too Soon.”