Flashy CEO loves to hate Gates

LARRY ELLISON is the Microsoft founder's nemesis and polar opposite, with the kind of bank account necessary for grand gestures.

In an industry full of those who would be Bill Gates, Oracle founder Larry Ellison has long headed the list.

"All the men in this industry feel inadequate because they're not Bill Gates," pundit Esther Dyson told Vanity Fair magazine in 1997. "Most people have kind of resigned themselves to this fact. Larry, obviously, hasn't."

Ellison's combativeness came squarely to light yesterday when Oracle confirmed it had hired a private detective agency to investigate Microsoft and its ties to lobbying groups.

His refusal to lose may eventually pay off. After Microsoft's stock plummeted in April, Ellison was only $2 billion away from eclipsing Gates as the world's richest man. The gap has since widened, with Gates at around $60 billion and Ellison at $49 billion.

Even if he wins the personal-wealth sweepstakes, however, Ellison is unlikely to match the global impact of Gates, who has become a household name. Outside of the computer industry, Ellison's name evokes little recognition.

Handsome, flamboyant, outspoken and egotistical, Ellison, 55, has taunted Gates and Microsoft since the early 1990s, when the Redmond company began making inroads in database software.

The rivalry accelerated in 1995, when Ellison heralded a new desktop computing device called the "network computer," or NC, partly in an attempt to undercut acceptance of the wildly popular Windows 95. Lacking a hard disk and projected to cost about a quarter of a PC, the $500 NC was intended to supplant Microsoft Windows by hooking directly into the Internet. When PC prices dropped dramatically, the NC's appeal diminished and the device never caught on.

Oracle's performance, on the other hand, boomed with acceptance of the Internet. Web sites, particularly ones dealing heavily with data management, quickly made Oracle the Web standard. Microsoft's SQL Server and BackOffice products aim at a similar market but are not considered as powerful as Oracle's offerings.

While Ellison's business acumen may rival Gates', the two could not be more different personally. Ellison, abandoned as a child and raised in Chicago by a great-aunt and great-uncle, is a bon vivant and ladies' man whose liaisons are tracked in Silicon Valley's gossip grapevine.

Ellison also is a licensed pilot who once threatened to strafe Gates' Medina estate in a Russian MiG fighter jet and an experienced yachtsman.

Ellison may rival Gates in one other department: competitiveness. "Our job is to hurt Microsoft" and become No. 1, he said at a press conference yesterday at the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters.