Oracle CEO not alone

Electronic News, May 27, 1996 by Cynthia Bournellis

Redwood City, Calif.--The recent fuss surrounding computer appliances can easily be attributed to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who proved last week at an industry event at the posh Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco that he is no longer alone in his obsession to build the $500 network computer (NC).

And while Mr. Ellison has garnered support from 70 major companies in the hardware, software, telecommunications and networking industries, including Apple Computer, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Netscape Communications, he is still fighting off much derision from industry colleagues. So much so that his newly-formed subsidiary, Network Computer, Inc. (NCI), whose charter is to license software for the NC, is already showing signs of a brain drain.

Andrew Laursen, VP of NCI, resigned last week to take a senior position at Unwired Planet, a start-up in Redwood City, Calif. Unwired is working on licensing wireless technology to Internet service providers, said one source, who added that Mr. Laursen left after being passed over for a promotion to head up the subsidiary.

"Andrew's leaving is a fairly significant loss from a technical perspective, because he helped work on the NC architecture and was instrumental in cementing relationships with NC partners such as Acorn Computer," said an ex-Oracle employee, who noted that Mr. Laursen's leaving opens up a hole in the ranks. "NCI has a small development team, and losing your chief technologist just as the product is being born is a major problem. They haven't even got the bugs out yet."

Oracle last week named Jerry Baker, senior VP of the company's Product & Platform Technologies Group, to serve as president of NCI.

NCI isn't the only division that has suffered a loss. Six months ago, Farzad Dibachi, formerly the senior VP of Oracle's New Media Group, left the company to start Diba, Inc., a Silicon Valley company designing a software reference platform for single-purpose information appliances. While at Oracle, Mr. Dibachi contracted his brother Farid Dibachi to work on the NC reference platform. Farid has since joined Diba as the company's chief technical officer and chairman.