The Weekly Round-Up: 13.06.03

In the quiet, sleepy and oh-so-very-occasionally dull world of enterprise computing you can always rely on Larry Ellison to liven things up.

No sooner had PeopleSoft announced it was taking over rival JD Edwards in a $1.7bn deal that got analysts and investors chattering excitedly than Oracle chief Ellison waded in with a $5.1bn hostile bid for PeopleSoft. As they say, there's always a bigger fish.

It seems like takeovers in the enterprise applications software market are like the proverbial buses, you hang around for ages then two come along at once.

The JD Edwards-PeopleSoft deal would have propelled the new company ahead of Oracle and into second place behind SAP in the market, with Microsoft lurking in the wings.

Ellison claimed PeopleSoft CEO and former lieutenant at Oracle Craig Conway approached him last year about "combining" their application business but were unable to agree on a structure.

Not according to PeopleSoft, which insisted the merger of the two companies was never discussed and instead claimed that what was talked about was Oracle selling its application business and exiting the market altogether.

In a statement Conway claims the offer amounts to "atrociously bad behaviour from a company with a history of atrociously bad behaviour".

Back in the Oracle camp on Tuesday and we find Larry accusing the PeopleSoft board of being "negative". PeopleSoft then cancelled its plans to appear in court on the same day to seek a temporary restraining order against Oracle.

Whatever the outcome you can't help but admire, or at the very least enjoy, the latest show of bravado from the Oracle chief.

After all this is a man who fought a four-year long battle against San Francisco air officials over the right to land his $40m jet plane at night, who once compared himself to "an actor in a soap opera who plays himself" and once stood up in front of a hall of recent Yale graduates and told them they were a bunch of losers for finishing their degrees. (Alright that last one turned out to be a hoax, but it sounds like exactly the kind of the thing he might have done.)

You can find links to some of his most memorable outbursts at the bottom of this Round-up.

Whatever unravels in the coming weeks in the Oracle-JD Edwards-PeopleSoft circus you can't help but wonder that with Microsoft lurking on the outskirts of the enterprise software arena ready to pick up the pieces, Larry might just end up giving his old adversary Bill Gates a helping hand.

And in the soap opera of Larry's life, that might prove to be the most entertaining storyline yet...

Two reports out this week have declared that former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers was well aware of the financial jiggery-pokery (as rugby commentator Bill McLaren might have described it) used to inflate company accounts but neither could find evidence linking him directly to the $9bn fraud, with investigators describing Ebbers as "spectacularly unsuccessful" at managing his acquisitions.

However, both reports - one by WorldCom's bankruptcy examiner and the other by the WorldCom board - do suggest that Ebbers may have breached insider trading rules in his sale of three million shares in September 2000 for $70m.

The investigations uncovered astounding ineptitude on the part of the WorldCom board. One investigator stated: "The board repeatedly approved acquisitions and other actions with little or no information and almost no inquiry."

The $6bn acquisition of Intermedia, the deal which brought WorldCom to its knees, was approved by the board via a teleconference lasting a paltry 35 minutes. No documents were provided to the board to back up or explain the management's decision.

The deeply religious Ebbers famously protested his innocence in front of God when he broke his silence in church.

Ebbers told the congregation: "I just want you to know you aren't going to church with a crook. This has been a strange week at best... I don't know what the situation is with all that has been reported. No one will find me to have knowingly committed fraud."

Not much danger of that seeing as he took the Fifth Amendment shortly afterwards to avoid giving evidence to Capitol Hill...

eBay is a weird and wonderful place. Take this advert for a car roof-rack for bikes. The seller starts his sales spiel with a detailed and straightforward description of the item before this happens:

"I used the roof bars once but never got around to using the cycle holders. You know how it is... 'If I buy you a bike, will you come riding with me darling?' 'Of course I will - buy me the most expensive bike in the store'... 'Oh, might as well get the most expensive roof bars as well'... 'And the most expensive bike holders too'

"Did she ever come riding with me? What do you think? So hey, we got divorced, and life was crap for a while, but it got better.

"Oh, by the way, don't be fooled by the happy couple printed on the outside of the box. They're only models (he's gay and she hates herself - cries herself to sleep).

"Oh well - buy these infernal cycle holders off me and try and sustain your relationship. Me? Well I never liked cycling anyway.

He adds: "(She got the house you know...)"

Maybe he should have bought a tandem instead...

And finally this week, silicon.com has launched a special report on spam.

Spam email is a problem which affects us all, personally and professionally. The volume of spam whizzing across the internet continues to increase at an alarming rate - we now find ourselves in a position in which spam makes up more than half of all email traffic worldwide.

For its own part, the Round-Up finds itself in agreement with silicon.com columnist Martin Brampton who wrote this week: "It is part of the charm of email that at any moment something surprising may pop up. More often than not, it is a disappointment, like the messages that proclaimed love while carrying a virus. But life is like that, and mostly we still hope that something better will turn up."

You can read the full article here.

With your inbox acting as a meeting place for the wired community it's not such a surprise in this commercially driven world that a vast number of emails want to sell you something. Many have learned to deal with the email problem, but now it's spilling over into other communication channels, in particular adult nature.

Over the next two months we'll keep you up to date with all the news, views and opinions which will further the debate on this modern menace. We're also running a number of surveys gauging your views and gathering your experiences of unsolicited mail. Thank you to all the Round-Up readers who completed last week's quick survey. If you've another 20 seconds to spare, why not answer the latest survey.

Until next week, here are a few links to some of Larry Ellison's finest moments...

Ellison: Give me control of your IT budgets

"I'm like an actor in a soap opera who plays himself" - Ellison

Ellison: "If our bodies looked like our computers we'd all be dead"

"It could be worse. I could be Tom Cruise" - Ellison

Ellison tells LinuxWorld: "The suits are coming!"