Attached is the ad Oracle ran in the lower right corner of today's Wall Street Journal. An early edition posted to the newspaper's website illustrates how Ellison likes to operate. Check out the highlighted bit — Oracle never bothered to fill in the data to support its certain conclusion. The attitude: "Definitely say we're way 'faster' on hardware from Sun, which we now own, than on IBM, which makes a competing database; we'll find some numbers later to prove it."

All tech moguls, to some extent, play this marketing game, but Ellison has historically been an especially egregious example; his brazenness, in fact, helps explain why Oracle, through a series of mergers, has come to utterly dominate the market for the most complex types of large corporate software.

An example: Ellison in the late 1980s commissioned an ad to tout a hugely complex clustering feature for Oracle database software — and did so before one line of code had been written to support that feature. This according to Mike Wilson's biography of Ellison:

About 1987 word got out that the Ingres database would soon have a sexy new function: It would be able to do distributed queries... Ellison told [Oracle ad man Rick] Bennett to prepare an advertisement announcing Oracle's distributed capability. Then he assigned an engineer to whip up a distribtued feature so the company would actually have something to sell when the ad appeared. Ten days later Bennett's advertisement hit the trade press: "Oracle Announced SQL*Star," it said. "The First Distribtued Relational DBMS..."

"The fact of the matter was Oracle didn't have anything," said George Schussel, the trade show promoter who had followed Oracle from the beginning. "But that was the way they worked. Everything was marketing, everything was image. You simply announced the product and then figured out later how to deal with it from a technological point of view."

Another time, Wilson writes, Oracle took out an ad implying, outlandishly, it had ported a competing database to the PC from mainframes — "IBM SQL/DS AND DB2 DBMS NOW ON PC," read the ad headline. Ellison "exploded" when an engineer challenged the ad, Oracle vet Kirk Bradley told Wilson:

"He said, 'All companies do this. It's standard stuff. You don't know anything about business.'"

It's somehow comforting to know that, while hot companies like Twitter, Google and Netscape may come and go, some longtime CEOs basically haven't changed for decades. Larry Ellison will always be a shameless truth-bender. Just like some of his closest friends.

UPDATE: One commenter supposes, quite plausibly, "They're going to announce the results at OpenWorld on Oct 14 and we're all supposed to tune in then to find out what XX equals." So maybe Oracle is doing the same fill-in-the-blanks thing it's always done, just in a very open and shameless way. Transparency. People do change!

UPDATE 2: Oracle has been fined over this ad, since Oracle did not possess any TPC benchmarks to back up the ads claim. Oracle was, again, hoping the facts would fit the claim, when said facts came into existence, which at the time of this ad they had not.

Unlike the complex game of chess, mastering Jeopardy with a computer would seem to be a simple matter of automating Wikipedia searches. But there's more to it than that:

One of the toughest challenges for Watson's programmers is predicting confidence in answers-in other words, programming the computer to know when to buzz. Jennings, during his record-breaking Jeopardy! run, would sometimes buzz early, then seem to think for a few seconds before answering.

"I can't validate one way or another exactly what Ken Jennnigs was doing, but I can say the behavior you described is one that suggests that I'm extremely confident that I know all the answers," Ferucci said.

Okay then, but if IBM was searching for an even more impressive feat, how about programming its computer to host Jeopardy rather than play it? Trebek's robotic delivery makes him easily replaced by a speech synthesizer. Heck, we bet Watson's blinking lights would be more watchable.

Cook is paid more than anyone else at Apple, and he's the only executive allowed an outside board seat (Cook is a director at Nike). More importantly, he's humble enough not to push for a CEO job that can never be his as long as Jobs is in the saddle.

True, Cook is an operations expert, not a product genius like Jobs, but he could surround himself with Apple executives like Scott Forstall and Jonathan Ive to make up for that lack. Only one wild card: Mark Papermaster, the IBM chip executive whose recruitment by Apple has embroiled the companies in a lawsuit. if the hire goes through, Papermaster will report to Jobs, not Cook.

IBM is suing Papermaster and Apple over the terms of his noncompete agreement. Apple and IBM hardly compete, which makes IBM's lawsuit a bit puzzling. California law is unfriendly, in general, to noncompete agreements; if anything comes of the lawsuit, it will likely be some kind of settlement. Here's why I think IBM is suing Apple and Papermaster: It just wants to get some idea of what Apple's up to.

We know how this ends — with tech-company shareholders footing the bill. Cisco wrote off $900 million in bad debt in 2001. It will surely claim to have learned its lessons since then. But as others rush in to help customers acquire their wares, some will surely get burnt. As will investors, who may think they're buying shares in a tech company, only to discover they've put money into a bank.

This is IBM's stock-in-trade, right out of Sales 101a: Pretend to know something the buyer doesn't. You use the customer's own fears against them, to overcome rational objections.

So, they drag the same old scare tactics — Sweet Jesus, they're gaining on you! Don't just stand there, do something! — out of the marketing closet, every few years. Here, it's a roomful of affirmative graffiti ('THINK' being notably absent), plus a charmingly recursive slogan, 'The decision to decide' ([www.squareamerica.com]). More recently, silly execs building 'Innovation Rooms' were chastised with, 'Stop Talking. Start Doing'.

It's the kind of insight you'd expect to hear from luminaries like Yoda or Pat Morita, so I'm guessing it works like those cheap Jedi mind-tricks. Unless you're a Toydarian, of course.

More likely: IBM was the only likely buyer for Platform Solutions, which may have been running into financial trouble. One former contractor for the startup tells Valleywag that his work for Platform Solutions went unpaid for months before his contact there dropped out of sight altogether in January.

The Economist tidily sums up billg's career this week, now that Microsoft's Rain Man (see video) has walked away from the company after 33 years. I've whittled the piece down to its talking points.

When Bill Gates helped to found Microsoft there was a company rule that no employees should work for a boss who wrote worse computer code than they did. Just five years later, Mr Gates hired a business manager, Steve Ballmer, who had cut his teeth at Procter & Gamble, which sells soap.

In becoming the world’s richest man, Mr Gates’s unswerving self-belief has repeatedly been punctuated by that sort of pragmatism. To let it all go is to acknowledge that his best work at Microsoft is behind him. It is to accept that the innovator’s curse is to be transitory.

Mr Gates’s vision has come to seem so obvious that it is hard to imagine the world any other way. Yet, early on, he grasped two things that were far from obvious at the time:

• Computing could be a high-volume, low-margin business. Until Microsoft came along, the big money was in maintaining a select family of very grand mainframes. Profit would come from selling a lot of them cheaply, not servicing a few at a great price.
• Making hardware and writing software could be stronger as separate businesses. When mighty IBM unwittingly granted Microsoft the right to sell its PC operating system to other hardware firms, it did not see that it was creating legions of rivals for itself. Gates did.

Mr Gates’s invention was as a businessman. His genius was to understand what he needed and work out how to obtain it, however long it took. In an industry in which visionaries are often sniffy about anyone else’s ideas, the readiness to go elsewhere proved a devastating advantage.

Gates had the good fortune to be perfectly suited for his time—but he is less well-equipped for the collaborative and fragmented era of Internet computing. Some great industrialists, like Henry Ford, stick around even as the world moves on and their powers fail. Mr Gates, pragmatic to the end, is leaving at the top.

The plan is for companies that buy into Allied Security to buy up unused patents, issue themselves nonexclusive licenses for a song and then sell the patents. While it's not clear if Allied Security is a nonprofit, former IBM veep Brian Hinman who heads up the organization asserts it's not a profit-making venture. IBM, of course, has done much to refashion itself as a promoter and producer of open-source software — something anathema to Microsoft's culture.

The same can't be said of Intellectual Ventures, which was founded by former Microsofties Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, Intel's Peter Detkin, and Gregory Gorder of Seattle law firm Perkins Coie, which counts Microsoft as a top client. Myhrvold has been buying up patents left and right, and while his company has yet to sue anyone, he hasn't ruled it out. Microsoft executives have traditionally aped Bill Gates hard-line rhetoric when it comes to intellectual property, and there's little reason to believe Myhrvold and company are any different. While Google is also an investor in the fund (along with Apple and eBay), the Mountain View company must be worried enough about the fund's plans and ties to have helped create a potential competitor.

In other words, if Intellectual Ventures continued to aggregate patents in a competitive vacuum, it could become just as if not more dangerous a monopoly than Microsoft in the company's heyday by commanding premium royalties or denying access to patents entirely in order to hobble products and competitors. It's yet to be seen if Intellectual Ventures will carry water for the Redmond software giant in court, and for now, Allied Security is collection of legal documents and yet an actual owner of patents, but this could shape up to be one of the most boringly important battles in the coming years.

Google is a very strong competitor, and so people will enjoy watching whether they can be challenged. The world will be better off if they are challenged effectively, and I think there's only one company left in terms of the depth and breadth and staying power that you need (to) really give them a big challenge.

Google-baiting aside, did Gates bringing up WordPerfect make anyone else feel really, really old?(Photo by AP/Stephen Brashear)

"You could say I was too lazy to calculate, so I invented the computer." The whole documentary is a lot of fun to watch — famed British thespian David Jacobi even makes an appearance in a dramatization as the legendary Alan Turing. Zuse and Turing were on opposite sides of World War II, with Zuse's machine mostly used to crunch numbers for the Nazis' rocket projects. Helping to keep track of the undesirables intended for slaughter in the concentration camps? That was IBM's job.