Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of Oracle Corp, collects Samurai body armor. Dave Duffield, founder and chairman of PeopleSoft Inc, adopts children. He has six of them, all less than age 10.
Ellison, 58, flies fighter jets and races yachts. Duffield, 62, saves unwanted house pets through Maddie's Fund, a US$240 million foundation he set up in memory of a beloved miniature schnauzer. About the only thing the two have in common is software -- Ellison started Oracle in 1977 to sell database programs. Duffield, a former engineer at International Business Machines Corp, founded Pleasanton, California-based PeopleSoft in 1987 to process payrolls.
"There couldn't be two people more different than Dave Duffield and Larry Ellison," said Kate Mitchell, who worked for Ellison from 1992 to 1994.
She got to know Duffield after that when she was president of Tesseract Corp, which makes software that's similar to PeopleSoft's.
On June 6, Ellison announced a US$5.1 billion hostile bid for PeopleSoft. Duffield and the rest of the board rejected the offer on June 12, saying the US$16-a-share price was too low and that the purchase wouldn't pass antitrust scrutiny. PeopleSoft sued a day later, alleging that Oracle was interfering with customer contracts and engaging in unfair trade practices. Analysts say the culture clash will make it hard for Ellison to extract what he wants from PeopleSoft if the bid succeeds.
`Survival of the fittest'
"You can't imagine two more different cultures," said Erin Kinikin, an analyst at Forrester Research in Santa Clara, California. "At PeopleSoft, no one person is greater than the whole. At Oracle it's survival of the fittest."
PeopleSoft is the third company that Duffield has started. He left IBM to found a company that built a payroll system for the University of Rochester. Then he jumped into human-resources software with his second company, Integral Systems.
Sitting on a beach in Hawaii during a retreat for Integral salespeople, Duffield pieced together a plan to write payroll programs for server computers and the PCs that hooked up to them.
The Integral board wouldn't go for it, Duffield said in a December 2000 interview. So he and engineering buddy Ken Morris left to start PeopleSoft. He gave up the CEO post in 1999.
Mitchell and others who know Duffield say the prospect of a takeover by Oracle must be torture. He funded PeopleSoft out of his pocket for two years in its early days and ran it according to such tenets as "integrity" and "having fun." As CEO, Duffield coddled workers. He gave everyone a laptop and twice invited the whole company to spend the weekend at his house on Lake Tahoe, Duffield said in the 2000 interview. He once heard a band playing on the PeopleSoft campus. It sounded terrible, so he bought all the musicians new instruments.
Ellison pushes his employees not just to win, but to kill their competitors, Mitchell said. "There are few people as brutal about beating the competition," she said.
Should Ellison succeed in buying PeopleSoft, he says he'll keep only the best software developers. That would mean cutting the bulk of PeopleSoft's 8,180 workers loose at a time when the unemployment rate for April reached 8.3 percent in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley. The US jobless rate was 6.1 percent last month.
"Dave Duffield cherishes everybody who works for him," said Richard Avanzino, president of Maddie's Fund, which Duffield started in 1999 with US$200 million of his own money. "PeopleSoft is his baby."
Duffield rarely talks to the press, and PeopleSoft spokesman Steve Swasey said he wouldn't be available to comment.
There's a small chance that Duffield may break his silence and try to rally shareholders to vote against accepting the Oracle bid, said Bruce Richardson, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston, who follows PeopleSoft.
Duffield's appeal would be similar to that of Walter Hewlett, the son of Hewlett-Packard Co co-founder William Hewlett, Richardson said. Walter traversed the country exhorting shareholders to block CEO Carly Fiorina's bid to acquire Compaq Computer Corp. He failed, and Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq for US$18.9 billion in May last year.
"Duffield can't be comfortable knowing that the heart of his company could be ripped out," Richardson said.
Acrimony aside, Ellison's bid is boosting Duffield's net worth. Duffield is PeopleSoft's second-largest shareholder with 9 percent of the stock, according to filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The value of his stake has risen 12 percent to US$489 million from US$436 million since Ellison made his offer. PeopleSoft shares closed at US$16.92 on Friday, rising from US$15.11 the day before Ellison's bid.
PeopleSoft employees have had Oracle scares before. Many cringed in 1999, when Duffield and the board picked Craig Conway as the new CEO. Conway had spent eight years as a marketer at Oracle, before leaving in 1993 to become CEO at TGV Software Inc, a maker of computer networking software.
Conway has some Ellison-like attributes. He built a 56m2 gym in the barn next to his house in Woodside, south of San Francisco. He was in the judo club in college and soaked up Japanese culture like Ellison, who's building a Japanese-style compound not far from Conway in the same town.
Contempt
When Conway joined PeopleSoft, the comparisons ended. In the 2000 interview, Duffield said he was relieved because Conway shared PeopleSoft's contempt for Oracle.
"He had a similar disdain for Larry Ellison," Duffield said at the time.
Conway lashed out the day Ellison made his offer. He said the bid was designed to derail PeopleSoft's own acquisition plans. On June 2, PeopleSoft said it had agreed to buy rival J.D. Edwards & Co for US$1.7 billion. The purchase would make PeopleSoft bigger than Oracle in applications software, which businesses use to track sales, process payrolls and organize employee information.
Conway said Oracle's bid is ill-intentioned: "It's like me asking if I could buy your dog so I can go out back and shoot it," he said.
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