In an impressive clash of giant-sized egos, Oracle has cancelled a planned keynote at its Oracle World conference in San Francisco tomorrow by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. AllThingsD notes that Benioff in other recent public appearances has been bashing Oracle over its cloud computing offering - which he calls a "false cloud."
Undeterred, Salesforce is now staging a speech by Benioff tomorrow morning at the St. Regis Hotel, directly across the street from the Moscone Center, where Oracle is holding its giant conference.
"Oracle just cancelled my keynote tomorrow. But the show must go on!" Benioff said in a statement. "Sorry Larry" - a reference to Larry Ellison - "the cloud can't be stopped."
Benioff told the New York Times he thinks the event was cancelled because Ellison gave a poorly received kick-off keynote at the conference on Sunday night. "Larry was not prepared," he told the Times. "The keynote was panned in the blogs and in the on Twittersphere. There was concern that we would put on a better presentation. You don’t have somebody over to your house to tell better jokes than you.”
The Times notes that Oracle said in a statement that it didn't cancel the event, but instead decided to move the session from Wednesday to Thursday. “Due to the overwhelming attendance at Oracle OpenWorld we had to make several session changes," Oracle said.
But Benioff said he couldn't be there on Thursday morning, and the Times notes that the conference features a Wednesday night concert - Sting and Tom Petty - that would likely run into the wee hours and reduce the attendance at a Thursday morning keynote.
