Clash of the tech billionaires

San Francisco: They can't help it, they're just following their instincts and their logic. But they are probably driving each other nuts.

Ever more of technology's richest and most successful leaders are moving into businesses that put them in direct conflict with other Masters of the Domain. The stakes are commensurately higher, and tell us a lot about where the industry is going.

Computer networking hardware company Cisco and relational database software company Oracle, for example, were about as far apart as you could be in tech. Billionaires John Morgridge of Cisco and Oracle's Larry Ellison might have seen each other with indifference, or perhaps regard. But in these "cloud computing" days of accessing software remotely over Internet-hooked data centers, Cisco and Oracle are becoming direct competitors. Boom. Morgridge and Ellison's companies play on each other's fortunes.

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Image: Steve Jobs vs. Michael Dell