Insiders say Oracle's best hope in the cloud wars with Amazon is a team led with a 'culture of fear,' and executives are leaving

In May 2017, the Oracle executive Clay Magouyrk was presenting at a livestreamed all-hands meeting for the database giant's nascent cloud unit when he ran into a problem with his laptop. The attendees who spoke with Insider said that while they each remembered a slightly different version of Magouyrk's wording, the gist of his frustrated aside was that the laptop must've been built by "tiny Asian hands."

The day after the meeting, the executive Don Johnson — who at the time was Magouyrk's boss and the overall leader of Oracle's cloud business — apologized in an email reviewed by Insider for "not stepping in" during what he characterized as "inappropriate commentary."

"We at Sparta pride ourselves on being progressive, unfiltered, and bucking the trend of typical corporate America," Johnson wrote in a copy of the email reviewed by Insider. Sparta was, at the time, the codename for Johnson's unit, meant to evoke the imagery of a small-but-mighty team bent on overtaking Amazon Web Services, the dominant cloud platform.

"The comments made yesterday do not reflect my own views on how we should be leading our organization and will not be exhibited by my management team going forward," Johnson wrote. He also pledged to bring on executive coaches for his team.

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