That’s the version of events Benioff offered during a Q&A session that followed the speech he gave at the St. Regis hotel, following Oracle’s cancellation of his previously scheduled appearance at Oracle OpenWorld.

Benioff says he’s sorry for this but on Sunday he posted on Facebook that Ellison’s keynote address at the event Sunday night had set a “low bar” for the other speakers to follow. Benioff offered this explanation in response to a question. He also said he’s apologized in an email note to Ellison, but that it was also an example of the kind of hardball be learned at Ellison’s knee during his years at Oracle. See? It wasn’t complicated at all!

It also makes it sound like the explanation one might offer in the principal’s office for fighting in the cafeteria. Hear it in the audio below.

For its part, Oracle had no comment.

Benioff tweeted tonight that he’s been bounced from the speakers roster at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, and he’s blaming the decision directly on Ellison.

Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Sorry #oow11! Join me @ St. Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! The show must go on! Sorry Larry!

October 4, 2011 4:52 pm via Twitter for BlackBerry®ReplyRetweetFavorite

@Benioff

Marc Benioff

I just got a statement from Oracle’s Deborah Hellinger, who says the move was simply a change in schedule, and had more to do with the heavy attendance at the conference than anything else.

“Due to the overwhelming attendance at Oracle OpenWorld we had to make several session changes,” Hellinger wrote. “The Salesforce.com Executive Solution Session was moved to Thursday at 8:00am in the Novellus Theatre.”

Thursday is, notably, the last day of the conference — there are no other speaker sessions on the roster for that day, and this change to Thursday’s schedule hasn’t been made to the Oracle OpenWorld Web site. However, it has been updated: There’s no longer any mention of Benioff’s once-scheduled Wednesday keynote.

Benioff, who is a former Oracle employee, had been scheduled to speak at the Novellus Theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Wednesday at 10:30 am. He has since set up an alternate venue — a restaurant at San Francisco’s St. Regis Hotel.

Here’s one possible reason: Benioff’s recent Dreamforce conferences, held in San Francisco and elsewhere, have contained a lot of references to the “false cloud,” and have included Oracle in that description.

Also, it wasn’t for nothing that Oracle, which does a significant business in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, advertised heavily around the time of Salesforce’s recent Dreamforce conference. Salesforce, as we all know, does CRM in the cloud, and has a lot of momentum behind it of late. This could just be Larry Ellison’s way of expressing his unhappiness with Benioff.

Chances are there will be more of a backstory to this new round of Oracle mishegas in the morning. For now, here’s an excerpt of a recent Benioff speech in Boston, in a video shot by IDG’s Computerworld. The final slide shows an Oracle Exadata machine with its logo barely obscured. Makes you wonder why Oracle offered Benioff a speaking slot in the first place — and why Benioff accepted it.

Update: Well, here’s an interesting wrinkle. It seems that when CEOs speak at these conferences, often, but not always, they pay a fee for the privilege to do so. In this case, as Benioff has told Quentin Hardy at the New York Times, Benioff had paid Oracle $1 million for stage time at Oracle’s conference, and would have likely delivered some variation of the “false cloud” speech he’s been giving of late. Someone at Oracle may not vetted speakers carefully enough and gave Benioff a slot — he did have one last year. Ellison, I’m told, got wind of it, and being aware that Benioff has been slamming Oracle in his speeches lately, canceled the date.

Still, Benioff can declare victory — and he is doing just that. Taking a page from Ellison’s own playbook, he’s managed to pick a fight, and is scoring some publicity points from having drawn Ellison’s ire. As Benioff told the Times: “This is the best possible outcome … “It’s free publicity, and it is clear that Oracle is threatened by us.”

Also? He gets his money back.

Beyond that, details are slim. Dell offered no further specs and did not mention a launch date. But consensus seems to be that the device to which he was refering is the Looking Glass, which is believed to be faster than the Streak, though with the same weak 800×480 screen resolution.

[Image credit: Reuters]

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do,” Ellison said. “I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements….These people who are writing this crap are out there. They are insane. I mean it is the stupidest. Is it ‘Oh, I am going to access data on a server on the Internet.’ That is cloud computing?…Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”

In conversation with former Sun (JAVA) CEO Ed Zander at a Churchill Club event a little over a year later, Ellison expanded on those remarks, suggesting that if the cloud is anything, it’s a cloud of BS.

Cloud’s water vapor….Cloud computing is not only the future of computing, it is the present and the entire past of computing.

…Salesforce.com has been around for a decade. And so has NetSuite…and people are saying, “Well, that’s cloud computing.” Google is cloud computing. Everyone is cloud computing….Everything is in the cloud now….It’s this nonsense.

…But it’s not water vapor. All it is is a computer attached to a network. What are you talking about? I mean, what do you think Google runs on?…Water vapor? It’s databases and operating systems and memory and microprocessors and the Internet!

…And the VCs, I love the VCs. [They ask their start-ups] “Oh…is that cloud?” [And the start-ups go] “Oh! Oh! Microsoft Word! Change ‘Internet’ to ‘cloud’! Mass change. Give it back to these nitwits on Sand Hill Road.”

…What do you mean by “cloud computing”?…All the cloud is is computers on a network.

Our industry is so bizarre. They just change a term and they think they’ve invented technology….You can’t just come up with a [slogan] like “Let’s call that ‘cloud.” [But] it sure beats innovation.”

Below, the full video. Ellison’s rant begins around the 45:54 mark.

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.”

– Excerpt from The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison

If you’re going to claim in an advertisement that Transaction Processing Council benchmarks show that a hybrid Sun-Oracle server runs faster than a competing product from IBM, it’s probably wise to make sure you have the TPC benchmarks to back up your claim.

Not if you’re Oracle (ORCL), though. On Aug. 27, the company ran an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal and the Economist claiming that “Sun + Oracle is Faster” compared to a TPC-benchmarked IBM (IBM) system. “Oracle and Sun together are hard to match,” Oracle said in the ad. “Just ask IBM. Its fastest server now runs an impressive 6 million TPC-C transactions, but on October 14 at Oracle OpenWorld, we’ll reveal the benchmark numbers that prove that even IBM DB2 running on IBM’s fastest hardware can’t match the speed and performance of Oracle Database on Sun systems.”

A boastful claim. Thing is, at the time it was made, the Sun (JAVA)-Oracle system hadn’t yet been audited by the TPC. In other words, it was based on an unsubstantiated benchmark. And that didn’t fly with the TPC, which fined Oracle $10,000 and ordered the software maker to pull the ad. “Oracle’s claim that it is faster than IBM using a TPC-C benchmark result it claimed would be announced on October 14, 2009 was not supported because Oracle did not have a TPC result at the time of publication,” the TPC explained in an official statement. “The TPC requires that claims based on TPC benchmarks must be demonstrable using publicly available data from official TPC benchmark results.”

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.”

– Excerpt from The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison

If you’re going to claim in an advertisement that Transaction Processing Council benchmarks show that a hybrid Sun-Oracle server runs faster than a competing product from IBM, it’s probably wise to make sure you have the TPC benchmarks to back up your claim.

Not if you’re Oracle (ORCL), though. On Aug. 27, the company ran an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal and the Economist claiming that “Sun + Oracle is Faster” compared to a TPC-benchmarked IBM (IBM) system. “Oracle and Sun together are hard to match,” Oracle said in the ad. “Just ask IBM. Its fastest server now runs an impressive 6 million TPC-C transactions, but on October 14 at Oracle OpenWorld, we’ll reveal the benchmark numbers that prove that even IBM DB2 running on IBM’s fastest hardware can’t match the speed and performance of Oracle Database on Sun systems.”

A boastful claim. Thing is, at the time it was made, the Sun (JAVA)-Oracle system hadn’t yet been audited by the TPC. In other words, it was based on an unsubstantiated benchmark. And that didn’t fly with the TPC, which fined Oracle $10,000 and ordered the software maker to pull the ad. “Oracle’s claim that it is faster than IBM using a TPC-C benchmark result it claimed would be announced on October 14, 2009 was not supported because Oracle did not have a TPC result at the time of publication,” the TPC explained in an official statement. “The TPC requires that claims based on TPC benchmarks must be demonstrable using publicly available data from official TPC benchmark results.”

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has a sense of humor nearly as large as his astonishing $84.6 million pay package. Asked for his views on cloud computing at Oracle OpenWorld, a smirking Ellison reduced the concept to a thin sheen of windshield condensation.

“The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do,” Ellison said. “I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. … Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop? We’ll make cloud computing announcements. I’m not going to fight this thing. But I don’t understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads.”

Really.

Well, for on thing, Oracle (ORCL) might announce a cloud computing-based data backup solution. Call it Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module or something. Offer it on, say, Amazon’s (AMZN) Simple Storage Service. The company might also partner with Intel (INTC) to speed enterprise adoption of cloud computing. That is, if it hasn’t done that already …