The dueling, the growling and the insults between Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison this week at Oracle OpenWorld stopped having any relevance late yesterday afternoon.

Steve Jobs is dead. Every rivalry in the tech world now seems trivial.

Benioff looked up to Jobs. Ellison called Jobs his best friend. Today, Benioff and Ellison chided each other. Tonight I wonder if they are looking inside themselves now that this most innovative man is with us no more.

Here’s what both Ellison and Jobs have said about a man who both looked up to as the tech leader of our time:

Ellison in an interview by the San Jose Mercury News last June:

Steve Jobs is my best friend, and I love him dearly, and heis one of the most remarkable people on this planet. You watch him create Apple, then in one of the worst human-resources mistakes in the history of Silicon Valley — the only thing worse was when the French fired Napoleon — they fire Steve Jobs and Apple almost completely disintegrates. Then he comes back and he saves a company that was on life support.

I never see this quoted about Steve, but they once asked Andy Grove who he most admired in the PC industry, and he said, “One guy: Steve Jobs. He invented the PC industry.”

You know, we live in a very egalitarian world. We don’t like heroes. And Steve is one of these heroic guys whose accomplishments are of such epic proportions, and it gnaws away at our egalitarian sense of the world.

Benioff got his first job at Apple. He relied on Jobs for advice. Benioff attributed the

Photo credit: Kien Tran - http://about.me/kientran

success of Salesfoce.com to Jobs. The story is well-documented. Here’s what Benioff said on Twitter after learning about Jobs death:

“I’m so sad. Its such a terrible loss. For the whole world. I’ll never forget him.He did so much for me. yfrog.com/obj1uaj“

Services Angle

Who are the most innovative people in the technology world? What do they use to create? By far, at least in my experience, the most brilliant innovators use Apple technology. They carry Apple iPhones and iPads. They work on MacBook Pros. It’s the elegance of the technology. It’s inspiring. How lucky we are. And what good fortune for Ellison and Benioff to have known so personally one of the greatest innovators of our time.