"It turns out Oracle's strong preference is to do everything hostile-ly," Ellison said, in an apparent reference to the company's takeover of PeopleSoft.

McNealy also joked that Sun cannot match Oracle's large conference room, where the presentation was held, because hardware has lower margins than software.

Oracle recently announced its endorsement of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system as its preferred development and deployment platform for 64-bit computing. Oracle also endorsed Sun's recently announced Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers.