Former HP CEO Selected As Oracle Co-President

theodp writes "Late on Monday, Oracle announced that ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd has joined the company as a co-president and a director. Hurd resigned from HP a month ago, after an investigation by the board into a personal relationship with a contractor turned up questionable expenses. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a personal friend of Hurd, criticized HP's board at the time, saying it was 'the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs.' 'Mark did a brilliant job at HP and I expect he'll do even better at Oracle,' Ellison said in a statement Monday. 'There is no executive in the IT world with more relevant experience than Mark.' Stepping down to make room for Hurd was Charles E. Phillips Jr., who had some personal relationship issues of his own."

Comments

Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[MogNuts]

Hey you gotta give it to the man. Larry Ellison puts his money where his mouth is (when saying HP made the worst decision ever in firing him).

Re:Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[helix2301]

Ellison has no problem saying how he feels he is at a point in his career he says what he wants and does what he wants. Mark Hurd will do a great job at Oracle good acquisition by Larry Ellison.

Re:Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[msobkow]

Yeah, he really put his money where his mouth is this time. Snapping up an experienced CEO and creating a new position for him just shows how much he is impressed by the guy.

The fallout over at HP is well-deserved. You don't let someone go because of allegations -- you let them go because of convictions. Letting them go because of allegations is playing politics, not running a business.

Personally I've thought HP/Compaq have been on the way down for some time now. While they used to build solid hardware, we've had no end of reliability problems with this past year's models. It's gotten so bad that we're actively seeking other hardware vendors.

Re:Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[Anonymous Coward]

"Doing well" is relative. He fired people and cut pay, so the company is crippled. Now the people who knew how the business and apps run either work for someone else, or don't care. The stock went up 40% under him, however. So "doing well" depends on your point of view.

He knew how to run a company in the short term, which is what Oracle is best at. Minor improvements to a largely crappy product with expensive upgrade costs. Great business model, unless you want to retain customers. That's the Hurd way, that's the Ellison way. Neither is very good at long term planning. Ellison has gotten lucky so far, in the same way Bill Gates got lucky - he's now embedded in so many places it would be almost impossible to stop the gravy train. The product can suck donkey balls and have poor management tools, but it's stuck and will keep getting upgraded until it works.

Same as Bill Gates, Larry has a bunch of customers using the product that don't like it very much. Or they don't know that better options exist. And Hurd's employees felt the same way - either they hate the company (low morale) or they don't know anything different. A lot of coworkers are keeping their jobs solely because people are not hiring unemployed people. They know that the first people to go are probably the scrubs, so if you retained your position you're probably worth hiring. At this point, people would rather suffer than have an employment gap in their history, so we spend the extra hours to make up for the loss of intellectual capital and manpower.

It makes employee productivity look great, and makes the expenses of keeping the firees look unnecessary, but we're not delivering what we could deliver. And I think the HP board was starting to see that. Even a product company needs smart people to come up with ways to market and sell, and all companies need R&D, so you have to value your employees as assets. A Starbucks location with expensive rent could look like an expense to be cut, but if it keeps your profits up it's probably better to keep it. Same with expensive employees. Mark looks at numbers.

Re:Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[Anonymous Coward]

The fallout over at HP is well-deserved. You don't let someone go because of allegations -- you let them go because of convictions. Letting them go because of allegations is playing politics, not running a business.

Uh, that's what HP did.

Hurd's sexual harassment was alleged, yes.

Hurd stealing from the company in the form of expensing stuff for his mistress under something else, however, isn't in question.

Most people seem to forget that part, and only focusing on the harassment. To me this proves he must have a really strong stupid streak. When you earn millions of dollars, why on earth do you risk misusing 20.000$ of company money on private entertainment of a woman you like. You earn enough to pay for a few hotel and restaurant bills yourself, for crying..

Re:Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[Mongoose Disciple]

Frankly, I'm kind of amazed that Microsoft hasn't been able to make stronger inroads with SQL Server in more of the Oracle shops.

Yeah, you can't run SQL Server on anything but Windows, but honestly, 90% of the big businesses I have personally seen using Oracle are running it on Windows anyway.

Microsoft should seem like a big, stable, sueable-in-case-of-catastrophe kind of company to all the same kinds of managers who would be scared to death of adopting an Open Source solution even in the cases in which they're clearly superior across the board. (Otherwise I'd also be wondering why PostGre isn't eating more of Oracle's lunch, too.)

SQL Server has ridiculously better tools included (it's telling that to work on an Oracle database you generally use someone else's tool and never the ones Oracle provides because they're expensive, terrible, or both -- in some cases you're even better off using an Open Source tool a decade old) and is a lot less expensive.

I don't get it. Oracle DBAs managing to advocate for their own job security?

Re:Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[Mongoose Disciple]

I'd argue two things:

Yes, Oracle is robust, but it's a level of robustness 99% of business applications don't actually need. Basically, Oracle is perenially successful at the equivalent of selling soccer moms who want to take their kids to practice and haul groceries home formula one race cars (complete with pit crew) instead of used minivans.

Performance-wise, at some point and in most cases, you can close the gap by throwing more/faster hardware at the problem -- and usually this is still ridiculously cheaper than the Oracle solution.

I'm torn on this one.......

[scosco62]

Is this a case of a "good old boys" club, where one of the insiders takes care of his buddy -or- He believe that Hurd is really that good.......sounds like the latter... This contractor thing is idiotic, both that a guy in such a position would get himself into such a ridiculous position - and that the board would make a big deal about it. I suspect that if they really wanted to keep him .... the whole thing would have just "gone away".... so there's some subtext here, somewhere.

Long Live Crony Capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't seem to login.
Looks like if you are well connected you can get away with anything and land up plum jobs.
Yes I know Mark Hurd did not break any law and he only cheated on his expense reports (That too I am sure was a mistake by his assistants).
We as a society seem to be setting fine examples of acceptable behavior.

Re:Long Live Crony Capitalism

[Overzeetop]

As always - it's not what you know, it's who you know.

Hmm.

[Anonymous Coward]

That will go down fantastically well with Oracle's female employees I suspect.

The price of bigamy

[zoomshorts]

Multiple mother-in-laws.

Gotta love it

[Anonymous Coward]

He gets a cushy job in a month while good people I used to work with are still unemployed over a year later and the rest of us still stupid enough to work for HP are pulling more work load with the original (temporary - yeah right) pay cuts over us. I can barely afford to keep my children fed driving a 10+ year vehicle with over 150k miles on it so HP has enough money to buy up large companies. "Gotta tighten our belts!" - You can't afford to pay the employees what they are worth - but you can spend billions buying up companies. Remember this HP. because once the economy starts in an upswing the people you have left will leave. I would not want to own any piece of this company

Re:So good in which way?

[gtall]

Well, databases are exactly a hot innovation area any longer. Oracle has been squeezing profits out by hook and crook for years. Maybe Hurd is just the guy to carry on that fine tradition. He knows how to run a tight ship as long as the ship is not going anywhere in particular.

Re:Well, yes, gotta hand it to Larry

[mister_playboy]

Now please explain why, again assuming two candidates seem equally capable of doing the job, you would _ever_ pick a female over a male.

Boobs. :)