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

[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.

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.

Re:Long Live Crony Capitalism

[Overzeetop]

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