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

[Anonymous Coward]

...........,,,,,,,,

There are some extra periods and commas I had laying around. If you need more, I'm sure others have extras too.

Re:Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[Migala77]

Mark Hurd will do a great job at Oracle good acquisition by Larry Ellison.

According to an article at TechCrunch, he didn't do too well at HP: "Word on the street is Hurd wasn’t let go for his affair or even for his embellishment of trivial expense reports. Instead the board kicked him out because his employee approval rating was absolutely atrocious."

Re:Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[Surt]

Wait, so was it a good hire because he was let go over allegations rather than convictions, or a bad hire because he was head of HP during a period in which they 'have been on the way down for some time now'?

Re:Larry Ellison Doesn't BS

[VolciMaster]

In that case they would be the first technical company to remember the very few simple maxima:

1. A manager delivers through his subordinates. Screw them once, twice, thrice and at the end the result is that you are no longer able to deliver. 2. If staff is considered a "resource" than the manager is doubly so.

To be honest, I find that difficult to believe in. If that is indeed the case in HP some deep drilling is on order. It should be possible to counteract global warming by pumping heat into the frozen depth of Hell.

You must have never worked at HP, then - the overall employee morale is extremely low (at least in the US, Romania, Spain, and UK, where I've directly interacted (and worked) before). A complete lack of focus on customer support for enterprise products, refusal to try to keep senior engineers and support staff, and the list goes on.

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.

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.

Re:Long Live Crony Capitalism

[Mongoose Disciple]

So if Mark Hurd is "well-connected", that would mean that he actually is more valuable as CEO to a company like Oracle, especially because his connections are probably especially relevant to Oracle's industry.

No kidding. You can't really sell Oracle, Peoplesoft, etc. on actual merit or return on investment, so connections are at a serious premium.

Re:At Oracle you get fired

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was only for failing to "COMMIT" your "TRANSACTION"?

Experience counts!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well at least Mark Hurd has demonstrated experience screwing people. With the way Oracle has been behaving of late (Java, OpenSolaris) this will probably be a great job asset....

I feel bad for the EX SUN employees

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurd drove all of the R&D and creativity out of HP. As an HPer we competed with SUN alot but I always thought they had some great tech just not the ability to make money off of it. Hurd will just cut\cut\cut until there is nothing left. Guess it's not really a surprise as my guess Larry is just interested in buiolding massive Oracle solution on his own high margin hardware and nothing else....

Thank god I survived the Hurd years at HP. I just hope we don't screw it up with another Hurd like CEO.

Well, yes, gotta hand it to Larry

[Moraelin]

Well, yes, you gotta hand it to Larry. Whether it's using his money to basically bully those criticizing a pal for his defense of overt sexual discrimination (see, eg, http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2006/06/28/oracles_ceo_cancels_115m_gift_to_harvard/), or rescuing a pal which was likely actually ditched for being an asshole all around and driving employee morale to new lows, it's up to Larry to don his superhero cape and come to the defense of pricks, assholes and bigots everywhere. Making the world safer for well-connected sociopaths and the ol' boys' club, one person at a time. You can practically imagine him flying away from a crime scene, wind blowing in his cape, with starry eyed housewives going, "Thank YOU Captain Asshole! Whatever would we have done without you?" ;)

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. :)

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

Doesn't Oracle know...

[StuartHankins]

you can't polish a Hurd?