Can’t the board of directors at Oracle tell Larry Ellison to keep his stupid mouth shut?
In a letter to the New York Times, Ellison said, “The HP board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.”
I agree that firing Steve Jobs from Apple was one of the worst corporate decisions in history, and that John Sculley as CEO was a joke, but why is Ellison commenting on the situation at HP? Stick to your own concerns, Larry. Mark Hurd isn’t a founder of HP, and from what I can tell he has absolutely no involvement with product. Hurd is a money guy, who wants sales targets met, and costs cut. In other words, he’s a corporate hack. Firing Hurd is not like firing Jobs, it’s like firing John Sculley.
Hewlett-Packard is a company that badly needs different leadership, despite doing well recently, at least as far as Wall Street is concerned. For corporate computing, the only story that HP has to tell right now is the XP-series of storage area network systems, but it isn’t their story, it belongs to HDS — Hitachi Data Systems. HP needs to get back to being an engineering company. Hurd has zero conception of what a SAN is, or even what USB is, and that’s why he needs to go, regardless of anything related to money mismanagement and sexual impropriety.