Note to Larry Ellison: Shut Up!

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.

Bosstown radio

Over the past four years I’ve tracked some of the Boston radio scene events, including:

  • Classical music station WCRB switching frequencies
  • Steve LeVeille let go by WBZ, then brought back by listener demand
  • End of WBCN as on-air station
  • Departure of Barnes Newberry from WUMB
  • WGBH buying WCRB

Deaths:

  • WBZ talk show host Paul Sullivan
  • WBZ legend Larry Glick
  • WGBH Jazz Decades host Ray Smith

The Internet has had a huge effect on the radio industry, of course. Something I didn’t like for a long time was the Web player that the CBS network was using. I don’t know when CBS hooked up with Radio.com to update the player, but I think the results are excellent, despite a couple of pop-ups that have caused Firefox to crash.

The CBS station WODS — Oldies 103 in Boston — is still the best place to catch The Beatle Years and Beatle Brunch. You’ll find them on the WODS podcast page.