Oracle Hires Mark Hurd As Co-President

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/technology/07oracle.html?_r=1&hp

by gamble • 16 years ago

77 34 16 years ago

Another1• 16 years ago

when Oracle bought Sun many analysts speculated that Oracle will sell Sun Hardware Division, of course even more analysts speculated the obvious which is, Oracle is taking a dive into the hardware business

When I read this all i was thinking was, Mark Hurd seems like a hardware guy, Oracle really wants to get this hardware business right!

kiujygtyujik2• 16 years ago

Hurd is the guy who managed to single handedly destroy the remains of HP's engineering ability. I give it about a week before the last Sun guy leaves.

Of course this could be a cunning plan to avoid the costs of redundancy payments - hire Hurd and watch all your best engineers resign for free.

brown9-2• 16 years ago

Hurd is the guy who managed to single handedly destroy the remains of HP's engineering ability

I thought Carly Fiorina was blamed for this? How many people can single-handedly destroy something?

Let's be realistic, CEO's aren't able to get much done without the approval of the board of directors, who are elected by the company's shareholders. There are very few "single-handedly"s in business. You can't blame just the CEO, as there are people above him/her. Blame the board, blame the shareholders who didn't/don't value "HP's engineering ability".

seldo• 16 years ago

At HP, Hurd was famous for ruthlessly cutting jobs. If I were a former Sun employee, I would be very scared of this guy.

gamble• 16 years ago

Hurd's only real achievement at HP was finishing Fiorina's work and applying the coup de grace to the HP Way. HPers loathe him. They'd have been dancing in the street when he left, if they didn't know that the board was so happy with his performance that his successor was guaranteed to carry on in the same style.

Of course, if there are Oracle employees who have a problem working for people with Hurd's attitude, they haven't been paying attention.

kujawa• 16 years ago

I worked for Snapfish (division of HP) for about six months last year. It was quite disappointing. This isn't a company that's ever going to innovate again.

I grew up loving HP calculators, and detest anything that doesn't run on RPN. I have an HP-15c app on my iPhone (notibly, not the one done by HP, which is inferior.)

Carly and then Turd killed any sort of innovation in this company. They're purest evil, and I can see why Oracle would like to hire this sort of executive.

flatulent12• 16 years ago

It is a bit funny seeing one Oracle exec who had an affair (Charles E. Phillips Jr) getting replaced by another. Someone could base a movie on them.

It's good to see Mr Hurd back at work so soon. He seems a good match and well qualified. Besides seeing how Oracle does under him, it'll be interesting to see what influence he has on decisions affecting the industry in general.

In particular, some wonder how much Android will be affected by the JAVA case against Google. Others wonder about the future of other open-source projects such as VirtualBox (development appears to be continuing)

If they need another exec with a colorful past, there's always former Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas. He was accused of putting drugs in others' drinks; an airline pilot complained of pot smoke so thick that a gas mask was needed.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/06/06/he...

Steve Jobs used LSD when he was younger and turned out pretty well. Sun had other that did the same. I heard one former Sun exec in a PBS interview talking about that experimental period, trying to expand the mind. Basically he said drugs failed at that, and the expanding experience came later... the internet

There's a little bit of related history at this link that mentions Suns' fifth employee:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-grim/read-the-never-befor...

brisance• 16 years ago

I know this is the internet and all, but it would be prudent not to cast aspersions about executives having an "affair" when the fact was that Hurd left for other reasons.

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

Uh,

Hurd left because of unethical behavior which many would interpret as evidence he was having an affair.

HP didn't have overwhelming evidence of an affair (and an act isn't necessarily grounds for termination) but the world already a preponderance of evidence. I don't think Mark Hurd is going to be starting any civil cases on the subject any time soon.

flatulent12• 16 years ago

"the company's investigation of the claim also revealed Hurd's attempts to conceal payments he made to her" (quote from another article at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/07/... )

Beyond things that a company would approve of, just what were these payments for? (...something beyond payments for sex, or payments not to talk about having had sex?)

Note that payments "to her" is different than saying payments "for meals" mentioned elsewhere. (obviously those would go to the restaurant, not her)

If it would make anyone feel better, there are affairs that are non sexual.

The WSJ had this on the amount: "One person familiar with the matter said the questionable expense reports totaled no more than around $20,000."

A bit much for dinner? Do HP stockholders have a right to know what that was spent on?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870330970457541...

some1else• 16 years ago

So.. If under his watch HP made a lot of money with service parts, and substantially reduced R&D spending, he may be a great fit for Oracle. In the sense that they will spend as little as they can on improving Solaris, and just try to make it necessary for the enterprises to integrate with the rest of Oracle portfolio? :-) If I recall correctly, that's the market potential that the recent memo was referring to.

ojbyrne• 16 years ago

Those kinds of things only work once. I think every IT manager out there knows Solaris is dead, and will be pushing to migrate to open-source alternatives. And every other product that Sun brought to Oracle is also suspect.

I just recently quit working at an IT managerish job, and I hope the one thing I left them with is "never, ever buy an HP printer."

jonursenbach• 16 years ago

Since Oracle is a direct competitor to HP, I wonder if HP (or even the SEC) are going to be investigating the hire for conflicts of interest regarding trade secrets just like they went crazy when engineers left Google for Apple.

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

"H.P. found no evidence of sexual harassment, but said Mr. Hurd had tried to conceal a personal relationship with Ms. Fisher by removing her name from his expenses for meals. "

Interesting. He's a multimillionaire CEO and couldn't be bothered to just pay for the dinners out of his own pocket, but expensed them to the corporate card instead? It must be good to be da king. Until you're not...

wmf2• 16 years ago

That's normal behavior for HP executives. The company also paid for them to make personal trips in HP's jets.

amirmc• 16 years ago

I've heard there are sometimes insurance reasons for that. i.e the senior execs can only fly on private flights.

lionhearted• 16 years ago

> Interesting. He's a multimillionaire CEO and couldn't be bothered to just pay for the dinners out of his own pocket, but expensed them to the corporate card instead? It must be good to be da king. Until you're not...

Maybe I can shed some light - this isn't a morality judgment either way, but perhaps it will explain the reasoning of people involved.

Every competent executive team or board that authorizes compensation pays attention to a person's "fully loaded cost" - that includes everything from their pay to their benefits to their expenses to the taxes they pay on the person. They do math on that number.

Typically, if an important team member wants to shift compensation from one area (salary) to a lower tax area (expense account, retirement account, benefits, whatever), the board will authorize that. They factor it into his fully loaded costs, there's just different taxes and accounting on it.

This doesn't get into rightness/wrongness, just people's decisionmaking. Companies know roughly what people spend on their expense accounts and have policies for it. Some companies make it only for "real" expenses, whereas other companies will let people accept lower salary but expense more benefits.

This isn't just for executives, by the way - companies that offer free food on-site tend to do the same kind of math, for instance. 401k investment plan matching, same kind of math again. Actually, moving $10k from salary to benefits might lower fully loaded costs, due to the way the taxes and accounting works. This doesn't get into rightness/wrongness, just the practical aspects of it.

Mrdev4• 16 years ago

I doubt Phillips will have a problem finding another job.

treblig• 16 years ago

When was the last time a "Co-President" worked well?

Serious question, I'm just having trouble thinking of one.

wmf2• 16 years ago

Oracle has been running with two presidents for a while now, so presumably it's working.

Larry and Sergey are co-presidents of Google.

Oracle Hires Mark Hurd As Co-President

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