

A Double Standard at H.P. - spinchange
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/business/09nocera.html?_r=1

======
hristov
I am surprised that the nytimes would run such an obvious hatchet job of an
article. I am not saying that they are always honest and truthful and fair,
but at least they used to be smart and skilful enough to make their hatchet
jobs not that obvious.

~~~
luckydude
I'm a little confused. So on the new CEO's watch while at SAP, SAP stole
Oracle's IP, for which Oracle is suing SAP for $2 billion. The same board that
fired Hurd for some non-sexual hanky panky is ok with hiring a thief? Or the
boss of thieves?

How is this a hatchet job?

Don't get me wrong, I have no love for Oracle, at best I'm neutral on them.
I'd never want to work there. But at least it is a fairly well run business.

HP, on the other hand, seems to have one of the worst boards in the history of
the valley. I just don't see what they are doing as making any sort of sense
at all. Pick a thief over someone like VJ who has long time insider cred, well
liked by the rank and file, well respected in and out of the company, nah,
let's pass on that, we need a crook. Seriously, how can anyone justify choices
like this?

Sorry for another rant on this topic, but HP used to be a hugely admired
company, it would be nice if it returned to that, but instead it seems to be
determined to do one wrong thing after another. Starts at the top and the top
is the board.

~~~
hristov
I am not going to give you a detailed answer, because I do not have time to
defend multi-millionaires, they can defend themselves. So I will just give you
one sentence of the article:

"Over the long term, though, it hoped that TomorrowNow would act as a kind of
stalking horse, allowing SAP to persuade its new customers to abandon Oracle
entirely and switch to SAP’s expensive suite of software applications."

If you don't think that was written by an Oracle shill, then you really need
to improve your reading comprehension or are an Oracle shill yourself.

~~~
luckydude
As best I can tell, you are reading that article in such a way so as to
believe it was heavily slanted in favor of Oracle and you cherry picked one
sentence you believe makes your point.

Shrug. I don't really care if the article was pro Oracle or pro HP or pro you.
Wasn't my point, and still isn't.

The point I raised was that hiring a CEO that was involved in that mess shows
really poor judgement on the part of the HP board, they had internal
candidates that were far better choices IMO, and they do this. Another bad
decision.

My point was all about the HP board.

And in rereading the article, I suspect that the author shares my point of
view. It's not that it is a pro-Oracle point of view, it's a con-HP board
point of view. I don't care about Oracle, I grudgingly respect that they wring
every dime of profit they can out of whatever they do but I've had friends
work there and from what I can tell it's a pretty crummy place to work. I do
care about HP. I still have friends who work there and it used to be a
fantastic place to work. I was hoping that getting rid of Hurd would be a step
towards returning to the HP way and couldn't be more disappointed in what the
HP board did.

------
gamble
Can anyone explain what TomorrowNow was doing that got them sued?

~~~
jacobolus
[http://andrewscg.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/oracle-sues-sap-
an...](http://andrewscg.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/oracle-sues-sap-and-
tomorrownow-for-corporate-theft/)

------
_delirium
> “The board chose Léo because he was the best available athlete.”

Athlete? Spell-check gone awry, or does "athlete" have some sort of
metaphorical usage in corporate management?

~~~
smanek
I've heard it used by strategy consultants to mean someone who is well rounded
and performs well in many roles/disciplines, instead of someone with a narrow
focus/expertise.

------
zalew
offtopic: why H.P. instead of HP?

