What does the Hurd mentality bring to Oracle? It's going to be a long time before Oracle can take on the likes of HP and IBM for the IT-market crown. But before he retires, you can bet Larry Ellison's last billion bucks that he most surely wants to become the dominant systems supplier in the data center. This goal is not as unattainable as it might seem, especially now …
As an HP employee, I extend my sympathies to everyone formerly of Sun who will now find their salaries "rebalanced", i.e. cut by 10%, and to everyone in R&D who will find interesting ideas stamped on.
Hurd was so proud of Teradata he started something similar at HP -neoview- does anyone have any data on whether it made money? Because right now what is hot is not very-large-scale-database data warehousing (which, to be fair, oracle might be able to play in), it's very low cost massive scale data storage and analysis: MapReduce and the runtimes for it.
Let's hope this time round Hurd doesn't just try the same idea for the third time, but takes a slightly different stance on it. Of course, Oracle suing Google isn't going to help, what with Google's patents on MapReduce and all.
... all Oracle and ex-SUN employees. Look at Hurd's history at HP, acquire then cut, acquire then cut, ad infinitum. Then "re-evaluate" all pay, this means cut all pay except his own. While he is about it he will stop all pay increases (including cost-of-living increments), except his own and introduce a pay-for-perfomance (one-off bonus) culture with targets that are tantalizingly just out of reach. He will then look at other employee benefits and cut them as well (this includes pensions, medical cover, dental cover, travelling expenses, car allowances, meal allowances, overtime...) except his own. He will then lecture you all about morality and ethical business practices, while getting a leg over a minion and fiddling his expenses, overseeing the questionable procurement of government contracts and indulging in a bit of "pretexting".
I would advise anyone at Oracle with a viable exit route to get out now.
Thus speaks the voice of experience.
cuts and restraints ... for everyone but themselves.
honest and ethical practices ... for everyone but themselves.
bonusses withheld ... for everyone but themselves.
Sounds very familiar there, it's something every drone at Sun Microsystems has experienced for half a decade by now. In relation to the company's size, Ponytail's 14M+ payout on ditching Sun significantly exceeded Hurd's golden parachute.
Watch ORCL stockprice head higher.
(got coat a while back)
HP gets rid of Mark due to his "misstated expense reports." Today - there's so much technology to avoid that and a smart company like HP should be able to figure it out too. As a freelancer, I used for example ABUKAI Expenses (http://abukai.com/expenses) on my Blackberry. It's super simple - you take a photo of each receipt, submit and it auto-generates the entire expense report for me - and without any misstatements or other issues for sure. Funny enough now HP sues Oracle... Let's see what happens next.
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