Mark Hurd is dead Long-time Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd died this morning. He was 62. Oracle chairman and personal friend Larry Ellison broke the news with an open letter on Hurd's personal webpage. "It is with a profound sense of sadness and loss that I tell everyone here at Oracle that Mark Hurd passed away early this morning. Mark was my close …
By gutting R&D at HP he improved the immediate profits at the expense of the future of the company. From being a leader it became a "me too" company. It is difficult to think of any field in which it is still a leader let alone THE leader.
Gutting R&D in any technical firm is a guarantee of eventual death.
We can be cold. Wife and two daughters folk, could well be reading this.
Have you ever played that game where you pick a name out a hat and then have to describe them as quickly as possible?
"Was in the Beatles and then got shot"
John Lennon's entire life and work dismissed in the heat of battle between frankly worthless players.
I would love for my epitaph to be, "Was in the Beatles and then got shot", but at best I'm only going to achieve half of that.
Hurd really didn't make many friends during his time at HP. He was completely cost-driven, didn't realise that R&D was never going to produce ROI on a quarter by quarter basis so ripped the heart out of it. He also asked everyone in HP to take a 10% pay cut which you might never get back and wouldn't necessarily save your job. Not impressed.
Some people will not survive to get a day of retirement. Others will live longer than they ever expected. That's just a fact of life.
Being the big boss is different than being an employee. Private jets, lots of vacation, setting your own schedule. He might have had quite a nice life while working, rather than just muddling through until retirement.
If you're lucky enough to get a job you can enjoy doing while earning money, great! Hang onto it. If not, while its' tempting to say your personal life and enjoyment is more important, you'll find very little enjoyment when you haven't got enough money for the necessities. And even if you can squeeze by though your early years, you'll find yourself not accumulating the reserves you'll need, or at least find very useful to have, later.
My over riding memory of him was an email whilst at HP asking us to take a % pay cut to ‘help the company’ with him gleefully saying “i am taking a 15% pay cut” on his base pay of $1mill but conveniently leaving out the part where the previous year he made $45mil in bonus packages meaning his true pay cut was 0.25% whilst the proposed % pay cut to me was in fact that full %.
Needless to say everyone said no in the UK but believe it was a forced pay cut in US.
Hurd was the perfect example of how CEO's and the BOD's have hijacked corporations today resulting in capitalism's failure. In reality he created no value at HP during his reign of terror. Among others he bought EDS and Palm. Both were disasters. The intent was to boost revenue while slashing away at the workforce, R & D and anything of value which could be eliminated to cut expenses. No new value was ever created. Customers fled as the workforce supporting them was outsourced offshore or was simply eliminated. The short term boost in revenue along with increased profit from cost cutting earned Hurd millions in bonuses. He he walked with at least a $100 million during his short tenure. He was the master of manipulation of how to use a corporation to increase his own wealth. A true Wall Street darling. A prime example of how the 1% have been stealing all the wealth in the last 30 years while the rest of the workforce saw little if any increase in pay to this day. A truly sad story.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
