Lee Majors cannot be happy about this. Just a generation (or two?) ago, the tastefully named gentleman was the Six Million Dollar Man -- better, stronger, faster, etc. And nearly worthless compared to a guy who basically got bounced from his last job.
Mark Hurd didn't sustain severe injuries in a test-flight crash and come back as a bionic man (as Majors's Steve Austin character did in the '70s, in case you didn't know), but he did suffer a pretty hard fall after leaving the CEO post at HP under a cloud of bizarre circumstances and sexual-harassment accusations.
He must have hit rubber at the bottom, though, because he sure did bounce back quickly. Hurd is back in a top post with another top company now. Oracle, in a Labor Day announcement, said that it has hired Hurd as co-president, at the expense of Charles Phillips, who went overboard off the Good Ship Ellison.
Yes, Hurd will report to Cap'n Larry himself, and he'll have a friend with him on the quarterdeck --the other co-president, Safra Catz. Given the nature of the allegations against Hurd at HP, we're not sure what kind of experience he has with bizarre three-ways -- but he's gotten himself into one now. Well, maybe.
For its part, HP isn't so sure that Hurd can legally board the Battleship Oracle, and it's putting its lawyers to work by suing the former HP CEO. Why is everybody fighting over this guy, who, just a month ago, was awash in a mild scandal?
Well, for one thing, he's a well-respected technology executive largely credited with turning around HP after the unfortunate reign of Carly Fiorina. And then there's this from the Wall Street Journal:
"Oracle investors appear a bit overexcited about the hiring of Mark Hurd as their company's new co-president, adding about $6 billion to the company's market capitalization in early Tuesday trading."
And this, in the very next paragraph of the WSJ story:
"HP stock similarly added about $6 billion to its market capitalization on the day in 2005 that Mr. Hurd was hired."
Good grief! This guy is the $6 billion man! No wonder Oracle wants him and HP doesn't want him to go to a company that's increasingly becoming a rival. This dude is -- quite literally -- money. Is he worth it? Well, that's for Admiral Ellison to find out. He probably was worth it at HP, though, and he might just be the CEO-in-waiting at Oracle. So, sorry, Lee Majors. Hurd has gone from being the fall guy to being the $6 billion man (again). That's inflation, we suppose.
Is Mark Hurd worth $6 billion? How will he get along at Oracle? Send your thoughts to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/07/2010 at 1:23 PM1 comments
Maybe this prediction will be as wrong as all the dire warnings about Hurricane Earl were. We can hope, right?
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/07/2010 at 1:23 PM0 comments
What? There's a Southern Virginia now? We thought that outside of the D.C. area, Virginia was just kind of a myth... Only kidding. We at RCPU love Virginia. It's gorgeous. And it's going to be home to a new Microsoft datacenter (although how it beat out your editor's native state of Texas, we'll never know).
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/02/2010 at 1:23 PM0 comments
Let's not kid ourselves here. It's blazing hot outside by New England standards; your editor is working on a cover story for Redmond magazine on the 25th anniversary of Windows; Labor Day weekend is fast approaching, and Hurricane Earl might very well blow us right off the East Coast this weekend.
Today is not the day for bloviating, philosophizing or entertaining here at RCPU. It's a day to, quite literally, "mail it in," which is what we're doing. Absent any news of significant interest for commentary, we're leading with the fairly mundane but not unimportant story of Microsoft publishing a fix (not really a patch...but something) for a DLL flaw that's been running amok lately.
And...that's pretty much it. No witticisms, not pop-culture references, no flashpoint arguments. All you'll get here today is a wish for a nice long weekend and some impatience for the post-summer news machine to crank up again soon. Happy Labor Day, everybody. Stay safe out there.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/02/2010 at 1:23 PM0 comments
Hey, another Labor Day reading suggestion! Yes, you can pass the long hours indoors as Hurricane Earl, which must be from Texas and might have grown up in a trailer park, splatters the East Coast. Howard Cohen's piece on the history of the channel will provide you with...well, minutes of reading pleasure -- but it is worth a read.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/01/2010 at 1:23 PM0 comments
We always love, of course, the content on RCPmag.com, but we really love it right now because news in August -- outside of VMworld -- was slower than an offensive tackle dragging in from a day at training camp. So, if you need some late-summer reading material, check out Jeff Schwartz's story on why Dynamics CRM is popular among partners.
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/01/2010 at 1:23 PM0 comments
It's show time in San Francisco, where VMware is holding its annual VMworld conference and possibly stranding East Coast-based attendees through Labor Day weekend. There's a hurricane on the way, you know, and it might just soak the Eastern Seaboard this weekend.
With hurricanes, of course, come clouds -- or more appropriately, a big, swirling storm cloud with an eye in the center. Well, this week, all eyes were on VMware's cloud plans. (Oh, that was a terrible turn of phrase. But give us a break -- it's 95 degrees here in Greater Boston today, and we're not as air conditioning-equipped as some of you folks in other parts of the country are.)
At VMworld, the virtualization leader is making its hybrid pitch, more or less. vCloud Director, the company's new offering, is all about helping customers set up "internal clouds" (or Internet-based services that the customer itself hosts on-premises and delivers to users), as well as letting businesses know which tasks to run in an internal cloud and which to outsource completely to VMware or one of its hosting partners.
It sounds a bit like Microsoft's plans for the Windows Azure Platform Appliance, which will serve as sort of a set-top box of cloud applications. VMware is even beefing up its cloud efforts with a couple of acquisitions, specifically of Integrien and TriCipher.
What vCloud Director and the Azure appliance show is that the cloud that's moving into IT and the partner channel will be more of a steady farmer's rain than a hurricane. Hybrid, internal-external setups will rule for some time to come, and after making a considerable splash about the fully-outsourced cloud, big vendors are now settling into promoting the hybrid model.
That's pretty much what's going on in San Francisco this week. By the way, if you're at the show, or if you just really want to know what's going on there day by day, Rick Vanover has been blogging on-site for Virtualization Review. And, if you do get stuck in San Francisco this weekend, enjoy. We'll be swimming around the streets of our East Coast cities...maybe.
Have a thought about virtualization, VMware or Microsoft? Drop it to [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 09/01/2010 at 1:23 PM0 comments
He's apparently healthy and not broke, so why is Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and Pacific Northwest sports magnate, suing pretty much the whole technology industry (except Microsoft) for patent infringement? This is as much of a head-scratcher as we've seen lately. Is this just a money grab? Is it an attempt to squeeze something tangible out of the failed Interval Research project, which Allen is using to launch the legal action? Is Allen just bored waiting for football season to start? We have all questions and no answers. And we suspect that Allen's legal action will get about as far in the courts as the Seahawks did in the NFC West last season. (In other words, since Allen hasn't sued the St. Louis Rams, as far as we know, we don't really see him beating anybody here.)
Posted by Lee Pender on 08/30/2010 at 1:23 PM5 comments