Taking my cue from Mike Fauscette (who basically said in his recent post that you can't consider yourself an enteprise-software/IT blogger and not comment on this story), here's my two cents on Leo Apotheker being appointed CEO at HP (HPQ). And more important, on Larry Ellison's opinion of Leo Apotheker being appointed CEO at HP.
I believe:
"It's the HP board that Larry is s*&#ting on, not Leo."
(Or do you spell 's*&#ting' with two t's?)
So off I went to hp.com to see who was on the board. The first thing I found strange was that HP has a page, right beside its "Board of Directors" page, called "Former CEO's."
Really!
Yep, there's Carly. And there's Mark. Really! Maybe Larry's right!
I am guessing this HP web page started with the idea of some PR guy to give tribute to Hewlett, Packard and Lew Platt. But guys, you could have titled it "In Memoriam" and left off Carly and Mark. I don't think John Young would mind.
But on to the subject at hand, to a Valleyboy like Larry the problem at HP is clearly that HP's board does not include a lot of Valleyboys. Of course, there is Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder and inventor of Mosaic but for the most part the board is made up of real businesspeople as opposed to those trapped in the 101 bubble. Maybe there's some bad blood between Andreessen and Larry. Andreessen's also on eBay's and Facebook's boards and was into the "cloud" more than 10 years ago, back when Larry was still saying that the client/server software architecture would never take off.
Other than Andreessen, there's John Joyce formerly of IBM Global Services via PWC, a guy from Verizon (VZ), a woman from Nokia (NOK) and another who was a TV network executive, a guy who spent his career at a chemicals/specialty-materials manufacturer that is now a subsidiary of Dow, the chairman/CEO of McKesson (MCK), a guy who is also a director of General Mills (GIS), the former chairman of Wachovia (ouch!), and the guy who appears to have invented the legal maintenance organization (LMO), a sort of HMO of lawyers.
In other words, it looks like the HP board is made up of HP customers instead of Silicon Valley geeks and the financial types that suck up to Silicon Valley geeks hoping for insider information. And it looks like this group of proven business managers brought in a proven business manager.
So in the end, as is true of most Silicon Valley navel gazing, this is much ado about nothing. But it still could be a problem for Apotheker; time will tell. In Palo Alto, no one wants to work for a company that doesn't play the game. And the valleywags are already at work making this appear to be the worst corporate idea since bringing John Scully into Apple (APPL).
That's apparently where former Oracle (ORCL) President Ray Lane as HP Chairman comes in. (Unlike HP's "Former CEO" page, there's not enough room on Oracle's web site for a "Former Presidents" page.) As Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, he's the prototypical Valleyboy although prior to 1992 he also worked at boring places like BoozAllen, IBM, and closing the loop back to HP... EDS.
Lane's job was to make sure people like Larry didn't s#*t all over Leo. Oh well, "C'est la vie," as Apotheker would probably say.
Solution: Pack up "the garage" and move the whole HP shebang to Salt Lake City or Albuquerque. What would it hurt? According to Barbara Boxer, Carly already laid off all the HP employees in California.
-- Dennis Byron
(no financial interest in companies mentioned)
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