Meg Whitman has decided to pull the plug on the mammoth task of attempting to resurrect HP. This news will have immense implications on Oracle’s coming years. This is not just because of the reason that Whitman was not able to reveal the mess was actually an HP that was made unmanageable functionally by an earlier CEO of the company, Mark Hurd, who is now the co-CEO of Oracle. The company mentioned later is skidding on the leadership front for some time. But the track record of Hurd at HP, the end-game of the same is now being discussed in the event of the break-up of the once much needed tech leader offers a nice roadmap for the purpose of how Oracle is in the same position as HP in a few years.
This news further offers some evidence for the small time rule of Léo Apotheker at the top position of HP. The person was given the responsibility with the task that Meg failed to perform – that to find and develop a synergistic sales, product development and marketing strategy for HP. Paradoxically, when one considers the news of this week when Léo Apotheker attempted to implement the initial step of the break-up of HP, he was rudely discarded by a board that included none other than Ms. Whitman. Meg has accepted his failure in executing the task for which Léo was hired for executing later. On another level, stock market is responding in a positive manner to the break-up, which is pretty amusing. If the past is observed, then this case will finally lead to break-up of Oracle too. Everything is taking place in the same manner.
If one observes the current team in HP which comprises Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, one comes to know that both of them are not from technology background, rather they are numbers people. Both of them do not have a track record for a leadership that is visionary or for that matter, they are not aware of product development or any traits that Oracle will required to return in the game of innovation where it has been losing of late – mainly because of the reason Oracle has been pushing the engineered systems bought from Sun by Larry in the market. These were the systems handed over to Mark Hurd. And the numbers reveal that Oracle has been following this strategy in spite of continuous failure to lead company towards growth and profitability.
By far, Mark Hurd is one of the more dangerous of the two persons discussed here for the company. Hurd is a guy who belong who hardware and numbers and was infamous for cutting costs at HP and disabling the mechanism of synergy between the PCs of HP and its printers, services and servers divisions. The person’s track record at HP while looked well when one viewed in quarterly terms in which Wall Street views the public companies, it was evident from the analysis that when Apotheker arrived on board that there was no mechanism to conduct things in a synergy.
