eWEEK Readers: Hurd Instinct Threatens HP

Oracle seized former HP chief executive, and appointed him as a co-president – mainly to strike at HP, according to a poll of eWEEK UK readers.

Oracle hired Hurd on a nearly $1 million salary just one month after he left HP, when the board queried his expenses (and his personal relationships).  The appointment created a stir, especially as HP’s recent acquisition of Sun has put it into competition with HP, and Oracle boss Larry Ellison had previously laid into the HP board for criticising Hurd.

We Hurd it on the grapevine

We wanted to know what was Oracle’s biggest reason for hiring Hurd, and our readers came down pretty firmly on the side of corporate competition. Hiring Hurd was pretty much the clearest way Oracle could say “We intend to take HP’s customers” – according to 37 percent of people who voted in our online poll.

HP clearly sees things the same way. There was no non-compete clause in the $40 million severance package Hurd got, but HP is suing him, arguing that he cannot work at Oracle without breaking a confidentiality provision around customer and product information.

A quarter of the poll thought – with charming simplicity – that it was a simple matter of Oracle hiring a “smart executive” who would be good at the job. Hurd gained kudos at HP for cutting the headcount and raising efficiency, and Oracle will have to perform a similar trick on the Sun assets.

The rest of our readers mostly seemed to view the hiring as a personal action by Larry Ellison. Fifteen percent of you think that the main reason Oracle hired Hurd was to strike against what Ellison termed the “cowardly corporate political correctness” HP had shown.

And an equal propotion, who clicked “Other” thought Ellison was expressing something even more individualistic: he hired Hurd because they are best buddies. With varying degrees of delicacy, but considerable unanimity, readers suggested that the two men share a common set of attitudes to corporate life.

The least popular option was of course, the one that Oracle majored on in its press releases: was Hurd hired for his “storage and cloud expertise”?  Only seven percent of you believed that one.

What’s your favourite browser?

After that question, our next poll won’t be so controversial. But it is the kind of thing that keeps us awake at eWEEK Europe. Do you use Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer? And if you use IE, which version? Or do you use a less mainstream program to travel the web?

Microsoft has just taken the wraps off the beta of a new version of IE, and already IE8 seems to have stemmed the erosion of Explorer’s market share. Google is pushing Chrome heavily, and using it as the basis for an operating system.

IE originally lost users – first of all to Firefox, and later to Chrome and others – because it had a poor record on security, but the browser is still most people’s “home” in the web.

Options within browser technology, such as the use of Flash or HTML5, have become more controversial than the browser itself, leaving users with more freedom, or more confusion.

In that situation, where should we turn to, for enlightenment? To our readers, of course! Please vote for your favourite browser, add in any we’ve ignored through the “Other” option, and add to our understanding by posting comments. We are looking forward to hearing from you.