Larry failed in his attempt to buy the Golden State Warriors. Instead he wants to play war with HP. He doesn't care about Marky. Larry just wants to have some fun.

I have always felt that in order to enforce a non-compete clause some percent of the salary must continue.

What trade secrets? The only thing this pinhead knew how to do was lay people off. We make cheap printers and sell $40 ink refills. What is Oracle going to do with that? [Portion removed by Palo Alto Online staff].

Don't you just love corporatism? HP makes crummy printers and outrageously expensive ink cartridges, lays offs big chinks of its work force and the two corporate officers responsible are either running for senate or fooling around with bimbos while cheating on their expense account and then get hired by the competitor so they can make untold millions and destroy their former employer. Hooray for predatory capitalism which makes any comparison to hyenas a big insult to those animals.

Good point Daniel. What ever happened to that kind-spirited capitalism of yesteryear? Or those fine command economies?

Walter, I seem to remember Mr. Hurd got somewhere north of $20 million as a parting gift, even though he was fired. That ought to be enough to buy his silence for a year or two. And it's not as if he's going to have to beg for his supper.

Unless he's got more bimboes than Tiger to appease monetarily.

Ok, let me get this straight: HP fires the guy and then wants to prevent him for working for anyone else? This is going to be tossed out so fast.

Oracle Corp. said it will pay Mark Hurd, its new co-president, an annual base salary of $950,000 and be eligible for up to a $10 million bonus in the current fiscal year.Web Link

Looks like he has landed on his feet--$11 million + the $30-40 million in severance from HP.
He will have to watch out for Honey Traps Web Link but Ellison can coach him on that

I am not a lawyer, but it was my understanding that non-compete agreements are generally illegal and unenforceable under California state law.

Just to clarify: The claim here is not premised on a non-compete (which indeed, is generally not acceptable in CA). It is premised on Hurd's promise as part of the severance to not disclose HP's proprietary information and trade secrets for a period of time.

HP's position is that Hurd's very senior role and work at Oracle will inevitably and necessarily lead to disclosure of such information/secrets, whether intentionally or not.

So if Mark doesn't want to comply with his separation agreement with HP, worth $30-$40M, I think he should return the money. HP is not filing suit based on a non-compete agreement - rather the severance agreement where Mark agreed not to share any company secrets or utilize contacts made during his time at HP. Given he is intimately familiar with HP's planning for the next two years, how is there anyway he can not disclose them and do his job? How can he interact with customers without using contacts gained as HP's CEO? I think $40M is enough compensation for him to comply with his agreement for two years.

Ellison is already poking HP in the eye
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., September 7, 2010

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) today issued the following statement:

“Oracle has long viewed HP as an important partner,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “By filing this vindictive lawsuit against Oracle and Mark Hurd, the HP board is acting with utter disregard for that partnership, our joint customers, and their own shareholders and employees. The HP Board is making it virtually impossible for Oracle and HP to continue to cooperate and work together in the IT marketplace."Web Link

They had 100s of thousands of customers in common.

This matter is going to be a huge distraction for the HP BoD and CEO candidates will not want to work @ HP with such a vindictive board over them--- that will mean HP will have to settle for an internal candidate---and chaos for some time---that will help Oracle build up its SUN hardware and software business while HP is distracted with its eye off the ball.

It's nice to see the rich good old boys defending one another when they cheat. Ellison can now expect a similar defense when he needs it. Ellison runs the company like it was his private property. I wonder if the Oracle board goes along with it.
Hurd cheated on his wife and on his expenses.
What will stop him from taking vengeance against HP? What a slimy character.

I find it amusing. If the guy wants to work, he has the right to work. Period. As to the quality of HP Printers, as much as I hate to say it, I agree with the above. I have five HP printers, all less than two years old, that stopped working for unknown reasons. I have oft contemplated driving to HP and putting them all on the receptionist's desk with a thank you note for my losing so much time and money. My family and I now buy printers from other companies.

Hurd is clearly a greedy unscrupulous corporate parasite. To bleed that level of money out of HP when they continue to lay-off average workers is unbelievable and without conscience.

Ellison is totally unscrupulous. He is just trying to use Hurd to get whatever information he can so that he can use it against HP.

They deserve each other.

HAHAHA ...

>> Posted by ex-EDSer, a resident of another community, 5 hours ago
>>
>> What trade secrets?
>> The only thing this pinhead knew how to do was lay people off. We make

That must be a pretty powerful trade secret. I just read a statistic that the CEOs that laid the most American workers off received on average 45% more pay and bonuses than other CEOs.

What kind of a country do we want to aim for, hey, pretty soon we can be just like China, Mexico or India, I guess it just depends on what kind of food more people like?

If Sun could not make a go of selling their crappy products I don't what Oracle expect to do with them. Some percentage of about 30,00 employees from Sun are about to be dumped on the Silicon Valley market, more fun for Bay Area unemployment and housing prices.

This is what happens when you take a great system like UNIX, and you add so much complexity that the cost of ownership becomes impossible to afford for most companies. MySQL, Apache, Firefox and all the other Open Source stuff eats your lunch.

Remind me again why we are paying these CEOs so much? Is it because they are outsourcing, or because they are destroying their businesses and American competitiveness, or just because they have figured out how to screw everyone else with no value delivered to anyone?

"Enough!" ... I don't know what your problem is with HP printers, maybe you are just nasty and abusive with them because I have a Deskjet 990cse, from at least 2002, and maybe older, an earlier duplex printer that still works very well on both Mac and PC?

Carly Fiona's business model had been that the more workers she laid off, the better HP will be loved by Wall Street. This is now corporate America's business model, although the originators of this philosophy were Reagan's supply-siders and Friedmanites who were hell bent on destroying the manufacturing and industrial base of this country by encouraging corporations to use cheap labor abroad in order to increase the corporate bottom line. Hurd was just another corporatist who never tired of lay-offs while using HP money to play around with a bimbo. Instead of being content with his multi-million golden parachute, when he should have probably faced criminal charges, he moves to a competitor, and the worst predator in the Valley at that, who will use him to screw the provider of his golden parachute. As far as HP printers, each one that I owned mysteriously stopped functioning, always shortly after the one year warranty had expired. I wouldn't use one even for free-so Hurd was also responsible for providing the public crummy, grossly overpriced products on top of everything.

If you buy furniture, clothes, or electronics Made in China, then don't blame Mark Hurd or Carly Fiorina for laying off HP employees. Thousands of carpenters in North Carolina and textile workers in South Carolina lost jobs because of our collective actions.

If you think Mark Hurd is a corporate parasite, then think of the shortfall of $500 Billion that the state employee pension fund will need from California tax payers. Are the beneficiaries of such pensions parasites? Who is worse?

I'm forced to buy some products made in China because almost nothing is made in the US anymore, thanks to outsourcing, the new American religion. Unlike Hurd, state employees do actual work and if caught cheating on their expense account to fool around with bimbos, they would probably be facing a criminal investigation, lose their job and pension, and certainly would not receive a 20-30 million dollar check upon termination. And even before he was caught embezzling his own company, Mark Hurd was responsible for very lousy printers, so yes, he is a corporate parasite extraordinaire.

"If you think Mark Hurd is a corporate parasite, then think of the shortfall of $500 Billion that the state employee pension fund will need from California tax payers. Are the beneficiaries of such pensions parasites? Who is worse?"

Perhaps you should think of the Cal PERS theft Pete Wilson did to pay for political pork. Or think of the years during good economic times when state employers were not paying their contribution to PERS, but the workers were. What did they do with the savings? Put it away for a rainy day? No, again spent on pork.

Cal PERS is no different from Social Security. Both are continually raped by politicos for their personal benefit, and both would be solvent if it weren't for these heinous violations of trust.

I thought state employees were there to help the rest of us do "actual work." Why are they doing actual work?

Is this a surprise? Silicon Valley is big fraternity where the big boys protect each other. Right, wrong or indifferent this is the way it works. Looks at idiots like Rick Belluzzo who got run out of HP, ruined SGI, got fired at Mircrosoft and now has run Quantum into the ground. Yet he's still pulling in a $1M/year and going around makes celebrity speeches with his board members.

The government and country is being run by big business through the Republicans. They are so afraid of the people they are terrified of populism and they see Democracy as exactly that, populism. Companies are not national institutions anymore, so they run them into the ground and workers just scatter. We are letting our society be designed and built to keep people isolated, weak, and politically powerless ... not to mention ignorant and dependent.

"lay off American workers and still get the job done by outsourcing"
is the business model of all CEOs in US. Why blame Hurd. This is everywhere!

Obama is DEFINITELY creating a lot of jobs - however these jobs are being created outside US. Stimulus funds also end up India and China - US has no consumer-goods manufacturing base.

We are a country of entitlements.

I have always felt that a non-compete requirement should continue the salary during the time of non-compete.

WEW: You are repeating yourself

I have always felt that in order to enforce a non-compete clause some percent of the salary must continue.

I have always felt that a non-compete requirement should continue the salary during the time of non-compete.