I think his interpretation of the facts is very plausible. Sadly, Larry Ellison was absolutely right when he said, at the time of Hurd's scandal, "the HP Board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple Board fired Steve Jobs many years ago."
Good CEOs who can revamp stagnant companies are hard to come by, particularly in the consumer space. Hurd was that CEO, Apotheker is not. And getting out of the consumer space, at a time when there are several paradigm shifts going on, means missing huge opportunities.
Firing Hurd was the right thing to do - I will argue that they were late. Hurd was seen as aligning with Oracle and making decisions that did not conflict with Oracle. EDS, conveniently missed Sun acquisition, consumer focus in lieu of enterprise paints a consistent picture. There is a reason Hurd now works at Oracle and Larry did not like him getting fired. Besides show me what he did apart from cost cutting.
Apotheker comes from Oracle's competitor SAP. To that effect he isn't shy of focusing on interests that happen to conflict with Oracle's. To that end, what Gruber is saying is right - the board always wanted more Enterprise focus and that required going against Oracle. That's what Apotheker is doing.
As for missed opportunities - it does not matter. HP just does not have the DNA to do great in the already saturated PC and phone/tablets market. Not having to deal with that means they can focus their resources and capital where they are well oiled to do great. It only mattered if HP managed to get a CEO that can change its DNA - Neither Hurd nor Apotheker were into that. If they could have found a great consumer focused CEO with proven and relevant record, then it would have been worthwhile to risk competing in consumer space when it meant losing focus on Enterprise. Otherwise its just not really smart.
And they are still not giving up on webOS. But the only catches here are they don't yet know what to do with webOS and the Oracle/Itanium problem. With PSG off their bottom line they could now afford to ignore webOS until they find the right thing for it and focus their hardware resources to sell more proliants and fix the Itanium problem. That's the idea.
Hurd didn't pay a hooker. At worst he was having an affair with a events organiser. With full hindsight, I'd say the board wanted Hurd and consumer business out.
It's of course not OK to lie and get caught. If the board wanted him badly I am sure they would have found other ways of keeping him around - fines etc and worst case hiding it or downplaying it. Things aren't that simplistic at corporate board level of a multi billion company.
Fact of the matter is that he was going to be shown the door - if not for lying then for job performance. He just wasn't doing the things the board wanted him to do. That never ends well.
I wonder what do you think Hurd was a good CEO? I understand that HPQ stocks were going up but the raise was based on eating the future.
Hurd made HP very toxic place to work (I know that first hand): and how the heck you can compete with Apple when your engineering force is demoralized?
Also what would be HP future under Hurd helm?
As of Larry's comment... Larry talks his book. He does not care what will happen to HP and he needed a guy to clean up Sun hardware division. So of course he will praise Hurd.
This is true also because Steve Jobs speaks about it in his Stanford speech, but it's a rare event that you cannot know in advance. No company fires the CEO to let him learn more and then come back to rescue the company.
Moreover Apple went on the verge of bankruptcy before Steve Jobs came back. So it was still a bad decision for the board to fire him.
> Sculley wrestled with low Macintosh sales and a need to bring some order to the creative chaos Jobs had unleashed. Sculley found that he couldn’t rein in Jobs—and decided he had to go.
"And getting out of the consumer space, at a time when there are several paradigm shifts going on, means missing huge opportunities."
For HP, at this time, I'm not sure I agree. Why? It's as simple as Apple is in that market as well and nothing HP (or anyone really) has done has stopped or caught up with their momentum.
In fact I think it's smart for them to transition to the enterprise world entirely. We don't hear about it often on HackerNews or Techcrunch, but that market is massive and HP has been acquiring companies within it for years. They likely make more money in the enterprise market (security specifically) than in the PC business. Hell, they just bought a company called Autonomy for 10 billion dollars. What do they do? Enterprise search and information management.
I would agree with your assessment. But it's not just Apple that's making life difficult for HP.
Simply put (and this has been happening for four or five years now) Assus Acer and Lenovo are eating HP's lunch on the low end and Apple is eating their lunch on the high end. All the while they are playing second fiddle to Dell ( and to an increasing extent to Assus) in between.
Additionally HP would need to play serious catch up to Apple, HTC, and in the international market Lenovo (maybe even Motorola although I don't know how that is going to work post acquisition) in mobil. And as Dell has learned, playing catch up in mobil requires throwing a lot of money down the drain without a guarantee for positive returns. (This last part about Dell is just my perception. For all I know Dell's margins on mobil have been stellar, but I don't think that's the case)
I understand the market's reaction to HP's pivote, although I think a lot of it is panic and hedging bets and some bad timing on HP's part, but that is what markets are suppose to do. I don't so much understand the tech industry's reaction to the move.
Good CEOs who can revamp stagnant companies are hard to come by, particularly in the consumer space. Hurd was that CEO, Apotheker is not. And getting out of the consumer space, at a time when there are several paradigm shifts going on, means missing huge opportunities.