During the first dot com boom, people bought servers. And then Amazon web services killed the idea. You don't need to buy servers, we got them, they said, a ton of them. But now companies like Facebook that are not in the data center business end up with these huge, humongous huge data centers.
Reuters: Oracle CEO claims can prove wrongdoing by new HP CEO: Hewlett-Packard Co's incoming CEO oversaw a scheme to steal Oracle's software by rival SAP AG..... Oracle seeking some $2 billion in damages ..... Then HP hired SAP's former CEO, Leo Apotheker, to replace Hurd and named former Oracle COORay Lane as its chairman. ..... Ellison said in a statement that Oracle intends to subpoena Apotheker, but it could not do so because the executive has been living outside the jurisdiction of the San Francisco area court that will try the case..... Apotheker is due to start work on Monday at HP ..... "A few weeks ago I accused HP's new CEO, Leo Apotheker, of overseeing an industrial espionage scheme centering on the repeated theft of massive amounts of Oracle's software. A major portion of this theft occurred while Mr. Apotheker was CEO of SAP," Ellison said .... "HP's Chairman, Ray Lane, immediately came to Mr. Apotheker's defense by writing a letter stating, 'Oracle has been litigating this case for years and has never offered any evidence that Mr. Apotheker was involved.' Well, that's what we are planning to do during the trial that starts next Monday."
Image via WikipediaFred Wilson and Chris Dixon remind me of each other, although I met Chris only for the first time yesterday, and it was my second time meeting Fred in person, although it feels like I meet him near daily since he blogs daily, and I drop by when I can. I greeted him at the very outset - "Hello Fred, so very good to see you" - and then pretty much left the space for the crowd. It felt like an AVC community thing to do. We already meet you most days, let others have a go at you now.
Wow. This guy shows no signs of slowing down. This dude Steve Jobs, CEO of the past decade, dubbed the most remarkable comeback story in the history of business, Larry Ellison's best friend, is just warming up, it looks like.
"There are one or more strategic opportunities in the future," says he. You got to watch out for those. Word is already out he wants to take another crack at the netbook. He could also be thinking in terms of the natural user interface, 3D computing, and gesturing as opposed to touching. Gesturing is cleaner.
TechCrunch: Looks Like Top Gun 2 Is Cleared For Takeoff — All Thanks To Larry Ellison’s Son: It has everything you need in a movie: California, drinking, jets, tragedy ..... the son of Oracle founder, ultra-billionaire ...... 27-year-old David Ellison, who was all of 3 when Top Gun came out in 1986 ..... he just happend to raise $350 million dollars from JPMorganChase to co-finance a slate of films with Paramount
Larry Elli Son.
In The News
TechCrunch: Why Twitter Is Massively Undervalued Compared To Facebook: These days they are often mentioned in the same breath. .... Jobs invited Zuckerberg for dinner at his house to talk about Ping two weeks ago .... there would be friendship with significant benefits for both parties if Apple and Facebook could strike a deal
Mashable: The Other Facebook Co-founder Speaks Out: Instead of moving out with Zuckerberg to Palo Alto to grow the company though, he decided to work as a finance intern and the two began to have major conflicts over the direction of Facebook. Eventually the company was restructured, leaving Saverin out in the cold. His co-founder title was stripped and his share of Facebook reportedly dropped from 30% to less than 5%, for which he sued Facebook in 2009..... making his net worth somewhere in the range of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion.... Even his Facebook page is bare; it only has two posts. All it says is that he’s a “technology entrepreneur and investor.”
I don't believe companies have co-founders. It is rare for a company to have a co-founder. The title co-founder denotes equal status, and that almost never happens. Paul Allen was not a Microsoft co-founder. Bill Gates was the founder, the indispensable person, the person who saw where the company might be in 20 years. Bob Miner was not an Oracle co-founder. Larry Ellison was the founder. Bob Miner never was able to make peace with the fact that at some point his net worth surpassed a million dollars. That was not a co-founder.
The big bang of Oracle happened with Larry Ellison and Bob Miner happened to be nearby. Paul Allen happened to be nearby. The big bang of Facebook happened with Mark Zuckerberg. Saverin was not a best friend, not even a friend. Saverin was roommate. He happened to be in geographical proximity. He is the accidental billionaire. The guy did not get the idea. And by that I don't mean to suggest the idea of Facebook did not originate with him. What I mean to suggest is the guy did not "get" it. He never got it, until he realized Facebook was getting really big, and so he sued. His billion should go straight to charity.
The two idiot twins should not have received any money. The justice system is flawed that they ended up with any money.
To some extent Paul Allen was there, he was number two. Bob Miner was with Oracle for years. He did work. These Facebook drama clowns did nothing. The twins were rowing the boat. Saverin had all the wrong ideas about where Facebook needed to go. The guy, if anything, was not even a non founder, he was an anti-founder. If o-n-e of his ideas had been incorporated, Facebook was gone down the tube.
Wall Street Journal: AOL, Private-Equity Firms Explore Bid for Yahoo: devising a bold plan to marry two big Internet brands facing steep challenges...... The discussions are preliminary and don't include Yahoo. ...... Shares of Yahoo jumped 13% ..... one of the best-performing tech stocks of the day...... A big chunk of Yahoo's current market value comes from its Alibaba stake. ..... Yahoo and AOL discussed a merger in 2008, as Yahoo weighed a $45 billion takeover offer from Microsoft Corp. Microsoft eventually pulled its bid ..... Bartz has improved Yahoo's profitability by cutting costs, but revenue hasn't grown much and the company faces other problems..... more than 600 million people use its home page, email service or other sites every month
This is Tim Armstrong trying to do the Larry Ellison thing. Larry Ellison went after PeopleSoft. I have no dog in this fight. I am just on the sidelines watching the drama. But AOL is not Oracle size. And Yahoo is not PeopleSoft size. Actually AOL and Yahoo are two similar size companies with similar problems/challenges. They both used to be number one, and now perhaps they never are going to get back the throne. Jimmy Carter also retired.
Wait, they are not similar size companies. AOL is a two billion dollar company, Yahoo is a 20 billion dollar company. Tim Armstrong has started to believe his own PR, or maybe he is reading too many of Mike Arrington's blog posts. Arrington has been quite hostile to Carol Bartz over an extended period of time.
Image via WikipediaShould not the talk be of merger? But AOL did try that once. That marriage was a spectacular disaster. Buying or merging is the easy part, integrating is the hard part. Larry Ellison seems to be good at both. But then he starts with the advantage of Oracle's size and muscle. Oracle will still perhaps do the next big thing in its space. AOL and Yahoo are not even trying to do the next big thing. For now they are still figuring out what their space is.
Perhaps Tim Armstrong got too much of a boost from buying TechCrunch. The buzz got to him or something. TechCrunch might be the top tech blog, but in terms of a business it is pretty small. It is actually very small. TechCrunch is an asteroid to Yahoo's Mars.
Nothing Yahoo could have done on its own would have boosted its share price by 13%. That's a big jump. Congrats Carol. Make some more Alibaba moves. Google just went into wind farms.
Bloomberg: Yahoo Said to Hire Goldman to Handle Takeover Approaches: The private-equity funds have weighed raising $10 billion to $12 billion ..... Yahoo also owns 35 percent of Yahoo Japan Corp., operator of the nation’s most visited Web portal. ..... a reverse merger with AOL gaining managerial control .... . Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said in December 2008 that talks about possible deals for AOL were under way with Yahoo, Microsoft and Google Inc. When those talks didn’t lead anywhere, Time Warner opted for a spinoff.
AllThingsD: Yahoo’s Stock Acts Like It’s in Play–Because It Kind of Is, as Predators Circle: assessing the situation aggressively ..... the key players in the growing soap opera are the execs who run Yahoo-affiliated companies in Japan and China. That would be Masayoshi Son of Yahoo Japan and Jack Ma of the Alibaba Group ..... any approach would have to be nonhostile ..... Armstrong, said sources, has not shied away from the idea of Yahoo acquiring AOL and installing him as CEO with Bartz as chairman. ...... Although AOL has also been trying to turn itself around and is in a much less powerful position than Yahoo, Wall Street likes Armstrong’s story for AOL as a modern-day media and media distribution company. ..... “At least he has a narrative that is believable,” said one big investor in both companies. “Bartz has no vision.”
Larry Ellison never saw the free browser as a threat. The browser allowed people to access his database software directly from the web. The web interface was good. And it is not like he is about to get into the smartphone market, unless he is just trying to help out his best friend Steve Jobs, but that would be taking friendship a little too far. Maybe the smartphone is yet another way for people to access database software. I think that should be the thought.
JavaWorld: Last Google Glassfish Post: defeat Microsoft everywhere, they are reeling .....Android momentum will stall, unless Google engages with Oracle around Java, never has their interests more closely aligned, and the fight over mobile Java is a secondary still to enterprise java, for everyone other than Microsoft, so why fight among family, which is what is going on with the lawsuit around Android, but it can change, and both companies definitely need to reach out to each other, and stop giving Microsoft breathing room to stay alive
How long before Google and Oracle can no longer stay out of each other's ways? Great Recession fueled cheap money is making it possible for a lot of the behemoths to borrow and buy, looks like.
This is partly Larry Ellison making it loud and clear that he just bought Sun and so Java is now his stuff. But there is so much suing going on, people who stay skeptical of software patents seem to be making much sense right about now. It is so easy to step on each other's feet with software.
Obviously I have not gone to the technical bottom of these legal wranglings but I think at some level it is obvious all the tall companies are not going the innovation and the market forces route. Instead they are suing each other. Maybe that is what consolidation means. But one wishes the word still were innovation.
This mess is not looking good, not good at all. The smartphone needs to explode. It should not be snuffed out. The smartphone is a paradigm shift just like the PC was a paradigm shift. The smartphone is a bigger paradigm shift than the PC was. The big players of the PC era should not think of the smartphone as an afterthought. The smartphone is about to become the center of the computing universe.
I hope all the lawsuits cancel each other out and the companies get back to work.
Google and Oracle talking would be a good idea. Let's jaw, not war.
Good Morning Silicon Valley: Will Android come out black and blue after Oracle deal with Big Blue? Plus more Oracle vs. HP: In the previous episode of the Oracle-Google fight, Google last week had asked a judge to throw out Oracle’s lawsuit, filed in August, which alleges that Android is infringing on patents related to Java. That’s not the case, Google said, as expected, and also called Oracle hypocritical. In the latest related development, Oracle and rival IBM yesterday announced that they had reached an agreement that would shift Big Blue’s Java development from the Apache Harmony platform to OpenJDK, which is Oracle’s platform. Because the Android OS is based on Java built on the Apache platform, InfoWorld says the Oracle-IBM deal could undermine Android and force Google to throw resources at Apache.
Appolicious: The smartphone wars enter the courtroom: Motorola last week shot across Apple’s bow with three patent infringement suits .... the growing patent infringement derby. ..... Motorola has accused Apple of violating 18 patents. Motorola claims that Apple has infringed on its patents with the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and some Mac computers. ..... “revenge time” for Motorola, the inventor of mobile phones, which has taken a drubbing at the hands of latecomer Apple ..... Horacio Gutiérrez, Microsoft’s chief intellectual property lawyer, as saying the spate of actions is a result of the collision of the cellphone and computing worlds. .... “Apple faces a lawsuit from Nokia over its iPhone technology and has taken legal action of its own against the Finnish cellphone maker. Apple is also part of a wider legal challenge to Google’s Android smartphone operating system, having filed a lawsuit against handset maker HTC over its use of the software. That echoes Microsoft’s action against Motorola over its use of Android software and Oracle’s action against Google over the alleged use of its Java technology in Android.” ... the thicket of lawsuits could slow the development of the smartphone business Windows Phone 7 offers nothing wonderful to consumers: Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 should prove to be about as appealing to consumers as, say, John Deere sports cars.
New York Times: Oracle and I.B.M. Agree to Java Pact: The accord covers the Java software typically used in everything from data centers to Web programs. But it does not extend to the set of smaller Java tools used in cellphones and other mobile devices. .... Oracle’s dispute with Google casts shadows over Java’s future in general. For example, Google, Mr. Lea said, has more people working on OpenJDK projects than Oracle, and the lawsuit restricts communications between the litigating parties. .... “By far the most eyes are still on the Android issue,” Mr. Lea said. “Oracle and Google have to start communicating with each other.”
It is said we live in an era when people will have not a few different jobs over a lifetime but a few different careers. The one job for life thing went out the window a long time ago. It has been so very true for me.
The immigration humiliation of the past two plus years has been a major blow to self esteem. You show up for enough tech events in town and you leave the impression you are one of those people whose startup never took off. The truth is I am about a year from my green card, and the startup thing will have to wait until then.
What to do has been no minor struggle.
A lot of people who know me think of me as a politician, and I have done some political work, sure, some pretty cutting edge stuff, I would like to believe. But I am who I am. I am a Third World guy. I don't think I have ever seriously contemplated running for office locally. I can get excited about microfinance, but affordable housing? I am not so sure. I am glad plenty get excited about that, and the people are well served, but I am not in that rat race personally.
It is not just a demand issue. It is not just about what the world wants. It is also a supply issue. In politics what excites me is the executive. The US presidency I find fascinating. But I could not say the same about the legislative branch. And that tells me I am cut for tech entrepreneurship. That fits into my personality type. I need much action.
Minus the web I am a fragmented person. I was born in India, grew up in Nepal, now live in America. America is not one country to me. There is the rest of America. And there is New York City. I try to think of New York City as a country on its own. I make a point not to step outside the city boundaries. And I am someone who has been to all parts of America. No one who ran for president of this country has seen as much of America as I have.
Larry Ellison takes his sailing pretty seriously. I take my politics pretty seriously. But I don't see myself in politics. I don't even see me doing the Bloomberg thing. I am perhaps too global. It is a mindset, it is a world view. In my case, it is just who I am.
I set out to raise 100K for my startup in 2008, and I did. I put the bank account in my business partner's name. ("Are you sure you want to trust me with all this money!") The Democratic primary over, I was going to focus on the startup like a laser beam. The McCain thing was not going to be much of a contest. I did not think so.
Back then it was about getting into the ISP space that I had started to call Web 3.0. How do you bring another five billion people online? By now I am much more interested in the mobile web. Looks like the mobile web has already engulfed much of humanity. Well, it is Mini Me for much of the world, but it is a start. Being able to do mobile phone banking is nothing less than revolutionary.
I have yet to buy my first smartphone. I have been pretty much broke during these two plus years of immigration humiliation. But I also look down upon that screen size. The goal has to be big screen wireless broadband for everybody. Third World people are not Mini Me people. And I spend so much time online everyday already that when I am offline I like being offline, untethered. You have to smell the roses, or in the case of New York City, the foul smell of the subway. I think that is also important.
When I do my startup in a year, right now it looks like it is going to be something in the mobile web space. I have a few ideas. I am going to learn some coding in the mean time, enough to lead teams.
In the mean time I will do pro blogging, social media consulting, I have coders who will work for you, I give them their pay and take my cut: let me know if you need some cheap, remote coding done. I am open to getting a job. I am about to put my profile up on a modeling site. I believe I could handle that on the side. I did get a call. I need to call back. I am open to more.
I could use some help with the pro blogging. Every startup worth its salt has a social media presence. This is like outsourcing some of the blogging. You let me do a post or two or three. On your part that would require you giving me an hour or two of your time, in person or on the phone, in person preferred, when you tell me your full story, your full story, and your startup's full story. And by full, I mean full. And you let me talk to the key people on your team. And you email me all the pictures you want to go with the posts. And I would spend hours on the posts. And after the posts come out, you should want to link to them from your site. If you get the full story out, that helps with your hard core users, they feel more included, and become more loyal, and it helps with the press. If they can do all the background research on you with little effort, they are more likely to do stories on you. And more stories the better. Every article written about you is so much free advertising. And it helps with your future investors. I don't have space issues like the mainstream media. I can give as much space to you as needed.
The attraction of the mobile web is that you are working with a pool of five billion people. There has to be an app for that. It is about becoming whole as a person. To me it is. I have a mobile web app in mind that grows to also end up with a big screen web presence. But one year is a long time in tech entrepreneurship. Maybe I will go back to my original idea. Maybe I will set up shop in Queens. But software speaks more to my butterfly effect instincts.
And now we learn the Einsteins at the patent office have granted not one but two location patents. In this land of plenty. I would not be surprised if Gowalla has the third one. If not why has FourSquare bothered competing with that little nuisance in the first place? Why not simply go ahead and sue like every big company seems to be doing to every other big company back there in Silicon Valley? With the exception of Larry Ellison. Larry is into fist fights. (Putting My Money On Larry Ellison)
Image via CrunchBaseThis is more than putting a few million dollars into Mike Arrington's pocket. The bad boy of Silicon Valley is going to be keep being the bad boy of Silicon Valley, but now he is bought.
"All your chats are belong to me," the Russian founder of Chatroulette said at one point. Well, Mikie, all your blog posts now belong to us. We are New York City. We own TechCrunch now.
We should let Larry and his boys out there in Silicon Valley duke it out with hardware. Let's not get into hardware. (Putting My Money On Larry Ellison)
New York City has the lead on the mobile web and we need to keep that and grow that. Web services have gone global by now, and that is swell, but that is another soccer field we can keep munching on.
BusinessWeek: HP, Oracle Lead Acquisition Spree Tearing Down Tech Barriers: broken down decades-old barriers between industries ..... HP, Oracle, IBM, Cisco Systems Inc. and Dell Inc., with a collective $100 billion in cash, have said they plan to keep making acquisitions. ..... The buyers are pursuing a vision of cloud computing, which lets customers store their software in massive data centers, rather than in the computer room down the hall. Record- low borrowing costs have helped spur the deals. ..... “Nobody wants to be Californicated by Cisco.” .... Oracle, the world’s second-largest software company, snapped up almost 70 companies in the past five years
I am putting my money on Larry Ellison. The guy, for one, has a track record, and a loud mouth, and a big stick. I don't know if you have been following, but the dude spent the past few years eating up all the small fish in his pond. He bought company, after company, after company. PeopleSoft made news, the rest did not make the same kind of news.
Now the shark is after the big fish. This guy has an attitude about him. He will jump into the water first and learn to swim later. Only, he knows how to swim. But the attitude is he would jump in even if he did not know how to swim.
The underbelly of this whole drama is that Larry Ellison is seriously trying to emulate his best friend, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has always integrated hardware and software, and so Larry Ellison was going to do the same thing. Steve Jobs got Apple to surpass Microsoft in market value, and now Larry wants Oracle to surpass Microsoft's market value, never mind that Bill Gates long retired.
HP is in for some tough times. And they just stepped on their own foot by hiring Thepo. That was not a good idea. When I say that was not a good idea, I am talking "strictly business."
This fight could last a few years, and most definitely will be worth watching.
Larry, give me data centers that are the size of servers.
Ben's Blog: Ben Horowitz: In Defense of Standards, Ethics, and Honest Financial Reporting at Hewlett-Packard: my business partner, Marc Andreessen, is on the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard. I note that I have no inside information, and this blog post is based purely on published material. In 2007, I sold Opsware, the company that I founded and ran to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6B. I worked at Hewlett-Packard from 2007 to 2008 as an executive in the software business. Recently, my old company Hewlett-Packard has been in the news—and not in a good way. ....... HP employs over 300,000 people. ..... Jodie Fisher had more access to the CEO and was paid more than 99.9% of HP’s workforce, despite having no traditional qualifications. ...... It is not an easy thing to fire a popular, highly successful CEO.
Something tells me this drama is far from over. The Oracle-HP alliance is now a full blown rivalry. This is about money. Like they say, follow the money. Oracle is now firmly in the hardware business as well, and HP feels eaten up. Oracle can do hardware, but could HP do Oracle-like software?
This is not about people getting along, or not getting along. This is about the money. And Larry Ellison might be dramatic, but he is first and foremost a businessman. His flare ups are market signals. Watch them and you are watching an industry churning.
New York Times: A Double Standard at H.P.: Oracle and H.P. had once been the closest of partners, with the latter selling the industrial-strength hardware that ran Oracle’s industrial-strength software. But that partnership appears to be dissolving. ..... Larry Ellison, Oracle’s flamboyant founder ..... “Hiring him had nothing to do with fighting Oracle,” said Ray Lane, the former Oracle (!) president who is set to become H.P.’s chairman next month. “The board chose Léo because he was the best available athlete.” .... Apotheker was likely to further traumatize the already demoralized H.P. staff. ..... “If you wanted to find someone who represented the diametrical opposite of the H.P. way, it is Léo,” said Jason Maynard, a veteran technology analyst with Wells Fargo Securities. “He is tough as nails and chews glass for breakfast.” ...... the same board that viewed Mr. Hurd’s minor expense account shenanigans as intolerable has chosen as its new C.E.O. someone involved — however tangentially — with the most serious business crime you can commit. ..... the chance to embarrass H.P. and its new C.E.O. is likely to be irresistible to Oracle and Mr. Ellison. Which will mean yet more egg on the faces of the H.P. directors.
New York Times: What Steve Jobs Learned in the Wilderness: But the Jobs of the mid-1980s probably never could have made Apple what it is today if he hadn’t embarked on a torment-filled business odyssey. ..... The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple was a much more capable leader — precisely because he had been badly banged up. He had spent 12 tumultuous, painful years failing to find a way to make the new company profitable. .... In this period, Mr. Jobs did not do much delegating. ...... Apple acquired the company in 1997 and used Next’s software as the basis for the new operating system, Mac OS X...... He didn’t invent the media player, the smartphone or the tablet, but he understood that no one else had yet come up with the equivalent of a Mac. ..... “He’s the same Steve in his passion for excellence, but a new Steve in his understanding of how to empower a large company to realize his vision.”
I am not an Apple person. I have never bought an Apple product, and I think I might stick to that. My smartphone is going to be an Android. I have no plans to get an iPad. I am psyched instead about the Chrome OS netbook. I love Google like some people love Apple. My blogs are on Blogger, not Wordpress.
But Steve Jobs fascinates me, and his story is legend. I am a Steve Jobs fan. Sure. Steve Jobs is no Mozart, not even close. But he strikes me as someone who perhaps really, truly appreciates genius, perhaps the genius of a Mozart, or of an Einstein. His Think Different campaign was modeled after Einstein.
Steve Jobs is not Einstein or Mozart. Einstein and Mozart belong with each other, not Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs belongs to a different club, the club of Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. That club has few members. College dropouts not born into moneyed backgrounds who changed the trajectories of business history. These are by definition people that talent hunters, recruiters can not find for you. These are not people who are meant to be understood until after the fact, until they have done what needs to be done, and the excellence is out there for the world to see.
Steve Jobs in the wilderness reminds me of the scenes in the Mozart movie where the guy is left out to pasture. He is left to die by people who are too insignificant for the age they live in, let alone for the ages.
"Those people should not have that kind of power," Mozart says at one point. That is how I feel about people who fired Steve Jobs. Those dumbfucks should never have had the power to decide if Steve Jobs should even be fired. There I stand with Larry Ellison.
It took a Larry Ellison to get Steve Jobs back at Apple. Larry knows how to throw his weight around, and he threw his weight around on behalf of his new found best friend, Steve Jobs. It is not like the people who fired Steve Jobs finally decided that Jobs had learned his lessons and now he can come back. They were long gone.
When you give dumb people too much power, Steve Jobs gets fired and a company like Apple loses a decade of its life. Corporate monkeys did not know how to respect a Steve Jobs.
New York Times: Mark Zuckerberg’s Most Valuable Friend: her regular meetings with the famously introverted Mr. Zuckerberg .... Facebook has successfully navigated one of the more perilous stages in a start-up’s life: a period of hypergrowth. ..... Ms. Sandberg’s close ties to many of the world’s largest advertisers, relationships she first developed as a senior executive at Google. ..... has freed Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on what he likes best: the Facebook Web site and its platform. ..... Mr. Zuckerberg, a 26-year-old engineer and product visionary, is socially awkward and reserved. At 41, Ms. Sandberg is the opposite: polished, personable, chatty and at ease in the limelight. ..... Sandberg, who has a Harvard M.B.A. .... Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, says he considers Ms. Sandberg to be a “superstar.” ...... “A lot of people choose to hire people who look exactly like them,” Mr. Zuckerberg says. “Here we just value balance a lot more. It takes work to build those relationships, but if it does work, you end up with a much better system.” ...... Mr. Zuckerberg met Ms. Sandberg at a Christmas party in 2007, and they immediately took a liking to each other. What followed was an intense, six-week business courtship, during which the two dined together multiple times a week. Because both of them are Silicon Valley celebrities, they typically ate at Ms. Sandberg’s house so they could keep their talks confidential. ....... Sandberg also oversees the seemingly arcane operational details that can help a company run smoothly — especially a company that is growing rapidly...... “She’s good at strategy and dives deep and understands how teams work together.” ..... To this day, Ms. Sandberg looks a bit out of place at Facebook. ...... Their penchant for jeans, T-shirts and hoodies is in sharp contrast to her taste for elegant clothing. ...... She went desk to desk to introduce herself, cracking jokes and asking questions. It had the desired effect. ..... mentoring many younger employees — especial Image via CrunchBasely women, encouraging many of them not to shy away from important roles simply because they were planning to start families. ..... Although she was still in her 20s, she played pivotal roles, like helping ramp up aid efforts to Africa by opening Treasury’s door to Bono of U2. ..... “I had never heard of him and said to Sheryl that I only meet with people who have a first name and last name,” Mr. Summers recalls...... The two often socialize, and Mr. Zuckerberg, who was captain of his high school fencing team, has taught Ms. Sandberg’s 5-year-old son a few fencing moves.
Image via CrunchBaseMy favorite TechCrunch writer - Sarah Lacy - has a piece on my favorite character in tech: Larry Ellison. Coincidence?
This Leo Apotheker - (please do not ask me to pronounce the dude's last name) - move by HP is all human drama, and n-o-t-h-i-n-g to do with technology.
It is like after Bush 2004 burnt into John Kerry's forearm that he was a Mr. Flip Flop, Kerry duly delivered the line afterwards: "I actually voted for the Iraq War before I voted against it."
Losers have a way of falling into the mousetrap neatly laid out for them.
I mean, duh. What was the HP Board thinking? They are like, okay Larry, hit me baby one more time. HP has been primarily a hardware company. Name one HP software product, quick. You can't. Name one HP enterprise software product. I don't think such a thing exists. And they got Thepo. HP's days as an independent company might be numbered.
This Apothepo guy used to run SAP when SAP was actually competing with Oracle. SAP to this day prides itself in being an all software company. They think Larry going into hardware is a mistake. To Larry's credit he thinks SAP's very existence is a mistake. That is not a fight between equals. Ring the bells, end the fight.
Wall Street Journal: Larry Ellison ‘Speechless’ Over New CEO of H-P: Larry Ellison, the outspoken CEO of Oracle, said he is having trouble finding words to describe his reaction to H-P naming former SAP chief Leo Apotheker as its new top man–and then found plenty of them. .... SAP, where Apotheker worked for more than 20 years, is Oracle’s largest competitor for business-application programs, and Ellison seldom misses an opportunity to take pot shots at the company. ..... When Oracle and H-P settled the lawsuit regarding Hurd’s hiring, both companies put out statements lauding the other as a valuable partner.
Image via Wikipedia
