It’s been a funny old week in IT. First of all, we saw the exit of HP chief Mark Hurd, not for his alleged affair with and actress, but for a violation of expenses rules and covering up a personal relationship with said actress while she was contracted to HP.
Now, that’s ignominious enough, but then one Larry Ellison came out and added is not inconsiderable tuppence to the debate.
Then, Rupert Murdoch decides to sue Skype for copyright because the name Skype contains the word Sky.
And then this morning, we hear that Oracle is suing Google for its Java usage in Android.
The HP debacle seems to be an odd one for sure insofar as Hurd was originally being investigated for sexual harassment. It seems that the board of HP may have become concerned about this going public and lost their nerve, making things public themselves.
However, the original complainant withdrew the complaint and both Hurd and the actress/complainant maintained that there was no romantic affair. So it now appears as if Hurd resigned over about $20,000 worth of expenses over two years, many of which are reported to have been mistakenly filed by an assistant.
Ellison then weighed in with an e-mail to the New York Times saying that the HP board’s move oust Hurd was akin to Apple’s ousting of Steve Jobs and just as daft.
Well, the jury is out on that, but given HP’s past experience with CEOs and public scandal, the board may have been overcautious, fearing a public backlash.
HP has certainly lost a capable person in Hurd, but whether he would have led HP to Apple-like performance is unlikely. That said, with webOS in its pocket, HP has the opportunity to launch some more consumer focused devices that may actually cross over into the “cool” camp and so allow it to cash in where certain of its consumer devices, like its digital cameras, failed to set the world afire in the past.
We’ll just have to watch and see who gets the job, though I doubt that Larry will be part of the interview board…
Then we get the comedic legal shenanigans of BSkyB and Skype. Or at least it would be comedic were it not for the fact that this is Murdoch himself. Most people would have thought that this kind of thing would have been thrown out for being frivolous but the case is being fought in several territories, with the currently reported one being in the European Union, who bizarrely upheld the claims of infringement.
Rumbling since 2005, cases have already been thrown out in Switzerland, Turkey and Brazil.
It seems quite bizarre that anyone could mistake the letters S, K and Y, in that order, as part of that word, for the Sky group, but so Mr Murdoch seems to think and some EU bod appear to agree. Writs at the ready…
While the Sky/Skype thing sounds a little daft, the suit slapped on Google over its use of Java in Android by Oracle sounds a bit more like…ching-ching!
Android has recently been reported to have overtaken the iPhone as smartphone OS stakes. Now, many expected Oracle to be a tighter in its control of licensing around Java when it bought Sun, but this might be seen by some as an odd first gambit.
There could soon be a rather handsome, unspecified payment made, or some cosy agreement about future devices – watch this space.
Ltd
