Mark Hurd, former president of HP in Silicon Valley, is excited about his prospects at Oracle. Because of the software giant’s deep reach into the business ecology, they are in a position to leverage their virtual monopoly to create very useful and innovative technologies for all involved. It all depends. Some companies in similar positions get lazy and just let their momentum take over the market as long as they can… we shall see.
Mark Hurd: ‘I felt Oracle was in a position to do something nobody else could do’
By Christopher Williams
7:00PM BST 26 May 2012Mark Hurd is mounting his own Silicon Valley comeback.
In 2010, his friend and tennis partner, Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison, gave him a job and blasted the Hewlett Packard board that had ousted him amid sexual-harassment allegations for having made “the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs”.
A Jobs-style messianic return to HP is out of the question and the comparison between the two men bears no further scrutiny, but sitting in Oracle’s preternaturally bland Moorgate offices, Hurd, 55, and now co-president of Oracle, knows he has at least landed on his feet. (read more)
The most insightful comment Mark Hurd had to make in his interview was his generational concept of customer service… “I’m old…” he begins, and relates that his generation is used to crappy customer service. Not getting a response or being stuck at a call center on hold for fifteen minutes is the status quo that nobody in his age group would even flinch at. Not so with his daughter’s generation: they want answers immediately, and will take their business and searches where they can get that response time. An allusion was made in this respect to mobile computing platforms and this demand for immediate information access from future, younger generations of consumers.
