Lol… HP once again demonstrating it’s retardedness.
Dude, you asked the guy to leave.
SAN FRANCISCO — The computer maker, Hewlett-Packard, has gone to court to try and stop its former chief executive, Mark V. Hurd, from joining a rival, Oracle.
H.P. filed a lawsuit Tuesday in a California state court.
Late on Monday, Oracle announced that Mr. Hurd had joined the company as a president and a director. Mr. Hurd resigned from H.P. one month ago, after an investigation by the board into a personal relationship with a contractor turned up questionable expense reports.
Oracle’s chief executive and largest shareholder, Lawrence J. Ellison, a personal friend of Mr. Hurd’s, had criticized H.P.’s board last month in an e-mail message, saying it was “the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago.”
Oracle’s decision to hire Mr. Hurd presented Silicon Valley with a true soap opera, filled with fierce business dealings and saucy relationships.
H.P. has long been one of Oracle’s largest partners in the business computing market. H.P. sells the computer servers and storage systems that customers use to run Oracle’s database software. But Oracle has just acquired Sun Microsystems, one of H.P.’s longtime rivals in the hardware market.
Oracle has, in particular, used Sun’s technology to build a new line of data warehousing systems that can sort through huge volumes of information like sales trends, pricing and inventory levels.
Before joining H.P. as its chief executive in 2005, Mr. Hurd was chief executive of NCR, which had the leading data warehousing technology.
He arrived in Silicon Valley five years ago, seeking to prove himself as a chief executive on the biggest stage.
He succeeded in that respect by pushing H.P. past I.B.M. as the largest technology company and turning in some of the most consistent financial results in the industry.
But Mr. Hurd’s time at the top came crashing down after H.P.’s board began investigating sexual harassment claims presented by Jodie Fisher, a former contractor.
The company discovered that Mr. Hurd authorized paying Ms. Fisher, a 50-year-old former actress in sexually charged films who had also posed for Playboy in college, to attend gatherings with H.P.’s top customers.
H.P. found no evidence of sexual harassment, but said Mr. Hurd had tried to conceal a personal relationship with Ms. Fisher by removing her name from his expenses for meals.
Mr. Hurd settled with Ms. Fisher for an undisclosed sum and fought H.P.’s decision to make the sexual harassment claims public.
