Daily Archives: September 22, 2006

HP: Dunn is out and the pressure is on Hurd

I was asked by the Wall Street Journal to “blog” the announcement by CEO Mark Hurd today about the spy scandal that just won’t go away. Here is the concluding comment I sent:

Today was an effort to sacrifice the queen in order to save the king. But nothing suggests that HP is Bobby Fischer or Gary Kasparov. It has been bungled from the beginning and goes back to the amateurish behavior of Keyworth and Perkins who used leaks for their own political purposes. In my view, Hurd will end up out of HP within a few months as the lawyers, prosecutors and politicians descend on the company. This is a sad day for Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, my engineer father reminds me that the real HP, the HP of garage startup fame, is really not this HP – it is Agilent, the instrument company spun off by HP a few years back. No such scandal seems to have engulfed that entity located just down the road from HP’s headquarters in Palo Alto. Thank god for small miracles – maybe there is hope for the Valley after all.

AppleInsider | Disney chief "giddy" about Apple’s iTV media hub

The potential for “synergy” between Silicon Valley and Hollywood continues to grow – Disney’s Bob Iger certainly is happy about it as his recent remarks to an investment banking conference suggest. Apple’s new iTV strategy suggests the possibility of rescuing television from its doldrums by squeezing a revenue stream from the new digitial video recorder technology that more and more consumers (me, too!) can no longer live without. This prospect makes the Disney CEO positively “giddy” with delight.

AppleInsider | Disney chief talks up Apple’s iTV media hub