My fellow Enterprise Irregulars were discussing the HP-Mark Hurd lawsuit yesterday and old Sun-Tzu came up ( digression – this is as close to author porn as you can get) and two of the reactions were:
“Art of War tells a General what to do, not a committee (board). Oracle has a general. HP not so much.”
“Art of War would send the ninjas over in the dead of night to Redmond Shores to cut their balls off. If sending these lawyers is the best Art of War HP can come up with, Larry and Mark are going to laugh all the way to the bank. “
Well, they accurately called HP. Today acting CEO Cathie Lesjak goes:
“At the end of the day business will prevail. Ultimately we’ll go back to being good partners. I believe HP is important to Oracle and Oracle is an important partner of ours,”
Are you kidding me? Have they learned nothing from how Oracle has twisted and turned its “important partner” SAP in that lawsuit? If you want to go after Oracle (oh wait, HP says it is suing Mark, not Oracle – yeah, right) you need a Churchill, not a Chamberlain.
You need a street fighter like Rimini Street. Seth Ravin, the CEO, is quoted in my book about his firm’s legal tangles with Oracle:
“Oracle started this war. I intend to finish it with a clearly free and open market for enterprise support providers.”
In the meantime, another EI came up with another Art of War metaphor
“A little more hammering on the stock price by Larry (Art of War redux) and he might be able to land HP for (that) $70B.”
Like I said it will be an interesting OOW. Fusion? What’s that?
