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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

At HP, Hurd was famous for ruthlessly cutting jobs. If I were a former Sun employee, I would be very scared of this guy.

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Hurd's only real achievement at HP was finishing Fiorina's work and applying the coup de grace to the HP Way. HPers loathe him. They'd have been dancing in the street when he left, if they didn't know that the board was so happy with his performance that his successor was guaranteed to carry on in the same style.

Of course, if there are Oracle employees who have a problem working for people with Hurd's attitude, they haven't been paying attention.

I worked for Snapfish (division of HP) for about six months last year. It was quite disappointing. This isn't a company that's ever going to innovate again.

I grew up loving HP calculators, and detest anything that doesn't run on RPN. I have an HP-15c app on my iPhone (notibly, not the one done by HP, which is inferior.)

Carly and then Turd killed any sort of innovation in this company. They're purest evil, and I can see why Oracle would like to hire this sort of executive.

Why are they evil? Maybe they're just business people. This is an honest question. You're not the only person I've heard react that way. Merely cutting R&D just doesn't seem inherently evil to me, even if it turns out to be the wrong decision.

I think he means 'evil' in a 'you just ruined something that I thought was great' sense.

Could mean evil in terms of 'destroying long term opportunity for short term profit'.

Not exactly. HP developed the first Memristor.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2010/apr-jun/memristor.html

I speculated what he meant, I didn't make the claim myself.

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