because your analysis leaves me almost speechless. First off, there's a difference between a CEO and an emperor. Hurd was a manager, not the embodiment of the company. There are a dozen other execs at HP who would rank in the Fortune 500 if their divisions were separated out. There are some good candidates out there at smaller companies, people forget that Hurd came from a similar background.
From a financial standpoint, the numbers involved do not add up. It would take 110 billion dollars minimum to acquire HP, assuming it was a "friendly" takeover, making it the largest non-financial merger in history. A hostile takeover would be almost impossible to finance, even Ellison's pockets aren't that deep.
HP's market value is less than Oracle's for a major reason: HP has less than half the net margin than Oracle. There would have to be a hell of a lot of "synergy" to make up for that. Because Ellison owns so much Oracle stock and the stock would take a huge dilution hit EBITDA-wise, his personal fortune could potentially get cut in half from a merger. Why on earth would he do something like that?
Synergy? There is 100 percent overlap in all hardware product lines with Sun. Other than legacy services, you could instantly devalue 80 percent of the Sun acquisition. That's synergy? If Ellison wants synergy, he should buy Dell, which has little in the way of overlap with UNIX offerings, but much to offer in complementary Microsoft platforms. Dell himself is on the way out, unable to rescue the company he started.
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