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Just when it seemed as if Oracle and Hewlett-Packard had patched up their differences following the hiring of Mark Hurd, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison publicly trashed HP's decision to hire former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker as its new CEO.
"HP had several good internal candidates ... but instead they pick a guy who was recently fired because he did such a bad job of running SAP," Ellison said in an e-mail to The Wall Street Journal, according to a posting on the publication's Web site Monday.
In his note Ellison went so far as to say HP's board members should resign for their actions. "None of the HP board members own much HP stock so they have little to lose," he wrote, according to the Journal. "But the HP employees, customers, partners and shareholders will suffer. The HP board needs to resign en masse ... right away. The madness must stop."
Oracle hired Hurd as co-president in mid-September, about one month after he was forced out from HP after he was found to have violated HP's standards of business conduct.
Last week, in a surprise move, HP hired Apotheker to replace Hurd. Apotheker, who held a number of posts at SAP over a 20-year span, stepped down after less than a year as that company's CEO in February after the company's poor performance in 2009.
NEXT: Ups, Downs Of The HP-Oracle Partnership
