This time Ellison publicly derided HP’s hiring of Leo Apotheker, former SAP CEO, to take the top job at HP.  Once again, Ellison’scritique took the form of a letter emailed to a publication–The Wall Street Journal. HP clearly had not solicited his opinion and did not comment on the Wall Street Journal blog.  

While Ellison was clearly not struck dumb by Apotheker’s hiring, he nonetheless proclaimed himself “speechless.”

 “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 wrote.

In fact, many HP watchers had hoped the company would draw from its bench–picking Todd Bradley, Ann Livermore, or Dave Donatelli to be its next CEO. Instead it opted for Apotheker, who spent more than 20 years at SAP and was ousted last year after SAP struggled for credibility in the SaaS realm and had launched and rescinded a support price hike on its software.

But, Apotheker does bring HP years of enterprise software experience just as former HP CEO Mark Hurd brings Oracle much-needed hardware expertise.

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