A former vice president of Hewlett-Packard's printing division has been indicted by federal prosecutors for allegedly sharing with HP confidential information from his previous employer.
First reported by Wired, the indictment was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif. As director of sales and business development in IBM's printing division in March 2006, Atul Malhotra allegedly requested confidential information about IBM pricing. Just two months later, Malhotra took the position of vice president of HP's printing division.
In the indictment, prosecutors say Malhotra e-mailed the IBM information, marked "confidential," to an unnamed HP senior vice president on July 25, 2006, and again to another HP senior vice president two days later.
He was fired shortly thereafter, in September 2006, according to HP.
"The activity with which Malhotra is charged was in direct violation of clear HP policies, including HP Standards of Business Conduct," the company said in a statement. "HP detected this activity, conducted an internal investigation, terminated Malhotra's employment from HP, and reported the activity to appropriate enforcement agencies and to IBM. HP has cooperated fully with the government's investigation."
Update 4:26 p.m. PDT: I added a link to TechCrunch coverage. Update 12:39 p.m. PDT: I added the Yahoo response.
Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network Division
(Credit: Yahoo)Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo's Network Division, could be leaving the company, All Things D blogger Kara Swisher suggested late Tuesday.
An internal Yahoo announcement could come Wednesday, Swisher said on her blog, but it may not address Weiner's fate. People Swisher has spoken to "do not expect him to stay long, even leaving within the next few weeks, pointing to the continued uncertainty at the company and also, I would imagine, sheer weariness," she said.
Weiner has been on paternity leave for the last four weeks, she added.
The departure rumor was reinforced by discussions with venture capitalists who said Weiner could be joining a firm such as Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, or Sequoia Capital, she said.
Yahoo wouldn't shed any light on the subject. "We don't comment on rumors or speculation," the company said in a statement.
Meanwhile, TechCrunch also weighed in with a report citing unnamed sources that "Yahoo and Weiner are still negotiating his separation agreement, and will make an announcement 'imminently' about his departure."
(Credit:
Steve Tobak)
Here's the first installment of Train Wreck's first recurring post: Dysfunctional Executive Watch. It'll show up whenever there's enough material. Enjoy the lunacy, and let us know if you've got something to report.
You've got fraud
On Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges against eight former executives of AOL Time Warner for fraudulently inflating online advertising revenue by more than $1 billion. Four of the executives agreed to pay millions in fines and return ill-gotten gains. Charges against the other four, including former CFO John Michael Kelly, are still pending.
The company had previously agreed to fork over $500 million to settle civil and criminal charges brought by the SEC and the Justice Department. ... Read More
The latest executive to leave Motorola: Rich Nottenburg, chief strategy and technology officer.
The doors of the cell phone maker's executive offices seem to have been revolving nonstop since activist investor Carl Icahn, who took a leading role in the Microsoft-Yahoo merger fracas late this week, began his successful pursuit of Motorola board seats.
Nottenburg's departure, announced on Thursday to employees in an internal memo, according to Motorola spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson, follows the replacements of CEO Ed Zander in January, acting CFO Tom Meredith in February, and mobile-devices head Stu Reed and marketing head Casey Keller in March, along with treasurer Steve Strobel and EMEA mobile-devices head Mike Fenger.
"(Nottenburg) left to return to the New York area to be with his family and pursue other opportunities," Erickson told Reuters.
In April, Motorola posted a quarterly loss of $194 million. Weeks earlier, under pressure from investors such as Icahn, the struggling company announced that it would split into two publicly traded companies, one handling handsets and accessories, and the other taking on wireless broadband networks and enterprise-level communications services.
In the wake of Nottenburg's resignation, according to The Wall Street Journal, Motorola Labs will be directed by Dan Moloney, who leads the company's home and networks mobility business.
Who's next?
Congratulations, Larry Ellison, you're No. 1!
Forbes, as it does every year, has released its list of top executive salaries. In the overall list as well as the technology category, Ellison, the Oracle chief exec and billionaire yachtsman, was tops with total 2007 compensation at $192.9 million.
2007 was a very good year for Larry Ellison.
It's another big win for Ellison, who recently won a $3 million tax break on his $200 million estate in swanky Woodside, Calif. Ellison's lawyers successfully argued that the house suffered from "significant functional obsolescence" because it turns out there's a limited market for 23-acre estates built to look like 16th century Japanese summer palaces.
There were a few surprises as well as the usual cast of well-compensated characters. Second on the tech list was Nabeel Gareeb of MEMC Electronic Materials, a little-known silicon wafer manufacturing company in Missouri. Rounding out the top 10 were Cisco's John Chambers, Hewlett-Packard's Mark Hurd, Nividia's Jen-Hsun Huang, IBM's Sam Palmisano, Corning's Wendell Weeks, EMC's Joe Tucci, Agilent's William Sullivan, and Intel's Paul Otellini.
Just missing the top 10 were Apple's Steve Jobs at No. 11 and Sun's Jonathan Schwartz at No. 12. Being named on a tech exec compensation list is probably the last thing Schwartz needed Friday, given that Sun's share price dropped more than 22 percent in one day of trading, thanks to very disappointing earnings news.
As a rule, executives (particularly the ones at under-performing companies) hate making these lists, because of the inevitable "are shareholders really getting their money's worth?" questions they engender. I know this firsthand: I used to have the pleasure of calling people to let them know they made the grade for the top executive compensation list at BusinessWeek. Once, a well-known Silicon Valley mogul gave me an earful off the record. He said something along the lines of: "This is bull***t. And you know it's bull***t. And you can tell your boss it's bull***t."
Why was he so angry? The methodology for measuring executive compensation tends to vary from publication to publication. That makes some sense, of course, since the methodology (or rationale) for lavishing millions on executives tends to vary from company to company. Forbes' list relies on "calculating the overall compensation for the past year for executives, factoring in salary, cash bonuses, vested stock grants, stock gains and exercised stock options," according to the magazine.
This methodology can lead to wild fluctuations from year to year. Jobs topped the 2006 list with $646 million thanks to a stock package. But he slid to 11 in the 2007 with $14.6 million in annual compensation.
Take what you will from the Forbes list: You can argue some of the execs earned their money, you can say many of them didn't. But all of them probably make far more money than you and me.
Google has found its new chief information officer, CNET News.com has learned: Benjamin Fried, a programmer who rose through the ranks to run much of Morgan Stanley's computing infrastructure.
Google CIO Benjamin Fried
(Credit: Association for Computing Machinery)Fried, a managing director who led Morgan Stanley's Application Infrastructure group, will take the new post in May, Google spokesman Matt Furman confirmed Thursday.
According to an internal Morgan Stanley memo seen by News.com, Fried will leave Morgan Stanley at the end of the month "to pursue opportunities outside the firm."
The memo also indicated that Fried is no stranger to Google. While at Morgan Stanley, one of his projects was working on Google's initial public offering in 2004, the memo said.
Google's last CIO, Douglas Merrill, left earlier in April to become president of EMI's digital unit. Earlier this month, rumors surfaced that Fried would be Google's new CIO.
Running Google's computing infrastructure is a daunting challenge on which the company's success hinges. Google not only has thousands of servers housed in at least 36 data centers scattered around the globe, but also a build-it-yourself culture that means the company is responsible for maintaining much of its own technology.
Fried, who worked for Morgan Stanley computing operations for nearly 14 years, has experience in the area, though. According to the memo, he worked on Morgan Stanley's first Web site, its workstation software, and its intranet.
From the World Wide Web to high-end salami
Fried got in on the ground floor of the Web. According to his biography, while he was at Columbia University, he worked on the original World Wide Web software written by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
In his most recent work at Morgan Stanley, Fried ran a wide swath of essential technology operations that are part of the Application Infrastructure group. His purview included e-mail, grid computing, real-time market data, source code management for software projects, the Web site, instant messaging, and desktop software.
Before joining Morgan Stanley, he did some work for Heuristicrats Research that sounds right up Google's tech-savvy alley: he helped design what he calls the Decision-Theoretic Scheduler, technology to schedule jobs in a system that's got too much to do already. It's abstruse stuff, but it sounds like it would apply squarely to Google's computing challenges. NASA used it to schedule missions, he said.
Outside of his computing work, Fried's an Ultimate Frisbee fan with ailing knees and a partner in Fra' Mani Handcrafted Salumi, a Berkeley, Calif.-based maker of cured meats that was founded by chef Paul Bertolli.
I became a consultant in 2003, but not without some trepidation about leaving the safety net of the corporate world. It was hard to break away. I had worked in the tech industry for 23 years and, despite my reputation, a surprising number of apparently misguided companies wanted to hire me.
Still, my mind was made up. As one executive recruiter put it, you could put a fork in me; I was done.
So I told John Bourgoin, CEO of MIPS Technologies, that I would love to consult for him, but wasn't interested in joining the company.
John said he wouldn't hire me as a consultant. ... Read More
Microsoft said on Thursday that it has hired Tony Scott as chief information officer to head management of its internal IT systems.
Scott fills a position open since November, when Microsoft fired previous CIO Stuart Scott for violating company policies. The company did not disclose which policies those were. Tony Scott will report to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner.
In a statement, Turner said Scott's responsibilities will focus on making the most out of Microsoft's IT investments, providing feedback to Microsoft product groups, and sharing best practices with other high level IT executives.
Scott comes to Microsoft from Walt Disney, where he led a major IT infrastructure upgrade. Before that, he was chief technology officer at General Motors and vice president of operations at Bristol-Myers Squibb.
A friend once told me there are two reasons why people don't retire, and both are tragic: they either want to retire but can't, or they have no other interests but their work.
In July, Bill Gates will cease to be a full-time Microsoft employee. While he will remain the software giant's chairman, philanthropy will be the world's most famous geek's new full-time job.
With super-rich high-tech executives like Dell, Ellison, and Jobs still gainfully employed, who pegged Gates to opt out on the "other interests" clause? Not me; I thought he'd work at Microsoft until he keeled over. And philanthropy? That was doubly unexpected.
... Read MoreI don't know how many times I've read a post or an article by some small-minded, self-important journalist advising a public company's board of directors on how to "fix" the company. The most common advice is "sell the company," "fire the CEO," or better still, "fire all the executives."
Even if a company is screwing up, how is a journalist--whose entire management experience consists of looking at his watch to be sure he files a story by 3 p.m.--qualified to dole out management advice? Is mastery of a keyboard sufficient experience to know how to run a company?
... Read More
