Posts Tagged ‘press’

Conduct Unbecoming A Public Company Board Of Directors

One thing you have to respect about Yahoo’s board of directors – no matter how much the press criticizes them for making painfully awful strategic decisions, they keep their chin up and at least maintain some level of basic decorum. The Hewlett Packard board has no such qualms. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard must be turning in their graves.

Clearly the board feels as though they are unjustifiably under fire from the press over the firing of CEO Mark Hurd, and the New York Times in particular. But they’re fighting back in a way that is unbecoming. And the fight seems to be more about making the board of directors feel better about themselves as individuals, rather than acting in the best interest of the company that they have a duty to serve.

The New York Times’ Joe Nocera has been the guy in front of the Anti-HP parade. In this zinger – titled H.P.’s Blundering Board – Nocera doesn’t criticize the H.P. board for firing Hurd, but he does criticize them for suing Hurd joined that company as president.

And H.P. deserved that criticism. They really stepped in it with the lawsuit.

And Nocera put a target squarely on his chest with that post. Soon Ben Horowitz, business partner to H.P. board member Marc Andreessen, was preaching about business ethics and how right H.P. was to fire Hurd. Nocera was named in that blog post, but nowhere was there a discussion of the lawsuit that most irked Nocera.

Horowitz disclosed his conflict of interest, which was the correct thing to do – that post was the H.P. board’s first volley against press that had been critical of them.

Then came incoming chairman Ray Lane’s complaint to the New York Times, strategically leaked to press, that claims Nocera “grossly mischaracterizes the facts about why Mark Hurd had to leave HP.” This letter referred to a second article by Nocera, mostly questioning H.P.’s decision to hire Léo Apotheker as their new CEO.

And once again Hurd was dragged through the mud. And called a liar. Classy.

That was the second attack by the H.P. board against Nocera.

But they’re not done. And this time they’ve got a real hook. Nocera screwed up and didn’t disclose a rather large conflict of interest, that his fiance is the director of communications for Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the law firm that represents Oracle in its suit against SAP.

That was the knockout punch. Nocera is done talking about H.P., I’d wager. And a statement has been added to the end of his last article by the New York Times:

In the Talking Business column in Business Day on Saturday, Joe Nocera wrote about a lawsuit by Oracle against a division of SAP, claiming theft of intellectual property. Mr. Nocera learned after the column was published that Oracle was represented by the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, where his fiancée works as director of communications. To avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, Mr. Nocera would not have written about the case if he had known of the law firm’s involvement.

Nocera’s conflict of interest aside (this is the gotcha type of conflict, not something that likely had any real impact on what he wrote), one thing is clear. If you’re press and you’re criticizing H.P., watch out. They’ll hit you back, and keep hitting until you’re done.

Those of us in the news business love to cat fight occasionally, and I’ve taken more than a few jabs at the New York Times over the years. But this is different. It smells like bullying, and I don’t like it one bit.

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Conduct Unbecoming A Public Company Board Of Directors

LIVE: Facebook’s Big Announcements

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Facebook is about to announce some major changes. The question is: What is about to change?

Many Mashable readers suspect that Facebook is about to announce the integration of Skype and Facebook chat. However, we’ve heard rumors that the world’s largest social network is instead about to unveil a completely new design. We doubt Facebook would invite the entire press corp to its headquarters for anything less than a major overhaul.

That’s why we’re here live at Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto, California for today’s unveiling. We’re about to find out just what the company has been cooking up for the last couple months. Will it fundamentally change Facebook? Will users revolt? What surprises does the company have in store?

Here are my live notes:

Facebook’s Press Event: Live Notes

All times are in Pacific Standard Time

10:40 AM: Zuck is on stage, and says that the speculation so far has been off the mark. He’s going to reveal something more fundamental about social network

10:42: They’ve been on a 60 day lockdown to get today’s features ready for today.

10:43: Facebook Places is already the biggest location app on the market and is growing fast. Hoping to roll it out further over the next few months. He’s also covering recent changes to Games and the continued rollout of Facebook Questions.

10:45: First slide: “Giving you more control.” Zuck is discussing building a broad social platform that developers can build social apps upon. It can be like the desktop.

10:47: Three announcements.

10:48: There are over 1 million sites using Facebook Connect. It’s just a one-way system though; you can’t use it to download their information.

10:49: Announcement: Download Your Information. It’s exactly as it sounds; it lets you download your Facebook data.

10:50: Dashboard for Applications You Use revealed. Alllows you to anage your apps in a simple way.

10:51: Now the company’s product manager for open source is on stage discussing Download Your Information.

10:53: It’s made for regular users. You start the process, Facebook lets you know when your data is ready to be downloaded, and then you have a zip file with your profile info, photos you’ve been tagged in, videos, friends, etc.

10:54: Now the company is discussing the application dashboard. There used to be two separate screens for managing apps, but now there is just one. You get a list of recent apps you’ve used, which you can then drill down into and see what permissions you’ve given it.

10:57: Now here’s the real meat of today’s announcement. Zuck is now going to focus on “the biggest problem in social networking.”

10:58: You have these different social circles and you want to interact with them in different groups, ways, etc. Some are work friends, some are family, etc. It’s been easy so far to share with everybody publicly or sharing with just friends privately, but not share with a small group of people.

11:00: This a problem applicable to all the social apps in the social ecosystem. So how do you solve this problem? The company has focused on letting you map your friends but how do you mak out all of your real-world groups?

11:01: If we can do this, then we can unlock a huge amount of sharing that they don’t do because it’s annoying or they’re scared of sharing certain things in large scale.

11:02: The first solution is friend lists. It’s a lot of work though. A lot of people have to pick and choose on Facebook events, making ti annoying. It’s not easy to just invite co-workers to events. Part of the solution is a product interface that makes it easier to manage the friend lists.

11:02: In reality, nobody wants to make lists.