Lots of good points in there and I just had dinner with two ex Oracle sales people who would agree with you that the company was behind in recognizing and capitalizing on some trends. I believe GE said the same. And to be fair to Tom Siebel, I think he did wind up giving back much of his option grants back for recent years.
Nevertheless, I don't see anything wonderful about Tom's management if the company has never even been profitable when all the expenses, including stock option expense, are considered. This has been going on about eight years now; When is the rubber going to meet the road for this executive's performance?
Good managment doesn't just grow the sales or beat the competition, they grow the profits, allocate capital wisely and make a good return on capital invested. Yet Silicon Valley has managed to persuade investors to hold SV managment to an incredibly low level of accountability to receive their outsize pay---mostly by grossly overstating performance and hyping visions that will probably never come to pass. It is absolutely ridiculous imo to pay a guy like Tom Siebel hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for running a company that has never even been profitable when all the expenses are counted.
I notice you use the word "vision" a lot. Imo, the greatest vision that Silicon Valley execs have had is correctly recognizing the stupidity of the investor audience they hype their "peformance" to. With that being said, I have much more respect for some of the old school, pre nineties tech execs, Ellison, Gates and Grove for example, who successfully competed in a time when companies didn't fake performance with phony pro forma numbers to the extent they do today.
By the way, Chambers and Cisco's performance has never even been remotely close to what the company has claimed with respect to profitability. Their reported numbers were as bad and as misleading as they come during the time Cisco was leading the market in the late nineties. And this would still be the case even if you did not believe that options were an expense. It was proforma numbers reporting abuse run rampant.
JMO, Huey |
