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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hueyone who wrote (18211)	7/18/2003 2:43:54 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 19079

well hueyone, It is difficult to quantify who should get excessive pay and who should not. If you ask me this question today, I would say Chambers deserves to be one of the most highly compensated CEOs in the industry along with Michael Dell and Steve Jobs. I would say that even if Cisco were operating at a loss, because my feeling is that Cisco has played this recession better than any other company, they put their once strong competition out of business or marginilized them, they came up with new products like wifi phones that are impressive etc. My point is that there is more to look at in times like this than earnings for whether a CEO has played his cards well. And of course you ask a different person, get a different answer as to whether a CEO is good or not. Wrt Siebel, up until this recession I would have said Tom deserved the same compensation as Chambers. This is because his company invented what is now the most important area in apps. But he has not executed in this decline, I know. Still the game is not over. I would say Sebl should NOT have received high levels of compensation (options or otherwise) for his last 3 years's work. Now Oracle. Sure Oracle is profitable, because they have the engine locked up, engine business is like msft, an outstanding revenue stream with almost none of the customization issues you have with apps (you don't get as much leverage at apps because customers demands are so different). But the apps side of the house, which is where the GROWTH is in this industry, and specifically the CRM product which is the highest potential large growth area, was mismanaged more than I've ever seen at a fortune 500 company. I'm talking about stupid, stupid mistakes that were made. Oracle was locked out of accounts like netscreen in their own backyard for apps, even though netscreen of course is using the Oracle engine! So Larry is not like Chambers or Mike Dell, etc. He cannot morph into a new business with new products painlessly and leverage his installed base. So even though Oracle is profitable now, they have not set them up for the future where the growth is (apps). I would rate Larry far below Tom Siebel for his applications expertise. The database engine business is a no brainer at this point with its mkt share so no real huge kudos from me on that. My belief is that Larry knows he can't manage apps and decided to kill his competition with this unfriendly takeover, it is the only way he can succeed here- the cowards way out. And how did he manage this takeover, well? I think not. He still might get psft but customers are furious, they don't trust Larry (who would?). He could have handled this so much better. So based on all these screwups I don't think Larry deserves much in the way of compensation these last few years. Personally I would pay Tom Siebel more than Larry here, not a huge amount more, but more. Chambers, Dell and Jobs should get million share options grants. One thing I discovered is that there are a lot of people like you who only know how to evaluate companies based on their current level of profitability. To me that is a bogus way to look at tech companies. I'm not interested in investing in a company who uses the hueyone performance metric of whatever earnings are at this moment to pay CEOs, because that overcompensates people like Larry and underpays the Steve Jobs of the world who have more vision.