Hewlett-Packard’s perhaps most respected board member, Marc Andreessen, wasted no time trashing its Silicon Valley antagonist, Oracle, at a conference Wednesday.
“The clock is really ticking,” he said about oldline software companies, singling out Oracle as “the most vivid case.”
Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, invests in upstart software companies such as cloud-storage service Box, which hosted the conference that Andreessen spoke at on Wednesday.
He also got in a dig at Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison. “Larry is one of my idols,” Andreessen said. “I wouldn’t quite say my role model,” he quickly followed up as the audience laughed.
HP and Oracle have feuded in court over Oracle’s hiring of ousted HP chief executive Mark Hurd. And the two companies are currently in litigation over Oracle’s announcement that its software would no longer support the Itanium chips co-developed by HP and Intel.
