Ellison and his company cast an outsized shadow in Silicon Valley, but they’re much less known outside. The reason is what they’ve been selling for decades: products that are aimed at what they call “the enterprise” in tech and financial circles — enterprises like governments, universities and an assortment of big and smaller companies. The flagship for years was database software; a database is, essentially, a place where people store their digital data in various ways so they can easily retrieve and manipulate it later.

In recent years, however, Oracle has been on an acquisition binge. Among the more notable purchases were PeopleSoft, which sold the leading enterprise products for managing things like customer relations and personnel, and Sun, a pioneer in high-end server hardware and software. There’s a more than reasonable likelihood that the computers processing your payroll check use Oracle software, but it’s not nearly so likely that your IT department has standardized on Sun/Oracle hardware unless you are in a few specific industries where Sun had major market share.

The Sun purchase was a fascinating shift for Oracle, which had for the most part been a software company, creating products that ran on a variety of hardware from the leading computer and server makers including Sun, IBM, HP, Fujitsu and Intel-based manufacturers. All of a sudden, with Sun in the fold, Oracle had gone vertical — systems that include proprietary hardware and software — and it was now competing with the companies that were its partners. This is nothing new in Silicon Valley, where businesses compete and cooperate (“co-opetition,” as some call it), but it has changed Oracle’s focus in some ways that have to make the other hardware companies nervous. How sure can they be anymore of their partner’s devotion to the long-term success of their collaboration?

Oracle has adoped Sun’s goal of taking market share away from IBM and the other big-iron companies, and why not? No one seems to need less computing power, and many of the large enterprises of the planet like a soup-to-nuts approach. Oracle’s Sun-based offerings include the popular Exadata series of machines; on Monday, new co-president Mark Hurd, late of HP in a corporate sicko soap opera, announced new models with lots of advanced features. 

But Ellison spent much more of his time Sunday talking about what’s obviously going to be a big-deal product for Oracle: the Exalogic line of machines aimed at the latest industry trend: cloud computing. Grossly oversimplified, this is Internet-based computing where users share resources that can live anywhere, as opposed to on your desk or in your company’s server room. Meanwhile, Oracle is merging the various software products it’s developed and bought into a mega-offering it calls Fusion, which will run on a variety of computers but, as you’re beginning to guess, will probably run best on Oracle’s boxes.

The more I heard him emphasize his company’s new focus on merging hardware and software, however, the more I heard an echo of a company run by one of Ellison’s longtime best friends, Steve Jobs. This is precisely the approach Apple takes with its products, hardly any of which are aimed at the enterprise: a tight integration of the machines and the code. If Ellison wants to be the Apple of the enterprise, he’s set out an ambitious goal. This will remain interesting to watch.

 This could get ugly. Oh, wait, it already is.

Oracle’s move to bring in Hurd wasn’t surprising in light of Ellison’s effusive praise for his former counterpart at HP. Then again, Ellison has never exactly been a paragon of virtue himself; for example, I remember him defending his company’s hiring of a detective to dumpster-dive Microsoft’s third-party allies during the antitrust battles the software giant fought in the 1990s, when Oracle was a deep and abiding enemy.

The instant analyses of HP’s lawsuit today are already running fast and furious. The Wall Street Journal has unpacked the legal document in plain English, which makes me wonder just what HP believes it’s going to win here.

The bottom line is that HP apppears to believe that Hurd basically had no right, after being paid gazillions to leave and signing an employment agreement with at least some safeguards, to then walk into a competing firm down the street.

Oracle is much more of a competitor today than it was a year ago. Since then, among other moves, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, which makes some of the same kinds of big hardware (servers and storage, in particular) that HP sells.

The whole thing adds a layer of bafflement to the already bizarre circumstances of Hurd’s departure from HP, which seem to have involved some kind of relationship with a woman who wasn’t his wife as well as some expense-account mischief. The company has been remarkably opaque about what happened, so it’s possible that Ellison was entirely correct to slam the board’s action. It’s also entirely possible that there’s serious dirt under these rocks. Maybe we’ll know someday.

It’s worth noting, in all this, that investors only care about ethics if they see some effect on share prices. So it speaks volumes that Oracle’s stock price jumped on Tuesday.

Interestingly, as the Wall Street Journal reports, “notably missing from the defendants’ list are Microsoft, in which Mr. Allen remains a major investor, and Amazon.com Inc., which is based in Mr. Allen’s hometown of Seattle. [A spokesman for Allen] “declined to comment on the selection of defendants.”

The absence is notable because a cursory look at the patents in question suggests that they are broad enough in scope that just about anybody with a state-of-the-art website could be construed as operating in violation of them. But the practices covered by the patents are also so obvious that there is little question that Microsoft and Amazon must also be engaging in them too. So are those companies paying license fees to Interval? And if so, why not disclose that?

Here are the four patents:

• United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”
• United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
• United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
• United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”

The first patent (507) is summarized in the complaint as having to do with “making and using websites, hardware, and software to categorize, compare, and display segments of a body of information …” The second (652) deals with “making, using, offering, providing, and encouraging customers to use products that display information in a way that occupies the peripheral attention of the user…”

But the last patent (682) is the most intriguing, so I pulled up the legal filing that included the actual patent.

Here’s the abstract describing the patent:

Disseminating to a participant an indication that an item accessible by the participant via a network is of current interest is disclosed. An indication that the item is of current interest is received in real time. The indication is informed that the time is of current interest.

You see, there’s just a whole lot of stuff out there on the Web, and it’s changing all the time, and it’s very confusing.

…[T]his proliferation of content, such as audio, image, and video content, presents certain challenges from the perspective of users seeking content of current interest. First the sheer volume of content available makes it difficult for users to find the content in which they are most interested in accessing at any given time. Apart from having to sort through the enormous volume of content available, much of the content of potentially greatest interest, at least to many users, is dynamic. At certain times, a file or other electronic resource may be of great interest while at other times, or perhaps even most of the time, it is not of great interest or not interesting at all.

So here’s a brilliant idea! Let’s come up with a dynamically generated alert system to solve this problem. We’ll patent it, but fail to incorporate it in a product, and then a few years down the line, when we suddenly notice that all the major Web-based businesses have somehow coincidentally also realized that this was a great idea, we’ll sue them. Easy money!

HTWW has long tended to take a dim view of companies that rely on intellectual property litigation as their primary form of revenue. But one has to imagine that Allen thinks he has a pretty good case, simply from the sheer scale of his attack. You don’t sue the entire aristocracy of the Web (aside from Microsoft and Amazon) lightly. Just choosing to sue Google and Apple alone demonstrates remarkable chutzpah.

Nonetheless, the entire spectacle is ridiculous and Paul Allen should be embarrassed. Allen has been spectacularly unsuccessful in many of his post-Microsoft endeavors, and I’m betting he will fail here too. Dynamic alerts? Attracting peripheral attention? Using a browser to make sense of information? These are ways of exploiting the Web that are beyond obvious, as proven simply by the fact that all the companies named in Allen’s lawsuit would be regarded as run by abject imbeciles if they did not incorporate such features.

Interval Research employed oodles of top computer scientists in its heyday, but if this was the best they could come up with in terms of potentially commercializable patents, no wonder Allen ended up shutting the lab down.

When a journalist as smart as the New York Times’ Joe Nocera is reduced to sheer speculation — he believes the board canned Hurd essentially because they and the employees had come to despise the guy — you know that the situation has spun wildly out of bounds.

I don’t buy Nocera’s take for one main reason. The board totally enabled Hurd to become one of the greedier and nastier CEOs of recent times. He is clearly a talented man, but his record at HP wasn’t entirely the triumph that his acolytes in the business press trumpted. His tenure featured mega-slashing of people, and mega-enriching of himself and his insider cronies.

I’m as lost as everyone else when it comes to understanding precisely what, if anything, transpired between Hurd and Jodie Fisher. She’s the actor who was, apparently, being paid $5,000 a pop to be a hostess at HP events.

I say “apparently” because, like everyone else except the insiders who do know, I’m not sure what happened. HP’s stonewalling on just about everything has been epic, and in particular the company hasn’t come close to clean about the precise nature of their relationship.

 One question that has a plain answer is this one: What happened to the HP of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the men who built a company that held human beings — and their humanity and communities — as essential to the mission as anything the people created?

What happened was this: It was destroyed by market and political conditions that encouraged boards and CEOs to exemplify the worst of American capitalism.

HP’s board has dug itself a deep hole, and it keeps digging. I take some comfort in knowing that Marc Andreessen is becoming a more visible board member, because I have trouble believing he’s comfortable with what’s going on at HP. I have absolutely no inside knowledge, but I find myself hoping he’s leading a board uprising. Someone needs to do it. Quickly.

Whitman, at least, knew how to run a company. She was a strong leader at eBay, a company that innovated in many areas as it became by far the largest service of its kind.

Like some other big tech companies of the era, however, eBay also resorted to over-the-top tactics to stifle competition. In 2000, it persuaded a federal judge in California that Bidder’s Edge, a company that offered price comparisons across multiple auction sites, was “trespassing” on its servers — a ruling that threatened “the very foundations of the Web,” according to some of America’s top cyber-law experts. (An appeal was dropped in a settlement, and a California Supreme Court decision in a different case appeared to contradict the district judge’s ruling.)

But my chief recollection of Whitman was her participation in the culture of greed that overcame Silicon Valley. While she was CEO of eBay, her company sent lots of business to Goldman Sachs. Goldman put her on its board of directors, “paying her an estimated $475,000 for little more than a year of part-time service” and — in a practice known as “spinning” — it gave her “insider access to the initial public offerings of hot stocks worth millions,” according to California Watch’s recent round-up of the Whitman-Goldman ties. (Whitman has denied any connection between her eBay role and Goldman’s offering her IPO stocks at insider prices.)

Now, I agree with Whitman and her defenders who say it’s absurd to blame her for Wall Street’s hugely cynical, and in some cases probably illegal, manipulations during the housing bubble of the last decade; she was on Goldman’s board for only 15 months, after all, and that stint ended in 2002. It’s all the other stuff of that earlier era– especially the spinning — that speaks to her personal values.

One of her defenses has been that, well, the spinning didn’t bring her much money (about $1.8 million, which later went back to shareholders in a lawsuit settlement) in the context of the enormous personal wealth her eBay holdings had provided, as if it’s OK to do something unethical as long as the relative numbers are small. And in April, she told the AP that she wouldn’t do it again, but called the practice part of the “normal course of business” of the era.

That’s the point: Spinning was normal for all too many of Silicon Valley’s hotshots back then. It was also cynical and outrageous, part of the dismal value system of the time that went, roughly, “What’s acceptable is what you can get away with.”

Fiorina, for her part, was part of an ascendant valley culture of a different kind. She wasn’t as terrible a CEO of Hewlett-Packard as her critics maintained, but her pay certainly dwarfed her performance. The board had ample reason to force her out in 2005, and her platinum parachute of more than $20 million made more than a few admirers of the old HP gag even though it had become (and remains) a too-standard practice in corporate America.

For those who remembered the old HP, Fiorina’s tenure was marked most dismally by her  dismantling of something core to the valley. This was a vision and practice called the “HP Way” — a corporate culture created by the founders, William Hewlett and David Packard, who believed and acted as though employees and communities were as important as shareholders and executives. More than a few of the companies that rose in the valley in the wake of HP’s pathbreaking success held some or all of these notions as foundations, too.

Fiorina didn’t start the process of ending the HP Way, but she pretty much finished it. Even if she’d been a good CEO in other ways, that part of her tenure will remain her most lasting contribution — and not a positive one.

A longtime participant in the tech and media worlds, Dan Gillmor is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. Follow Dan on Twitter. More about Dan here.