In the race for distinction by dysfunction, scoring an own-goal is helpful. But from time to time, it does not hurt to have an assist. We're referring, of course, to the lack of love between Oracle and Hewlett Packard. Here's the latest installment, a press release from Oracle 28 September, reproduced without edits or comments.

"After HP agreed to acquire Autonomy for over $11.7 billion dollars, Oracle commented that Autonomy had been ‘shopped’ to Oracle as well, but Oracle wasn’t interested because the price was way too high. Mike Lynch, Autonomy CEO, then publically denied that his company had been shopped to Oracle. Specifically, Mr. Lynch said, “If some bank happened to come with us on a list, that is nothing to do with us.” Mr. Lynch then accused of Oracle of being ‘inaccurate’. Either Mr. Lynch has a very poor memory or he’s lying. ‘Some bank’ did not just happen to come to Oracle with Autonomy ‘on a list.’ The truth is that Mr. Lynch came to Oracle, along with his investment banker, Frank Quattrone, and met with Oracle’s head of M&A, Douglas Kehring and Oracle President Mark Hurd at 11 am on April 1, 2011. After listening to Mr. Lynch’s PowerPoint slide sales pitch to sell Autonomy to Oracle, Mr. Kehring and Mr. Hurd told Mr. Lynch that with a current market value of $6 billion, Autonomy was already extremely over-priced. The Lynch shopping visit to Oracle is easy to verify. We still have his PowerPoint slides.”

The latest reputation numbers from Steel City Re show no material change from last week, if you consider another 4% relative under performance immaterial. The alleged overpayment by HP for Autonomy by nearly $6B is impressing no one that hasn't already formed an opinion on Hewlett Packard's (NYSE:HPQ) reputation. At the close of trading 29 September, HP was ranked in the 47th percentile relative to the 17 companies in the Computer Processing Hardware sector. This is up a notch from the 41st percentile last week. Its exponentially weighted reputational ranking volatility is up from last week's 460% to 512%, while both the reputational vector and velocity are negative at 19.6% and 41% respectively compared to -15% and -46% last week, respectively.


 Economically, the performance is poor with a trailing twelve month return on equity that is under performing the median of the peer group by 33.05% down approximately 4% from last week's 29.28% under performance leading us to affirm that the expectations set by a board -- its reputation -- are material.