• New York Times, Tuesday, August 10, 2010 10:41 AM

The 5,168 headlines Google carries about the ouster of Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark V. Hurd this morning are generally of two varieties. Some tell us that Hurd's payout could reach $40 million even as the company's stock price free falls (AP: "Hurd Reaps HP Payday As Investors Suffer"); others relate Oracle CEObro's Larry Ellison's outrage over Hurd's dismissal for expense account irregularities (Reuters: "Oracle's Ellison Blasts HP Board For Hurd's Exit").

The Los Angeles Times' David Sarno and Walter Hamilton lead with both notions and more, writing that HP "was left rudderless Monday, its stock foundering, its future uncertain and some investors questioning whether the ouster was necessary at all."

It is, no doubt, a public relations imbroglio of major proportions -- exactly what HP presumably hoped to avoid when, as the New York Times' Ashlee Vance and Matt Richtel report, it took the advice of PR firm APCO in firing Hurd to avoid what the image experts warned could be a headline-inducing sex scandal à la Tiger Woods. But an HP investigation concluded that no sexual misconduct took place; Jodie Fisher, the woman involved, says only that ""Mark and I never had an affair or intimate sexual relationship," regretting that he'd lost his job over the matter.

"What the expense fraud claims do reveal is an HP board desperately grasping at straws in trying to publicly explain the unexplainable; how a false sexual harassment claim and some petty expense report errors led to the loss of one of Silicon Valley's best and most respected leaders," Ellison wrote in an e-mail to the Times.

But others may agree with Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, an expert in corporate governance and senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management, who tells Vance and Richtel that HP's decision was "courageous" and that it "stands apart from other companies that have been scandalized in the headlines this year."

Then there's the matter of Fisher, who reportedly was preparing to file sexual harassment charges against Hurd. Acquaintances of the "B-movie actress " as the San Jose Mercury News characterized her in a headline, bemoaned the "bimboization of the 50-year-old divorced mother of a young son," as reporter Patrick May puts it. They say she is smart and articulate and is "very sad this whole thing happened," as one anonymous source claims, "especially when you're working for a company you loved working for."

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