SAN JOSE—Attorneys for Hewlett Packard have spent much of the past month in a $3 billion trial against Oracle Corp. rebutting the notion that a once-lucrative HP server technology already was on the way out before Oracle yanked its software support. But in closing remarks Wednesday, one of HP’s lead attorneys reinforced this message: That doesn’t actually matter.
“Even if it was true, it’s no excuse,” said Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Jeffrey Thomas, who has been HP’s man at the lectern for much of the prolonged trial. Thomas stressed to the jury that the decisive issue must be whether Oracle’s 2011 announcement that it would stop development for HP’s Itanium chip-based servers breached a contract from the year before.
