Opsware's sale to Hewlett-Packard netted founder Marc Andreessen a cool $98,279,186.25. [DocuDrama]

J.T. Wang, the chairman of Acer, looks like such a nice guy. But appearances are deceiving. The Taiwanese businessman is determined to keep his PC maker from becoming an also-ran. His company just announced plans to buy Gateway, the once-famed PC seller bruised by competition with Dell and Hewlett-Packard, for $710 million. The deal cuts at Chinese archrival Lenovo twice — first, by vaulting Acer past Lenovo into third place for PC market share. Second, by disrupting Lenovo's plans to buy Packard Bell, a fading PC brand that's still strong in Europe. Gateway, from a past acquisition, got rights of first refusal on any deal to buy Packard Bell — and Acer now plans to exercise those rights. Let's see — for a mere $710 million, Wang gets bragging rights, a bigger share of the vital U.S. market, and a way to bloody a rival's nose. Sounds cheap to me.

News.com reporters Dawn Kawamoto, Stephen Shankland and Tom Krazit, whose phone records were scrutinized by private investigators from Hewlett-Packard, today filed suit against HP, former HP Board of Directors chair Patricia Dunn, and former HP lawyer Kevin Hunsaker. [News.com]

Hewlett-Packard announced a color-matching mobile technology yesterday, pitching it as a tool for picking the perfect makeup for a given skin-tone using a color index and a mobile phone. Here are some other uses they considered and wisely rejected.

Spotted on the remainders table at a Barnes & Noble, selling for $5.98 a copy: Sex and the Single Zillionaire, former Hewlett-Packard director Tom Perkins's salacious romance. No wonder Perkins was so desperate to have then-chairman Pattie Dunn flog the book to HP employees.

Hewlett-Packard is getting into the makeup game. [ColourLovers]

Google expands its headquarters, again, this time renting out the former home of Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, a site five miles away from the current Googleplex. [San Jose Mercury News]

If there's one thing Michael Capellas knows, it's how to make money fast. After becoming Compaq's CEO in 1999, he turned the company around — and turned around and sold it to Hewlett-Packard in 2002. Tenure as CEO? Three years. He then joined the bankrupt MCI in December2002. MCI emerged from bankruptcy in 2004, and by February 2005, Capellas sold MCI to Verizon for $7.6 billion. Tenure as CEO? Just over two years. Now, Capellas, most recently an advisor to Silver Lake Partners, was named CEO of First Data Corporation, a payment-processing company recently taken private by KKR. Tenure as CEO? At the rate he's going, Capellas still being the CEO of First Data in 2009 would be a real surprise. (Photo by Ben Baker for Fortune)

Sprint is unilaterally canceling the accounts of 1,200 problem customers. One wonders if that number includes investigators hired by Hewlett-Packard. "Some of the cancellations involved customers who repeatedly asked for information about other people's accounts." [Reuters]

"We are very cognizant that we have to be a bit paranoid to make sure we're relevant in the future." - Stephen Nigro, Hewlett-Packard VP. [IT Pro]

• Oprah Winfrey endorses Barack Obama. Hell, if she can move copies of The Road she can probably sell anything. [NYT]
  

Noted author and former Hewlett-Packard board member Tom Perkins gave his first public talk yesterday since the HP board scandal blew up last September. Perkins complained about the growing prevalence of "compliance boards" that spend all their time obsessing about regulatory compliance, versus "guidance boards" that get involved in the company's business. Perkins places himself firmly in the latter camp, of course, and further notes that "the best of compliance boards would be entirely unable to prevent another Enron." Of course, the best of Perkins-style guidance boards would in turn be completely poleaxed by another HP pretexting scandal.

James B. Stewart's long New Yorker article on the Hewlettt-Packard board-surveillance scandal is, of course, not online. However, you deserve least one juicy nugget: the contretemps between spymistress HP chairman Patricia Dunn and powerful board member Tom Perkins regarding Perkins's "novel" Sex and the Single Zillionaire — now in paperback, and originally from the now-defunct Regan Books, the folks who wanted to bring you OJ Simpson's If I Did It. After the jump, Perkins and Dunn rassle over whether or not all HP employees should be forced to read his literary fapfest.

NICK DOUGLAS — Good deals are obvious. Great deals are not. News Corp's $580-million purchase of MySpace was "Murdoch's Folly" no more when Google paid $900 million to power MySpace search. In that spirit, here are the top nine business moves from 2006 that don't make sense — at first. Below, the video that started Deal #1.

As we mentioned this morning, Mark Hurd didn't give much of an answer to questions from the chairman of a Congressional panel investigating his company's spying scandal. Here's a more thorough compilation of highlights from Hurd's answers, taken from the Wall Street Journal's copy of the document.

By Theo DP

A reader called "Elite Office Services" asks Valleywag:

By Scott Francis

Here's Valleywag friend Theo DP with another insight into the histories of Hewlett-Packard's legally beleagured execs and new hires.

Mass e-mailer Theo DP, who's too poor to afford a blog, sent us one of his mass messages updating the Hewlett-Packard investigation scandal: