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HP IT

HP CEO Carly Fiorina to Step Down 839

ewwhite was the first of a tidal wave of readers to submit links telling us that HP Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina will step down, effective immediately. Chief Financial Officer Robert Wayman will be interim CEO, Hewlett-Packard said in a Business Wire statement today. Patricia Dunn will be chairwoman. Not much else in the story.
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HP CEO Carly Fiorina to Step Down

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  • more info (Score:5, Informative)

    by ack154 ( 591432 ) * on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:12AM (#11617412)
    From CBS Marketwatch [marketwatch.com]:

    "While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute HP's strategy, I respect their decision," Fiorina said in a statement.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:19AM (#11617501)
      HP CEO Carly Fiorina dies, and she goes through the usual process of defending her case in front of the Divine Jury. It is not clear what happens exactly and where things go wrong, but when the jury comes back and the sentence is read, it turns out she is admitted into Heaven. So Carly is filling in the usual paperwork at the HAO's desk (Heaven Admission Officer): non-disclosure agreement, legal disclaimers, non-competition clause, etc...

      'Congratulations and welcome to Heaven,' finally says the angel. 'Go down the corridor, first door on your right.'

      Carly walks to the door, pushes it open... and staggers back. Through the flames and behind the door, all you can see are countless devils inflicting the most horrible tortures to screaming souls. She rushes back to the Officer and waves her admission pass, breathless. 'Must be an error, this thing here says Heaven!'

      'Oh yeah,' says the angel, barely looking up from his/her screen. 'Forgot to tell you... we merged.'
    • Re:more info (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dsginter ( 104154 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:25AM (#11617548)
      What must be really depressing for her is that (as of this writing) HP's stock is up more than 11 percent [yahoo.com] in pre-market trading today. That's nearly a $7 billion increase in market cap - how depressing for her. She was worth negative $7 billion to HPQ's value.
      • Re:more info (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ack154 ( 591432 )
        I found that quite humorous... each little story I saw (with a couple exceptions) was just saying that their stock was up ... BECAUSE OF her "stepping down." Poor lady. Good for HPQ then.
        • Re:more info (Score:5, Interesting)

          by AviLazar ( 741826 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:43AM (#11617713) Journal
          I had a friend from college whose father works at HP. He hated her. HP used to have this contract with Ford (leasing) and at the end of the lease the cars would be made available to employees to purchase at a dirt rate price. One of the first things she did was get rid of this contract and get (i think) a saab or jaguar contract - which while extremely nice for her - was not nearly so nice for the employees.

          And I'm sorry, what does a person with a BA in Medievial history have to do with being the CEO of a tech company?
          • by Anon E. Muss ( 808473 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:58AM (#11617814)

            And I'm sorry, what does a person with a BA in Medieval history have to do with being the CEO of a tech company?

            It prepared her well for raping and pillaging the peasants (e.g. employees).

            • Re:more info (Score:4, Informative)

              by ipxodi ( 156633 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @02:42PM (#11620706) Homepage
              ummm... according to this [forbes.com] she has a BA in Medieval studies, but also a Masters from MIT's Sloan school and a Masters in Business from U of Maryland.

              I think the more advanced degrees are the ones pertinent to her career at HP, AT&T and Lucent.
          • Re:more info (Score:5, Insightful)

            by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75@nospaM.yahoo.com> on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:59AM (#11617826)
            And I'm sorry, what does a person with a BA in Medievial history have to do with being the CEO of a tech company?

            (Insert obvious HP company age joke here)

            Seriously, what does it matter? Most people change careers an average of three times during their lives, and many people don't ever get a job in what they went to school for. So you start at the bottom of some other industry and learn it, then work your way up. 20 years of real experience in a particular industry is better than 4 years of fake "experience" at a college anyway. I have no idea if Carly has that much experience in tech, but I wouldn't say her degree is the problem.

            (btw, my degree is in film production, but I work as a web producer. Lots of people in the world are in the same boat.)

            Anyway, I still say good riddance to her. I actually think that HP's actual products have really improved over the past few years, but the company itself no longer stands for anything. Hopefully the next CEO will continue to improve the products while at the same time improving the company. That was her biggest failing, both in moral terms and in terms of bringing shareholder value.
            • Re:more info (Score:5, Interesting)

              by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:44AM (#11618336)
              I got no problem with anyone changing career paths. I just have a problem with people responsible for laying off THOUSANDS of employees to save money. Then turn around and receive a $8 million severance package.

        • Re:more info (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:45AM (#11617724)
          I used to work for Compaq under big Mike. Then after the merger left, we had Carley. She was an absolute nightmare. Thousands of people laid off. Everyone demoralized. Nobody liked going to work anymore (yes, back in the day work was exciting and the people inspired by a culture of inquisitiveness and curiosity).

          Finally after surviving round after round of layoffs and being told again and again that I was next...I began to plan my future around my severance package. I was a walking zombie by that point. Everyone was. I couldn't wait to leave. It was then that evil management told me I'd be retained and my performence expectations raised three-fold.

          I quit the next day.

          Carley wasn't directly responsible for firing me or not; but she was directly responsible for running a campaign that sucked the life out of every free-thinking individual with a pulse in the organization.

          Now that she's gorged herself on the spirit of thousands, no doubt she'll float down to another company via her golden parachute and repeat the process there.

          Good riddance. Colleagues still at HP report that there is open celebration in the labs and cube-farms.

          • Re:more info (Score:3, Insightful)

            by sgt_doom ( 655561 )
            Well, Carly did say (after she went Medival on her employees and laid them off) that it is not an American's God-given right to have a job - especially not when she wants to offshore them all. I suggest she begin looking for her next job in China, India or Nigeria.
          • "Now that she's gorged herself on the spirit of thousands, no doubt she'll float down to another company via her golden parachute and repeat the process there."

            Is Nortel hiring? =D

      • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:36AM (#11617643)
        I just got off the phone with a DEC->Compaq->HP employee. He said they were dancing in the aisles. They don't know who the replacement will be but it can't be worse.
      • Re:more info (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:32AM (#11618200) Homepage Journal
        You see that's interesting because the reason CEOs are paid such large sums of money, and receive large bonuses is because of "the value they generate for the company". When a CEO receives a vast bonus (many millions of dollars) it is claimed that this is reasonable because during their tenure the companies market cap rose by, say, a billion dollars - if 5% of that goes to the CEO for the value they added to the company, then great. That's the claim.

        Yet here we see that, as you say, Ms. Fiorina is worth negative $7 billion. That's quite a loss for the company while she was CEO. Rather than generating money, she was holding them back, apparently. The question that is rarely asked is: how much would this company have grown, how much would the market cap have increased, if we had just left a monkey at the helm. If the answer is a billion or three, then maybe the CEO doesn't deserve a generous remuneration package after all. Of course guessing how a company would have performed with a monkey, or a random number generator at the helm is, well... not possible. Which is what the CEO club reply on.

        Given the bonuses for good performance, I wonder if HP is going to bill Ms. Fiorina for the apparently poor performance under her leadership?

        Jedidiah.
      • Re:more info (Score:5, Informative)

        by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:42AM (#11618301)
        She was worth negative $7 billion to HPQ's value.

        It's easy to see why. I really wish I had the link on hand to share with you, but not even 10 minutes of Googling helped me find a hilarious interview with Carly I read a year ago. It went something like this:

        Interviewer: So what is this "Adaptive Enterprise" you're talking about?

        Carly: It means that technology is used to fulfill business requirements, and it adapts to changes in business needs.

        Interviewer: Isn't that what all technology does?

        Carly: No. Today, business needs are forced to adapt to technology, not the other way around.

        Interviewer: Are you sure about that? I think IBM and Accenture make alot of money adapting technology to business needs.

        Carly: Uhm, yeah I'm sure, today the technology doesn't adapt to business needs. Adaptive Enterprise is all about having technology adapt to business needs.

        Interviewer: So, what does that mean exactly? Can you give us some specifics?

        Carly: Like, it means if your business needs aren't being met by technology, and you have Adaptive Enterprise, Adaptive Enterprise will adapt to your business needs.

        Interviewer: Isn't that what consulting companies like IBM and Accenture do?

        Carly: No, because Adaptive Enterprise is like a faucet that you can turn on or off if you need more or less computer power.

        Interviewer: So what does that mean, exactly? How can you turn technology on or off like a faucet?

        Carly: Adaptive Enterprise is when technology adjusts to meet the demands of business needs.

        Anyways, suffice to say, the interview was totally hilarious and played Carly off as a real idiot.

        • by n9fzx ( 128488 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @01:16PM (#11619429) Homepage Journal
          It should have been clear from the get-go that Carly wasn't a fan of technology innovation. Research, by it's very nature, is:

          1. Unpredictable in time, money, and outcome, and
          2. Often tells you things you don't want to hear.
          The current generation of Harvard MBA CEOs fears innovation for these reasons, and Carly was a prime example. The damage done by her and her ilk to the future of the US tech economy has been considerable: Bell Labs, the former DEC labs, and HP Labs constitituted the bulk of well-referenced (eg, important) computing research in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Without that innovation, the US computing industry isn't competitive with production in Asia, period.

          A good example of the Fiorina touch was the closure and large layoff of the former DEC Palo Alto labs (SRC and WRL); they had a clear net positive investment track record of over 1000%, but of course that was over 20 years. Three weeks later, HP announced the opening of a new lab in Singapore, because "we couldn't find enough qualified researchers in Silicon Valley"!

      • Re:more info (Score:4, Informative)

        by pizzaman100 ( 588500 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @01:03PM (#11619218) Journal
        What must be really depressing for her is that (as of this writing) HP's stock is up more than 11 percent in pre-market trading today. That's nearly a $7 billion increase in market cap - how depressing for her. She was worth negative $7 billion to HPQ's value.

        Since she owns 852,912 [yahoo.com] shares of HPQ, she might not be terribly depressed. ;)

    • Re:more info (Score:3, Insightful)

      by alnjmshntr ( 625401 )
      I actually thought she was a pretty good CEO, even though she had a lot of tough decisions to make.

      In a speech that she gave in around 1998 (if memory serves me right) she stated that the most important thing for any working person was to first make yourself financially independent. Then you can make the decisions you really believe in, without fear of being sacked. I think many of the (unpopular) decisions she made at HP may have been down to that philosophy.

      I respect that, it's something I have don
      • Re:more info (Score:5, Insightful)

        by royalblue_tom ( 557302 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:59AM (#11617827)
        Now hold on there a minute. Let's look at that in reverse. Basically, if you are financially independent, then you can try anything knowing that if it goes completely to the wall, at least you're not going to suffer for it. What you're saying is that her view is that her job is easier if she is less accountable (no fear of being sacked).

        The rest of the world is dependent on their patychecks, and irresponsible yahoos who make high level decisions without taking that into account need to be taken out and shot.
      • Re:more info (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LaCosaNostradamus ( 630659 ) <<moc.liam> <ta> <sumadartsoNasoCaL>> on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:01AM (#11617845) Journal
        That's the way I'm living my life. But in part it is due to the necessity of the current business environment. There was nothing wrong with getting a job at a place like HP, getting married, having kids, and buying a home, 1.5 cars and a pool. But that meant debt, and that meant dependency upon income for debt service. And today's "fuck the workers" environment is making that progressively impossible (at least, very irresponsible). And that's just lost business ... so it's a bit like corporations cutting their own throats.

        Which brings us back to HP, and Fiorina. I can clearly see that Fiorina and her crowd of institutional investors are "fatal cost-cutters". They will cut and cut until the company has little blood left to bleed. Controlling costs is a responsibility, but you have to spend money to make it, and the Carly Generation obviously doesn't understand that.
    • by emil ( 695 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:50AM (#11617753)

      Now, HP, here is what you do next:

      • The enterprise systems division is in terrible shape. Attention must be focused first on the Operating Systems, then on storage and hardware.
      • The HP-UX/Tru64 merger should again be taken up, probably favoring Tru64. "TruHP 12 UNIX" should target PA-RISC, Itanium, and Opteron. GNU Userland wherever possible, RPM packager, AdvFS, 128-cpu scalability, binary compatibility with previous OS implmentations on their respective platforms.
      • An Opteron port of OpenVMS must be immediately undertaken. Opteron ports of HP's operating systems will prove HP's commitment. No customer wants a knife in the back of their OS.
      • In addition to CDE/OpenVMS, immediate ports of GNOME and KDE should be undertaken. OpenOffice should also work.
      • New, inexpensive SATA SANS using the DEC Storageworks command sets (in additon to Win32/X GUI). I should also be able to "run clone" via a TCP connection, without loading an ugly gui (or any gui at all).
      • Low-end Storageworks for SOHO users. Works with any 3rd-party drives. Under $1k, maybe less.
      • The PC divison should do some real innovation. ATX was a step forward, but standard, easily interchangable motherboard form-factors (easy slide-out replacement, no tools required) would get you both recognition and sales. Give the designs to Dell, or anybody else who asks.
      • Storageworks in a PC bios.
      • Cross-license the entire Alpha architecture with AMD, in exchange for Opteron manufacturing rights. Give AMD the option to resume Alpha development/production if they desire.
      • Be prepared to lower the cost of printer consumables. The day will come.

      Successful execution of the above will put you back on the map and in the datacenter. When you've done it, adopt the slogan "HP - when you want the very best." Don't adopt the slogan before you can back it up.

      • You really think itanic support is important? I suspect the only way HP can be convinced to make systems with Itanium is if they have some kind of agreement with intel. Itanic is useful only for scientific systems that need lots of FP. Otherwise, you're many times better off with an opteron. The chip is cheaper, and the machine it goes in is cheaper. CDE/OpenVMS? Are you on drugs? Show me someone who actually wants CDE.

        Now here's another thought for you: ATX is a standard. Abandoning ATX would be stupid t

      • In addition (Score:4, Interesting)

        by CaptainZapp ( 182233 ) * on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:48AM (#11618385) Homepage
        Sir, that was a very sharp analysis. May I add the following, which might also be vital to HPs survival?

        Take a very careful look at enterprise support. VMS and TruUnix customers, who usually run mission critical, no-excuse for anything systems won't take it kindly that you are trying to save on support on those systems. In addition appologise to all VMS engineers that you fired or are in the process of firingand try to retain them, or even get them back.

        You fucked up very big time in repsect to enterprise systems. You might have a slim chance to still get it right, but there's not very much time.

        Sincerely

        An ex-DECcie under Olson

      • by majid ( 306017 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @12:38PM (#11618954) Homepage
        An interim CEO cannot credibly announce such sweeping plans. What they can do is take immediate steps, even if merely symbolic, to restore morale. They could include:

        - Selling off Carly's private air force, a sign of management looking for itself while laying off thousands

        - inviting Walter Hewlett back on the board (or another member of the Hewlett or Packard families)

        - Taking other small concrete steps to show the HP Way is back

  • adios (Score:5, Informative)

    by Alien Being ( 18488 ) * on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:12AM (#11617413)
    My work here [yahoo.com] is done.
    • by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @02:19PM (#11620405) Homepage Journal
      As an ex-HP manager, I thought I'd pen some thoughts on Carly's exit.

      First, don't feel sorry for Carly. She's made at least $50 Million from HP, probably more. This is a good time for her to make her exit, whether or not she's had a disagreement with the board.

      Itanium, upon which HP has been a partner with Intel, is a disaster. HP transferred its Precision Architecture (PA-RISC), the basis of Itanium, to Intel, transferred its silicon designers to Intel, shut down chip foundries that it had spent Billions to build. All of this was tied into their Itanium partnership with Intel, which HP thought would be producing the dominant microprocessor architecture. Now it is much more likely that Itanium will return no significant revenue to HP.

      Intel, eager to save their own ship after having bet their company on Itanium, has transferred Itanium innovations to their Pentium line, which they can do without any significant return to HP. Indeed, due to Intel's court-compelled cross-licensing with AMD, we might even see HP technology pop up there.

      HP must be starting to see some delayed negative effects of the merger - which was always a daring bid with many naysayers. I think you can read IBM's attempted sale of its PC manufacturing division to a Chinese company as an indictment of the HP-Compaq merger strategy. Where HP chose to "fix" a marginally profitable division at great expense, IBM did not see that its forte was competing at the low end.

      Over 6 or 7 years we have seen HP in a transition from a high-margin to a low-margin company. Computers are becoming commoditized, and the 70% margins that we used to pay for workstations are gone forever. But now HP does have to compete at that low end, a very difficult business requiring an almost ruthless focus on efficiency that is opposite of the corporate culture with which they went into this change.

      There is also the problem that much of the innovation that drove HP left when they spun off Agilent. That was a high-margin, low-volume business that required a lot of innovation. It wasn't very much like HP's main profit-centers, but it created a lot of ideas that transferred to other divisions.

      Thanks

      Bruce Perens

      • by sapbasisnerd ( 729448 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @03:54PM (#11621559)
        Itanium, upon which HP has been a partner with Intel, is a disaster. HP transferred its Precision Architecture (PA-RISC), the basis of Itanium, to Intel, transferred its silicon designers to Intel, shut down chip foundries that it had spent Billions to build. All of this was tied into their Itanium partnership with Intel, which HP thought would be producing the dominant microprocessor architecture. Now it is much more likely that Itanium will return no significant revenue to HP.

        This was always a gamble. If Itanium had come in 7 years instead of 10+ and/or if this Intel, Digital settle lawsuit [cnn.com] had worked out differently then Itanium might have been what HP and Intel had hoped it would be. A volume chip architecture not a niche market, and by volume I mean millions of units. No server chip (i.e. PA-RISC) will ever sell more than at most tens or hundreds of thousands. To move millions of units you need a family of chips, not just in computers but also as embedded in all kinds of consumer eletronics all sharing some level of common infrastrucutre even if that is not a lot more than chip fabrication. Intel has this and HP was hoping to ride on the coattails. After more than a decade of trying IBM is probably close as well (hence Cell and a bunch of other stuff flying a little lower under the radar). HP had to know they couldn't get there so teaming with Intel made some sense. They just failed to understand that it was doomed the day that DEC showed Intel a bunch of the Alpha technology and they decided to pinch it.

        I think you can read IBM's attempted sale of its PC manufacturing division to a Chinese company as an indictment of the HP-Compaq merger strategy

        It's much bigger than that, this isn't just about the "low end" becoming commoditized, it is also playing a bet on a pending market shift that drastically reduces the Windows PC's volumes sold as well as margins. IBM sees and understands that this is the beginning of the end of the Wintel PC as anything but pure consumer electronics like TV's and DVD players, with similar margins and markets. I don't think many people really get this yet, but I they are betting that the future human to network access device (and not too distant future) will be something that looks more like a TV with a game console (with an IBM processor in it) than a desktop PC, this is not a new idea by any stretch, people have been talking about "set top boxes" for 20+ years now, but this is the first time that a truly brt this big has been played on it.

  • She was forced out (Score:5, Informative)

    by fishdan ( 569872 ) * on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:13AM (#11617420) Homepage Journal
    According to the Business Standard she was forced out. [business-standard.com]
    "While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute HP's strategy, I respect their decision," Fiorina said a statement. "HP is a great company, and I wish all the people of HP much success in the future."

    There have been other shakeups in personel [ft.com] at HP leading to speculation that there is something wrong. You have to wonder if all the [com.com] animosity she accrued [com.com] while making the HP/Compaq merger happen [computerworld.com] has finally been returned.

    • by OmniGeek ( 72743 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:30AM (#11617588)
      I worked at HP in the 80s, still hold stock in the company, and I have been horrified for years at the degradation of HP from a great place to work (and a profitable, socially responsible company) into a soulless, internally repressive corporate tyranny. Bill and Dave would be speechless with rage were they still with us.

      Ms. Fiorina has presided over such low points as dumping a profitable calculator division (without even spinning it off or doing an EBO!), and a recent corporate general meeting where the proxy-voting process was blatantly abused and manipulated to ensure the board got their way regardless of what the stockholders wanted.

      To say nothing of the shenanigans with trying to suppress aftermarket inkjet cartridge suppliers/refillers. Hewlett and Packard would never have condoned such slimy means of boosting profits; they preferred to make money by adding value, and believed in interoperability and good corporate citizenship (a quaint concept, I know, but I'm an old fart...)

      I shed no tears (and gave a few cheers) at Ms. Fiorina's daparture; I just wish I had some confidence her successor will be an improvement.
      • by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:59AM (#11617822)
        To say nothing of the shenanigans with trying to suppress aftermarket inkjet cartridge suppliers/refillers. Hewlett and Packard would never have condoned such slimy means of boosting profits;

        Like it or not, no printer manufacturer these days is going to leave money on the table. Printer manufacturers invest R&D resources to develop printer products specifically for the intent of selling toner and ink. It's just one of the many businesses that take a generic fluid and increase its value a thousand-fold by injecting it into a specific package.

      • Fiorina and her ilk care nothing for anything that doesn't have the characteristics of modern business chic. It's got to be sexy, involved, seemingly important, and almost entirely without real value. People in expensive suits, jetting from meeting to meeting, rubbing elbows with "business leaders" and politicians, while dining on corporate credit ... THAT'S what a Fiorina creature is all about. Hence, it becomes easy to understand why people like her would dump entire and profitable divisions. Actual work is a dirty enterprise that has little do with business chic.

        I'd go so far to say that actual work (to develop products and service a customer base) is beyond the understanding of a "fad" CEO like Fiorina. I speculate that she probably doesn't actually understand paying engineers to make products. She probably also doesn't understand paying for a customer-support infrastructure to maintain the customers the company had. Her world seemed to consist of making economic threats to various groups (employees, suppliers, and yes, even customers) and then daring people to call her to see if she was bluffing.

        People like Fiorina should never be given power over a thriving technology business. In some fashion, we should all be ashamed for having put up with her CEO term for as long as it went. Hopefully she will fall back into historical academia where she can't hurt as many people ever again.
  • by pumpkin2146 ( 317171 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:13AM (#11617426)
    and your share price goes up, you know they must have been doing a damn poor job ...
    • by LaCosaNostradamus ( 630659 ) <<moc.liam> <ta> <sumadartsoNasoCaL>> on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:35AM (#11618227) Journal
      When Fiorina was indulging in fatal cost-cutting in her company, and the share price was rewarding her for it, then what can we say about her job then?

      I say: We pay far too much attention to the prices of corporate stocks.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:13AM (#11617429)
    Hey HP, you can stop sucking ass now! Stop pretending the Compaq merger was a good idea. Stop trying to prop up Itanium. Stop pretending dropping Alpha and PA-RISC for Itanium was a good idea. Stop making cheap printers that fall apart if you look at them. Get those scientific instruments and calculator business back. Just stop being a schitzophrenic Dell!
    • While it doesn't matter much now whether they think the Compaq merger was a good idea and Agilent seems to be doing just fine on its own, the rest is spot on.

      Under Fiorina HP was run into the dirt. Maybe now they can take directions which will restore the old reputation for quality engineering.
    • by Durrik ( 80651 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:55AM (#11617786) Homepage
      Spinning off Agilent was actually a good idea. Terrible name but still a good business decision.

      The problem was HP was a bit too big and covered too much areas, and had too many competitors. They couldn't sell spectrum analyzers to places like Dell, IBM, Compaq, because they had a PC line. And who buys from the competitors.

      They also couldn't sell computers to places like Techtronics, Rhode and Swartz, and other scientific instrument places. Of course I mangled all those names with my spelling.

      As a customer of HP, I never bought their computers in the first place. They were always overpriced. But I bought heavily on the Spectrum Analyzers, Sig Gens, etc. The worst thing for me in the spin off was the name. I still call the equipment I get from Agilent as HP. Its just easier to say, and old habbits die hard.

      I don't think HP will be able to reaquire Agilent. They don't have the cash on hand. The stock holders probably won't go for it either. And the feeling I get from the Sales Reps I deal with it seems that Agilent looks at the renaments of HP with some scorn, and that's probably throughout all the company. And Agilent still makes some damn good equipment. If HP keeps going downhill despite the CEO leaving, I could see Agilent aquiring HP just to get the name back.
      • I work at Agilent, and there's a definite air of HP buttsuckery around here. Everything is HP this and HP that. I'm hoping they buy us back just so people might STFU and GBTW.

        On the other hand, our data center is buying more and more Sun boxes these days.
    • Stop pretending that killing Alpha and PA-RISC was a bad idea. Itanium needs to go away too, but maintaining three heavy iron architectures is a waste.
    • Hey HP, you can stop sucking ass now!

      I think it is too late for that. They are almost in the position where they will have to be broken up. It's going to take something on the level of IBM hiring Lou Gerstner to bring H-P back to where they used to be.

  • NPR dancing a jig? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jacobcaz ( 91509 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:14AM (#11617433) Homepage
    I've been listening to NPR this morning and they seem to be giddy this has transpired. They keep going back to the story and their normally relaxed demanor seems to lift a litte.

    Is there no love lost between NPR and Fiorina or is it just that NPR is happy anytime a "big wig" gets the boot?

    • by http101 ( 522275 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:28AM (#11617579) Homepage
      Honestly, having seen the inside operations of how HP is run, I can tell you, they're happy simply because Carly is gone. She's cut corners like you wouldn't believe. Did you know that their consumers have better computers than what's in their tech support centers in the Houston RDC?

      Carly has taken it on herself to ensure techs are NOT able to do their jobs by implementing stupid tools like "ATM" or the Automated Technology Manager to replace the MMC snap-ins for Active Directory. VPN support for employees is utilized only through a "signed" proprietary program which is a pain in the ass to support because it either breaks or totally f*cks up a person's NT account. Their financial center is run completely on VMS and locks out users repeatedly. As for pager/cellphone support, the company gives you one, but you have to pay for the services. If you don't want a pager or cell, they give you a Blackberry which is linked to their own Blackberry service towers running Blackberry Server v1.0 while the rest of the world has upgraded their software 10-fold. I only say this as an example of how she's neglected certain aspects of the company's functionality just to put a couple more nickels in her purse.

      I don't know about you, but when I get home, there's a beer with my name on it!
      • by Ngwenya ( 147097 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:01AM (#11617854)

        ObDisc: I work for HP, but clearly I'm writing here in a personal capacity

        Carly has taken it on herself to ensure techs are NOT able to do their jobs by implementing stupid tools like "ATM" or the Automated Technology Manager to replace the MMC snap-ins for Active Directory.

        WTF? Dude, ATM long preceded Active Directory. The Atlanta team had ATM operational back in 1997 when I joined the company. And ATM feeds the Enterprise Directory, which is not AD based. Yes, we have more than one directory, because AD is inherently tied to NOS operations, whereas ED is tied to internal operations.

        VPN support for employees is utilized only through a "signed" proprietary program which is a pain in the ass to support because it either breaks or totally f*cks up a person's NT account.

        VPN support is via the Nortel Contivity box, which is IPsec based. Yes, the certificates are signed - what else could they be? And it's not tied to your NT account in any fashion, since it needs an ActivCard OTP to work. The newer VPN is just vanilla MSRA (although the old Compaq PPTP is still around).

        You want to cut into Carly - go ahead. Don't bother me none. But leave tech decisions which predate Carly's time out of it. Blame her for the merger, the stock price, the ink cartridge strategy or whatever - but individual IT decisions? Sorry - that isn't something that can be laid at Carly's door.

        --Ng

        PS: And if my other HP colleagues could hear me say all of this, they'd have me slammed as the worlds worst hypocrite for all I've bellyached and bitched about Carly.

  • by Leroy_Brown242 ( 683141 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:15AM (#11617441) Homepage Journal
    There's nothing like a good Corporate shake up first thing in the morning to make you feel good!

    Oh, sorry about your job. :P
  • Investors (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:15AM (#11617446) Homepage Journal
    Well, let's see..... I at one time did have shares of HP, but sold them after a series of decisions HP made under Fiorina including:

    1) Less focus on the printing division so they could make "me too" Wintel boxes and purchasing Compaq for an unbelievable amount of cash.
    2) Canceling then reinstating the HP calculator line.
    3) Getting out of and then back into the storage business.
    4) Failing to capitalize on technologies invented at HP.
    5) Being way too late to capitalize on the imaging expansion. Although the current imaging campaign (The Kinks Picturebook) is a well run ad campaign focusing on the consumer, they are still missing the Pro level stuff.

    If a company is going through significant expansion, one could excuse a series of screw-ups, but HP has not significantly expanded. Rather they have given marketshare to companies like Dell, Epson, Apple and others to the tune of about $10 Billion.

    My investment money went from HP to Apple. Fiorina was brought on to HP to bring the company into the Internet era, but seemed to miss that original goal entirely. Companies like Apple got it.

    Granted, running a company the size of HP is not easy, but Fiorina's hubris and arrogance have proven dangerous. Unfortunately, this pathological perspective is a model that American corporate (and political) figures seem to be embracing to their shareholders (and citizens) detriment.

    • Re:Investors (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rinikusu ( 28164 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:24AM (#11617542)
      it's interesting to note that even the hardcore HP calculator folks would rather buy an old one off of ebay for $insane_cash than buy one of the new TI wanna-be plastic ones. Nothing against TI (I have one, I like it, but that's because colleges use textbooks that use it.. I smell.. money being exchanged somewhere...), but most of my engineering friends tell me the HP is "where it's at". :P
      • Re:Investors (Score:5, Interesting)

        by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:38AM (#11617663) Homepage Journal
        HP calculators were well thought out, and engineered tools that simply did the job well and I have purchased a series of calculators, culminating with my 48sx (replaced with a gx when the sx died). From the early ability of HP calculators to be programmed with everything from sophisticated algorithms to the first "computer" game I ever played (Moon lander anyone?), HP has been the company to purchase calculators from. RPN notation and the concept of the Stack in a calculator truly made them a workhorse allowing one to be productive.

        When HP decided to let their calculator business wither, everybody was stunned. We wanted to see the calculators continue to expand with new methodologies for connectivity (USB, 802.11, Bluetooth etc....), storage (CF), etc....etc....etc.... and could have easily become a growth market playing off the early success of the PDA market. Who knows? Perhaps an HP calculator/PDA would have helped prop up the PDA market to make them more useful? Embracing more open standards for communication and storage could have helped. Also, the understanding that "virtualizing" the calculator functions into an embedded OS that would allow other expansion options and ease of programmability with modern graphics (OpenGL) would have been great roads to take.

  • HP and Fiorina (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Scott7477 ( 785439 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:15AM (#11617455) Homepage Journal
    IMO, HP needs to focus more on its enterprise business. The SNAFU with their own internal ERP systems should have been grounds for Fiorina's termination. How can you sell anyone on your ability to give them systems integration advice when you show that you can't do it yourself.
  • by FunWithHeadlines ( 644929 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:16AM (#11617463) Homepage
    She was the big mover behind HP's merger with Compaq, even being accused of underhanded deals to get the vote pushed through [macnewsworld.com]. Like all such mergers, things rarely go as well as people anticipate. And with the loss in recent years of the "HP Way" that they were famous for, she basically failed. I'm not a bit surprised she was forced out.
  • by Xpilot ( 117961 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:17AM (#11617475) Homepage
    ...HP technicians report that the new HP Flying Glider prototype and flight suit are missing, and a lab tech has been found dead. It is rumoured that a cackling evil-looking figure was seen flying around on the missing glider screaming for "revenge".

    • No, that'll happen when she forms CarlyCorp. She'll use her Science degree, MBA and medieval history degrees to form a truly 'evil' company. Perhaps a doctorate is in order? Carly becomes Dr. Evil?

      Instead of a glider and flying suit, I imagine she will hold the corporate world hostage by catapulting diseased cows into the offices of HP and demanding One Trillion dollars for the insanity to stop.
    • by jcostantino ( 585892 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:44AM (#11618335) Homepage
      ...HP technicians report that the new HP Flying Glider prototype and flight suit are missing, and a lab tech has been found dead. It is rumoured that a cackling evil-looking figure was seen flying around on the missing glider screaming for "revenge".


      Surely you meant her GliderJet and FlightPaq?

  • Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rlp ( 11898 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:17AM (#11617480)
    Just goes to show that a great company with a great reputation, skilled professionals, and a solid product line are no match for really bad management.
  • by zeruch ( 547271 ) <zeruchNO@SPAMdeviantart.com> on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:19AM (#11617491) Homepage
    ...she lasted this long.

    While the spectacle of the Compaq deal gave her an inordinate amount of visibility, not all of it was good. Her own profile also seemed to clash with the well-established corporate culture of HP (which from what I undertstand was exemplified by the mostly low-key and self-deprecating style of Lew Platt).

    There were simply too many gaffes, and I really am somewhat impressed she weathered it this far.
    Carlton Sneed Fiorina, whatever shall you do now...
  • by blcamp ( 211756 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:19AM (#11617499) Homepage

    Seems to me that Carly took HP, which was a tightly-focused, highly successful printer (and other peripherals) company (and let's not forget those fancy calculators!) and turned it into a colossal mess. Buying Compaq was a bust (shocking, considering the the only thing worth getting from there was the last vestiges of DEC).

    Look at HP's stock price this morning... up, what, 10% already? Looks like this moved disappointed very few folks.

    They need to refocus on what they did best, and spin off the rest.

    Best wishes to Carly, and hope she doesn't blow it with the next company she runs.

  • Booya? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by erikharrison ( 633719 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:20AM (#11617507)
    While I would love to be one of the many leaping into the air, clicking their heels together, and saying "there is no bitch like Fiorina" I have begun to suspect that, in fact, there might be.

    Who will replace her? Fiorina may have turned HP into Compaq, but they are still profitable, and under Fiorina's reign would be for some time. If she's been ousted, I somehow doubt she would be replaced by a innovative leader who would return the spirit of creation to the company. I fear it's more like "If we don't bother making even affordable shitty products we can cut this pie a little larger, and squeeze a little more blood from this stone".
  • by Evil W1zard ( 832703 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:22AM (#11617528) Journal
    That word makes me think of one thing... FLASHDANCE!
  • by arkham6 ( 24514 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:24AM (#11617545)
    I wonder how much money she got to be fired, how many millions? Its sick that employees get fired with not much more than a kick in the butt, but execs who do a horrid job get millions on their way out the door.

    (Sorry, rather bitter laid off HP employee)
  • by Zoxed ( 676559 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:25AM (#11617556) Homepage
    Googling for "fiorina" the first link is: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/bios/fiorina.htm l [hp.com]

    But her page has gone already :-)

    But google cache has it: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:PX8f_tPqKOcJ: www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/bios/fiorina.html+fiori na&hl=en [64.233.167.104]

    (I am sure my employer could not co-ordinate a website update with a press release this fast :-)

  • by rlds ( 849683 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:26AM (#11617560)
    Fiorina was recognized as a marketing genius at Lucent and that's why she got the job at HP. Fact is it takes more than a marketing genius to make the turnaround. HP lost its edge on innovation, plain and simple. It got obsessed with out-marketing companies like Dell, which were operating in a pure commodity model with a low cost advantage and knew how to market its brand, and also how to sell its products. Though it's true innovation in marketing is desirable to get an edge, it was clear that Fiorina didn't have it. She was using too much techno-babble to get to the CEOs of potential clients and no one else. Those CEOs were not buying it, they just cared about how much it would cost. So HP now has the option to get a true marketing genius to sell these commodities, or return to product innovations like Apple has done. But perhaps it's too late for the latter.
    • by Ohreally_factor ( 593551 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:44AM (#11617719) Journal
      So HP now has the option to get a true marketing genius to sell these commodities, or return to product innovations like Apple has done. But perhaps it's too late for the latter.

      Well, Apple has both, in Steve Jobs. And it's hard to separate the marketing from the innovation completely.
      • by RoboOp ( 460207 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @01:20PM (#11619487)
        Well, Apple has both, in Steve Jobs. And it's hard to separate the marketing from the innovation completely.

        True, but there are a few crucial differences:

        1. Jobs was a real entrepreneur, who founded several companies from scratch, as opposed to taking over the reins of an established company - ie a Manager who wants seven figures for holding the reins.
        2. Jobs cut his eyeteeth building things. He could assemble a circuit board, solder the components and write base code I'd wager. Most marketing experts are great for building PowerPoint files and diaramas. And it shows when you compare Apple's stock performance vs HP's.

        I just hope this is a trend that continues. Ignorant MBA weenies have completly run the United States into the ground. China is growing, the USA is shrinking. China's leader has a degree in engineering. Ours an MBA. Coincidence? I don't think so.

        The sooner we clean house and start focusing on putting engineers and entrepreneurs in the driver's seat of industry and government the faster the US can get back on track. Until then, look forward to more MBA like solutions such as offshoring, IP abuses, litigation and canibalization of past achievements.

    • by majid ( 306017 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @12:02PM (#11618536) Homepage
      Her marketing "genius" consisted of recklessly giving cheap financing to marginal companies during the dot-com boom. While the mania lasted, she was hailed as a genius, and cashed in her chips to move to somewhere else before the inevitable train wreck. Lucent almost died due to all the bad debts accrued when all those fly-by-night carriers went bankrupt.

      If the new management can return hope to HP's despairing staff, I am sure they can work miracles.
  • by kneecarrot ( 646291 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:28AM (#11617573)
    What about Carly's feelings? A human being has lost their job today - let's not forget that! She must be feeling down and I bet her confidence has taken a real hit!

    Oh wait, I actually don't care.

    Woo hoo!!! Ding Dong! The witch is dead!

    • by eclectro ( 227083 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:33AM (#11617616)
      What about Carly's feelings? .... She must be feeling down and I bet her confidence has taken a real hit!

      I will paypal anybody $25 if they can show me a picture of her smeared make-up.

    • She must be feeling down and I bet her confidence has taken a real hit!

      Oh, all right. I can help. Now that she's out of work, the next rent payment must be looking scary. I wonder how much she'd charge an hour for escort services. I'll have to check The Erotic Review for any past entries on her. I'll pay her $250, and I'll go as high as $300 if she allows anal.

      Yes, yes... I'm going to the hot place. :-P

  • by swillden ( 191260 ) * <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:31AM (#11617592) Journal

    I work for IBM*, and we quite liked what Carly was doing to HP.

    [*As a geek, not a flack, so don't get any silly ideas that IBM agrees with anything I say.]

  • by klubar ( 591384 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:33AM (#11617610) Homepage
    It's sad when a formerly great company like HP has been reduced to re-badging other company's products. Even if you think the iPod is cool, HP could have done better than just sticking its name on another company's product. What happened to innovation?

    I wonder what company she'll grace with her presence next? Dump that stock quickly...
  • by failedlogic ( 627314 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:37AM (#11617651)
    I am not a former HP and Compaq employee but this is one job I like to see being lost after the mergers. If let to go on, Fionrina would have completely bankrupt the company.

    She is a destructive CEO. That is what you get for hiring someone who's first degree is Medieval history! ;)

    The only reason that the company was "well" off was with her is that it was a relatively strong company to begin with. She in no way, has the ability to build up a company like HP or to re-create it.

    Fiorina was too unbalanced in her descisions. She would vote something out, people would be fired, and then she tried to retract saying "That wasn't such a good idea".

    As someone who sells HP printers - as well as other brands - its sad to see the current state of their printer division. They are no where near as good as they were. The old printers were built like tanks. It gets harder to recommend their brand (unless someone insists).

    Someone with direction and a vision needs to take over.
  • by bstarrfield ( 761726 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:38AM (#11617657)

    So she's forced out. Now she can write a book, go on speaking tours, appear on CNN, possibly serve as a lobbyist. Her career is far from over.

    But she laid off tens of thousands (literally), destroyed the legacy of Digital in Compaq, turned HP into an offshoring shell, and damaged HP's reputation. Brilliant!

    Her short term management style, however, is the American management style. Quarterly profits matter more than profits five years down the road. Acquire to destroy your competition, pursue that dream of oligopoly. Oh, and send as many jobs overseas as possible so you can keep your workers in line.

  • what HP? (Score:5, Funny)

    by helix_r ( 134185 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:40AM (#11617677)

    What HP?
    The _real_ "HP" is now called "Agilent"!

  • by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @10:49AM (#11617751) Journal
    And I don't mean Windows versus PC. You think the only thing in the tech world is personal computers judging by much of the tech media.

    I keep seeing how HP was just a "printer company" when Carly showed up. No, they were also the premier test equipment company on the planet, where individual items command six figure price tags. And companies bought them, because such things are indispensible in electronic design. So that gets spun away as Agilent, and HP dives head first into already saturated markets with razor thin margins. Great.

    HP also used to make the best calculators on the face of the Earth. Yeah. Calculators. The things REAL engineers use instead of gaudy, buggy, inefficient pocket PCs or PDAs. They made *RPN* calculators. When God was figuring out the initial conditions of the Big Bang, He used an RPN calculator. ;-)

    Now HP appears to be competing with Mattel for the "My First Calculator" market with colorful plastics and hip angled keyboard layouts that are just the bomb or the shit or whatever the preschoolers (or those with the minds of preschoolers) are calling things these days. :-\

    I've said it before, and I'll say it again until I am forced by act of Congress to stop: NEVER hire a CEO with a last name that sounds like a pizzeria.

    And I still say in the right light Carly looks like Edie Falco.

  • by Augusto ( 12068 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:03AM (#11617883) Homepage
    "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,"

    You were right Carly, goodbye.
  • by nomadicGeek ( 453231 ) * on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:23AM (#11618115)
    I remember talking to an HP engineer who worked for the non-profit side of the company (only the printer division was making any money at the time). He was complaining that the company was not doing well enough to give any of them raises or bonuses but it was doing so well that Carly was getting multi-million dollar bonuses.

    When you divide her bonus by the number of employees, it would have been at least a couple thousand apiece. She treated the employees as an expense to be controlled and pretty much ruined the engineering tradition at HP that I think made the company what it was. Now it is just another soulless corporation

  • Recent Speculation (Score:5, Informative)

    by null etc. ( 524767 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:31AM (#11618181)
    The following is an excerpt from the article entitled, "HP: We're not changing Fiorina's job", posted Jan 24, 2005 on CNet news.com.

    http://news.com.com/HP+Were+not+changing+Fiorinas+ job/2100-7341_3-5547456.html [com.com]

    Company representatives labeled stories of a pending management reorganization as unfounded and disputed a Wall Street Journal report that said HP's directors were considering a shift that would delegate some of Fiorina's duties to other executives.
    ...
    "Boards discuss a wide range of topics consistent with their fiduciary responsibilities, and any speculation about these discussions is just that--pure speculation," [HP spokesman Robert] Sherbin said. "While the board did discuss structural changes at its recent meeting, there are no other senior changes due in the near future."
    Guess two weeks isn't considered the "near future", huh.

    "You don't know; the news last week could have been the first shoe to drop in a larger movement to recalculate leadership at HP, but executive ability didn't seem to be the issue with that move, so much as responding to market conditions," [IDC analyst Roger] Kay said. "Some people have been calling for (Fiorina's ouster) since before the Compaq deal, but I don't see why making such a move right now would necessarily be helpful to the company."
    How much money do you make, Roger? I hope you're being paid for something useful.

    So it seems that rumors and whispers are often a much more useful prediction of stock performance than industry spokesmen and analysts.

  • by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:54AM (#11618443) Homepage Journal
    I still remember all of the flap when in reference to overseas outsourcing of tech jobs, she said that no one in the U.S. has a right to a job. Well, I guess she was right afterall!
  • by philkerr ( 180450 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @11:54AM (#11618446) Homepage
    In a recent /. article [slashdot.org] about HP putting region codes in printer cartridges I suggested people email in complaints, and gave a direct link to Carly's feedback page.

    Now I don't think too much credit can be held by one action, but do you think this might have been another round of bad PR she managed to generate for the company, and they finally got pissed at her? I know I sent in a strongly worded complaint about this move to her feedback page.

    If it did then this is good, it shows that when there are anough pissed off geeks we can press for changes.....

  • by Ralph Spoilsport ( 673134 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @01:18PM (#11619452) Journal
    My wife has a Good Job with HP.

    Here's what I've gotten from her end:

    1. The Compaq deal had NOTHING to do with market share or "growing the company". It had EVERYTHING to do with labour. The HP my wife signed on for back so many years ago was a VERY well paid and excellent place to work. That was expensive to HP, but it made for some of the highest productivity and (yes, it was true at the time) innovation in the industry. Carlyu, like the rest of the ultra-greedy industrial plutocrats in history, saw all that as an expense. By merging with Compaq, the FIRST thing they did was adopt Compaq HR policies, which meant my wife LOST a week of vacation, and was no longer in the middle of her pay curve, but was now at the top, and wasn't going to see a raise for YEARS, if ever.

    This resulted in massive gains to the bottom line of HP. This was followed by massive layoff. Between the layoffs and the destruction of the HP HR system, morale went to the bottom of (pick a Pacific Trench of your choice). Anyone left was marshalled into doing 3 persons of work, and the work of well paid, family raising computer programmers with mortgages in Palo Alto were replaced by well paid family raising computer programmers in India. This didn't add anything positive to the mood at HP.

    2. The merger's cover story of "synergy / growth / blah blah bullshit to become #1 copmuter maker" finally unravelled when it was revealed that after all was said and done, they were STILL #2 behind Dell.

    3. The HP branding of iPods has been a waste of time, and has only served to "debase the currency" of the HP name and moniker "HP: invent!"

    4. The spin off of the Scientific division (now known as Agilent) was in the works for a while, so Carly isn't to blame for the failures associated with that, but the bizarrely mishandled aftermath IS her fault, and is one of the direct reasons the Compaq deal got any traction at all.

    Basically, Carly raided HP for millions of dollars for her own greedy ass self. She got huge bonuses while the company declined. While thousands of people lost their jobs at the height of the tech recession, she gave herself a $37million raise. She, and all the plutocratic shitbags like her is the reason why this country is going down the shitter at warp speed. What I'm hoping is that her criminal decontruction of HP (calling it mismanagement doesn't begin to tap the suffering she caused for so many thousands of people) has been nipped soon enough, and that HP will somehow be able to regain the trust of its customers and employees.

    I remember when you bought an HP PC, It Was A Good PC. Built like a truck, reliable, and even if it was running a crappy OS like Windows, it did so competently. And when you bought an HP printer, it worked. (The Macintosh drivers always sucked great steaming tourdes, but that's a minor quibble - if you were on a PC, they worked GREAT.) And it worked really well.

    Now, if you want an HP MP3 player - you do get a GREAT and reliable piece of gear: BUILT BY APPLE.

    They need to take the kind of quality that separates Apple from the rest, and apply it to the PC world at a reasonable price. THEN they will be bigger than Dell, and who knows? Maybe my wife will get a raise for the FIRST TIME IN YEARS.

    And I remember when you worked for HP, it was like working for Apple, only without the Kool-Aid effect or the Reality Distortion Fields. You were On Top of the pile - maybe not the bigest, but certainly the BEST, and everyone knew it. I hope those days can return to HP. With Carly gone, they just might!

    Oh, and Carly, if you're reading this: Fuck Off.

    RS

  • Deworming HP (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jodka ( 520060 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @01:25PM (#11619578)
    from cnnmoney [cnn.com]:

    Shares of HP (Research) jumped about 9 percent in heavy trading on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday morning on the news.

    As others here have already pointed out, it says something about the quality of your corporate executive when firing her makes your company 9% more valuable.

    she would receive severance pay -- and a company spokesman told CNN she'll get a payout of $21.1 million, not including stock options.

    Appropriate that her parting act is to suck even more money from HP.

    Fiorinia was the classic corporate parasite and the HP corporate immune system was too slow to react. But I am glad to see that it rejected her before she killed the host. Like John Scully at Apple, Ms. Fiorina's two greatest skills seem to have been corporate infighting and self promotion. She has modeled her career on the tapeworm. It was only after years of thinning revenues that enough people recognized the problem and sought treatment. But then there are lots of people who recognize a problem only after their pets have lost weight and appear quite ill and then have them dewormed.

  • Lucent (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rlp ( 11898 ) on Wednesday February 09, 2005 @01:39PM (#11619816)
    Let's not forget that she and managers like her also helped make Lucent what it is today. Oh, wait ...

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