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.
more info (Score:5, Informative)
Not much to say, but .. (Score:5, Funny)
'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)
Re:more info (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:more info (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:more info (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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)
(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)
Re:more info (Score:5, Insightful)
My degree is in ancient history. I suppose I should just empty out my desk now? I've got news for you: 99% of what you do in an IT job is *not* about things you could (or at least must) learn at school.
One thing folks with history degrees learn how to do better than most with tech degrees is to communicate. I would submit to you that communication is central to the role of a CEO.
If a vocational education gave one everything that is needed to succeed in life, we'd all just go to ITT Tech.
Re:more info (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Re:more info (Score:3, Funny)
Is Nortel hiring? =D
Re:more info (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:more info (Score:5, Funny)
Re:more info (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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.
Carly Fiorina, Serial Research Slayer (Score:5, Insightful)
- Unpredictable in time, money, and outcome, and
- 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:Carly Fiorina, Serial Research Slayer (Score:5, Insightful)
For the past five years, most tech companies have been "run by the CFO", meaning that cost reduction was everything, and that pesky, unpredictable thing called innovation was to be avoided (at all cost). This is, of course, the strategic equivalent of holding your breath underwater in the hopes of evolving gills.
Re:Carly Fiorina, Serial Research Slayer (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition, the "side benefits" of research have considerable market value if a company is smart enough to use them: Following the divestiture, a large number of AT&T Long Distance customers indicated that they chose AT&T because of Bell Labs. Other companies have used research lab visits to sway large customers.
Re:more info (Score:4, Informative)
Since she owns 852,912 [yahoo.com] shares of HPQ, she might not be terribly depressed. ;)
Re:more info (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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)
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.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, HP, here is what you do next:
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.
Re:Good riddance to bad rubbish. (Score:3, Informative)
Now here's another thought for you: ATX is a standard. Abandoning ATX would be stupid t
In addition (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Good riddance to bad rubbish. (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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)
My thoughts on Carly's exit (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:My thoughts on Carly's exit (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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.
Carly was one ot the things that was wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Carly was one ot the things that was wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Carly was one ot the things that was wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
When your CEO quits (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:When your CEO quits (Score:4, Insightful)
I say: We pay far too much attention to the prices of corporate stocks.
Re:When your CEO quits (Score:5, Informative)
The other part of the full answer is that Fiorina should have been fired by late 2002 or early 2003. She had had more than enough time after the general market crash to "show her stuff" and demonstrate that HP can innovate itself out of a general market malaise. She failed. And we can then firmly blame the BoD for not removing their highly non-performing CEO at that time.
Fiorina's departure in early 2005 -- FOUR YEARS INTO THE ERA OF TROUBLE -- only demonstrates the sheer incompetence of HP's BoD. If the stockholders have any real balls, they will replace the entire Board, invite Packard back, rebuild a Board around him for lean times, and then give the general order to go head-chopping through the HP-Compaq executive class (since there's another class of non-performers).
Do HP's stockholders have the minerals for it? I'm betting "no".
Re:When your CEO quits (Score:3, Insightful)
Ding dong, the witch is gone! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone! (Score:3, Insightful)
Under Fiorina HP was run into the dirt. Maybe now they can take directions which will restore the old reputation for quality engineering.
Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone! (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, our data center is buying more and more Sun boxes these days.
Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone! (Score:3, Interesting)
Unpopular management vs. Bad capitalism (Score:3, Interesting)
What differentiates the situations, though, is that Fiorina rammed home a merger that was extremely unpopular (although I believed wise) in addition to overseeing a number of changes to the company that many believed permanently damaged HP's innovation-oriented corporate culture.
In sho
NPR dancing a jig? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there no love lost between NPR and Fiorina or is it just that NPR is happy anytime a "big wig" gets the boot?
Re:NPR dancing a jig? (Score:5, Informative)
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!
Re:NPR dancing a jig? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Feel invigorating! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, sorry about your job.
Investors (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Re:Investors (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
What a surprise....NOT (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:4, Funny)
Surely you meant her GliderJet and FlightPaq?
Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
I am actually surprised... (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:I am actually surprised... (Score:3, Funny)
Carlyland, regrettably, has become a wasteland. (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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".
Hmmmm chairwoman.... (Score:3, Funny)
Gee, whats the golden parachute? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Sorry, rather bitter laid off HP employee)
HP website already updated (Score:5, Interesting)
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 :-)
Another marketing genius bites the dust (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another marketing genius bites the dust (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, Apple has both, in Steve Jobs. And it's hard to separate the marketing from the innovation completely.
Re:Another marketing genius bites the dust (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Another marketing genius bites the dust (Score:4, Insightful)
If the new management can return hope to HP's despairing staff, I am sure they can work miracles.
You insensitive clods! (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait, I actually don't care.
Woo hoo!!! Ding Dong! The witch is dead!
Re:You insensitive clods! (Score:5, Funny)
I will paypal anybody $25 if they can show me a picture of her smeared make-up.
Re:You insensitive clods! (Score:3, Funny)
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
Damn, that sucks... (Score:5, Funny)
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.]
And don't forget the HP iPod (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder what company she'll grace with her presence next? Dump that stock quickly...
One job I like to see 'lost' (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Crappy management, huge bonus... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
What HP?
The _real_ "HP" is now called "Agilent"!
The media is too PC-centric (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Outsorceress Fiorina in her own words (Score:5, Insightful)
You were right Carly, goodbye.
don't let the door hit you in the ass, Carly (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
http://news.com.com/HP+Were+not+changing+Fiorinas+ job/2100-7341_3-5547456.html [com.com]
... Guess two weeks isn't considered the "near future", huh. 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.
I Guess She Was Right (Score:3, Funny)
Did we slashdot Carly? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.....
here's the deal from the inside (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
Re:That's too bad (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That's too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
While that might be true, but the fact is that she sucked as a CEO and she made lots of crappy decisions. And, because of that, she deserves to be kicked out, breasts or no breasts.
Re:That's too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's too bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Just goes to prove that anyone can be an asshole.
Re:That's too bad [Of course there are others] (Score:4, Informative)
CEO of Lucent Technologies Inc.
Patricia Russo
(http://www.lucent.com/corpinfo/bios/russo.html)
CIO of Lucent Technologies Inc.
Ruth Bruch
(http://www.lucent.com/corpinfo/bios/bruch.html)
Board of Directors
http://www.lucent.com/corpinfo/leaders.html
Re:That's too bad (Score:5, Informative)
SiO2
Re:That's too bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Except, if what one is concerned about is the presence of a female CEO that demonstrates that there's no difference between men and women when it comes to performance in that area, you should be glad that she's going.
It's not about being a good or bad woman - she's underperforming as a CEO, period. It's gender-neutral underwhelming work, and her femininity doesn't matter one way or the other. That she's a woman shouldn't matter. To miss her strictly because she's a woman sells women short, and implies an almost affirmitive-action-needed shortcoming in female intellect. Just judge her and other female executives on actual performance, and that will shut down the gender chatter significantly. Her novelty has already worn off, so the HP board rightfully focused on what she was actually delivering (now that delivering PR for hiring her has run its course).
Re:That's too bad (Score:5, Informative)
Mary Kay
Oprah
Avon
Hearst Magazines
Playboy
Re:The knives have been out for a long time (Score:5, Funny)
There's a difference between a woman and a bitch who fills cartridges only a quarter full.
Re:I know people who work at HP... (Score:3, Funny)
That's not the least bit nice - you are giving snakes a bad name
Re:BBC Article (Score:3, Insightful)
That's Sun Oil (Sunoco). Their share price is being influenced by, ahem, different factors.
I think this [yahoo.com] is what you wanted.