HP CEO Carly Fiorina to Step Down

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.

NPR dancing a jig?

[jacobcaz]

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?

Investors

[BWJones]

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.

That's too bad

[grungebox]

Say what you will about her policies, Fiorina was still one of only a handful of significant female CEO's in the world today. In fact, I can't think of another one off the top of my head, and certainly no other woman heads a company as powerful and important as HP.

Ding Dong The Witch is Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Carly could have been the worst CEO of a major US corporation.

Her strategy...no kidding:

1) Sell ink to customers
2) Buy Compaq... and then dump it
3) Offshore everthing
4) Give herself a big bonus

I'm being a little bit flip, but honestly,*THAT WAS HER FREAKING STRATEGY*

I heard her speak at a Gartner Symposium, and while she is/was bright enough, it was clear she (a) had no sense of humor (b) did not tolerate disent.

Its the best news I've heard this week. Really.

Booya?

[erikharrison]

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".

Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. They should've never given their HP-UX base the idea they were being abandoned (in favor of Winodws). The decline of the calculator division cost them their coolness factor. The loss of test equipment cost them their geek base. And I must say that none of the current HP printers is half as well made as my LaserJet 4 (manufacture date: March 1993), which simply works, and works, and works.

Re:Investors

[Rinikusu]

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:more info

[dsginter]

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.

HP website already updated

[Zoxed]

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 :-)

Carly was one ot the things that was wrong.

[OmniGeek]

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.

Re:more info

[ack154]

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:Investors

[BWJones]

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.

Re:more info

[AviLazar]

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?

Re:Another marketing genius bites the dust

[Ohreally_factor]

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.

Re:more info

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

[emil]

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.

Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone!

[Durrik]

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.

Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone!

[lucabrasi999]

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.

Re:more info

[Coryoth]

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

[superpulpsicle]

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.

Unpopular management vs. Bad capitalism

[swb]

Ebbers and Lay _are_ the victims of antipathy; one's pretty much guaranteed to go to jail, while the other faces a strong possibility of going to jail (depending on how long Bush decides to hold back the justice department).

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 short, she was an "unpopular manager".

Ebbers and Lay were "bad capitalists"; they pursued aggressive and ultimately illegal business activities. Unfortunately, the antipathy towards them makes many other capitalists extremely uncomfortable, as it hits close to home (many businesses pursue an aggressive business and legal strategy, especially tax-wise), and often borrows from the rhetoric of class warfare.

This leads to a certain dampening of the antipathy towards these men, as it invokes a circle-the-wagons reaction. Carly's strategy was never particularly popular, either among HP fans or among investors.

In addition

[CaptainZapp]

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

Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone!

[LaCosaNostradamus]

Yes, I've been watching aghast as our HP "LaserJet" 1300 printers (note I put the word in quotes) pull sheets of paper into themselves crooked, and merrily print on them, producing crooked output. These "LaserJets" are crap, in my opinion. If HP had called them "CheapJets", I would have had more respect for them. Meanwhile, our LaserJet 4000s are still ka-clunk-ing away. (I had one the other day that apparently caught some liquid inside it in the past, which led to severe rust in 3 roller bearings, which led to monstrous squeaking ... but it still printed as well as it ever did. Now, that's a printer beast. It remainds me of another fine species called the LaserJet II.)

Re:more info

[drinkypoo]

The way the pricing works in the inkjet market, they can't afford to give you real cartridges - they need you to buy refills to actually pay for the printer. You know, like the Xbox. The market has essentially demanded this pricing model in inkjets. People are still (mostly) willing to buy laser printers, and remanufactured toner cartridges are readily available, so they don't have to pull the same trick there. Besides, a full toner cartridge can just be set in the printer and work right, a mostly empty one has to be shaken and so on, because otherwise it will settle during shipment.

Re:That's too bad

[Overzeetop]

And that's a shame. Truth is, poor managers should not be CEOs. While there are more poor male managers in CEO positions than poor female managers in CEO positions, the females tend to stick out simply due to their gender difference. It's hard to be a really good CEO...and the best ones - male or female - rarely get any press.

Just goes to prove that anyone can be an asshole.

Did we slashdot Carly?

[philkerr]

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.....

Re:Good riddance to bad rubbish.

[emil]

You really think itanic support is important?

You don't understand. We are tired of HP making architecture decisions for us. HP should let the market itself decide. Maintaining both Itanium and Opteron is more reassuring than another jump.

CDE/OpenVMS? Are you on drugs? Show me someone who actually wants CDE.

You don't understand. CDE already runs on OpenVMS. X-Windows for VMS needs an update, and GNOME/KDE would be both market splash and reassurance.

Now here's another thought for you: ATX is a standard.

Fine. Keep the power supply connector.

The Opteron manufacturing rights vs. Alpha IP thing makes sense, but I don't necessarily see any reason that AMD would go for it.

• AMD already manufactures a MIPS core.
• Slot-A/Socket-A was originally the Alpha bus, licensed from DEC.
• Alpha is designed for high speeds without a deep pipeline.
• Look up Dirk Meyer sometime.

Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone!

[Rasta Prefect]

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.

Killing PA-RISC AND Alpha was a bad idea. PA-RISC _or_ Alpha sure, but not both. Itanium was the planned migration plan for PA-RISC, but the Alpha was a superior architecture and continuing development on it would have been a better plan than trying to force Compaq's old customers to move the an inferior OS on an inferior chip.

yes we are, very much so

[Anonymous Coward]

everyone is giddy. no one is sorry. all we learned under her management is that we don't deserve the pay we get, don't deserve raises, aren't entitled to our jobs, can be replaced by cheaper foreign labor, and that we don't perform to her expectations.

news flash carly - you don't perform to ours either.

bye bye.

Re:Good riddance to bad rubbish.

[MemoryDragon]

Actually every other division was run down by the strategies of HP the last few years. The problem is that people currently seem to run away from HP printerwise (most of the to Canon) HP simply exaggerated with their ink prices too much. (In germany they used to be #1 now they are probably in the same league as Lexmark with market share in inkjets, same goes for laser printers)

My Carly story

[theendlessnow]

I was talking just a couple of weeks ago with an HP tech support person onsite. I was asking him about the Itanium mess and the fact that HP had eliminated thier Itanium workstation line and that the had shipped the Itanium chip boys back to Intel. He didn't say much about the workstation line, but did say that he thought the Itanium chip boys would be much better off at Intel. He said morale was really, really low at HP right now. I got the feeling that just about everyone he knew at HP was looking for a job OUTSIDE of HP.

Re:Think Breakup First...

[chris_mahan]

Just so you know,

I don't print anymore.

I use blank paper to write on, then edit it, then move the stuff to the wiki.

Images? To the wiki.

Screenshots? To the wiki.

Documentation? to the wiki.

In the wiki can search it, link it, audit it, and annotate it, and that from every machine in the company.

And yes I work for a fortune 500.

Using mediawiki (the software that powers wikipedia)

Things are shifting in the business world where toner goes. It's not about the cost of toner, it's about the limited use of paper.

Re:more info

[iocat]

I just felt like she was kind of a tool. Unable to make HP better on its own, she and her team decided to merge w/ Compaq, start a huge war with the board, and then spend a couple years sorting the merger out, all so they could avoid the real problem, which was HP itself. WTF?

Re:Ding dong, the witch is gone!

[RealAlaskan]

Stop pretending the Compaq merger was a good idea. ... Get those scientific instruments and calculator business back.

Rather than HP getting back the scientific instruments (Agilent) and calculators, maybe Agilent should buy the calculator division (whatever's left of it) from HP? Then we'd have the old HP back, in everything but name. A few years later, when Dell and Carly's legacy has driven HP into bankruptcy, Agilent can buy the HP name and we have the whole shooting match together again.

The printers and computers were a bad idea from the start. A low-volume, high-ticket, high-margin, high-tech business like a maker of scientific instruments can't sell low-cost consumer crap to Walmart: the business models are just too different to have under the same management.

Re:Not much to say, but ..

[chinakow]

you know after getting laid off from HP that is probably the nicest thing I could say, $200 million to not lay off but fire thousands of employees, thank all that is good an holy she is gone, maybe HP can become a good company again, one that people want to work for. and one that I might think about buying things from.

Re:Not much to say, but ..

[hunterx11]

So if I'm starving on a desert island, who's violating my rights? Is it you?

Re:more info

[Nefarious Wheel]

Heck yes. I've been in IT thirty five years and in the SCA for about ten. I advanced in my mundane job more quickly as a result of my medieval pursuits (primarily due to learning how to herd cats) than I did by learning another package or gaining another cert.

I suppose that indicates modern corporate culture is primarily Feudal in nature. Hmmm....

Re:more info

[tsukurite]

The first round of layoffs got dubbed "Black Tuesday". More layoffs happened after the merger. Supposedly only one or two rounds. However, following the public outcry about the numbers, HP started to do them on the sly, dropping five here, seven there. The layoffs continue to this day. The timing? After every earnings report.

Disclaimer: I was with HP for 6 years. The Lew Platt years were amazing for a new college grad. The Carly era sucked the life out of a supportive, educational, opportunity laden company. After coming out of my bout of unemployment, I'm actually glad to have been laid off. I'm in a better job and I'm actually happy. Most of the folks I know that are still there are miserable. Hopefully things can start to turn around.

Re:more info

[thogard]

Maybe its time the HP share holders sue the current board for offering her 21 million to leave. Shes gone, and its clear that the stock holders thought she was very bad for the company. Shes been fired and that ends it -- no more payments. If she had it in her contract, so what... she cost the stock holders 7 billion in value. Maybe its time that the payouts only happen if they did good things for the company. Its time to show boards that the huge golden handshakes are over.