An Engineer's View of Carly Fiorina's Leadership 627
prostoalex writes "There is a pretty damning look at Carly Fiorina's leadership while at HP on TechnologyReview.com. The author was working for HP Labs, the center of invention and innovation for the company, only to be told that nothing exciting will happen in the tech market since it's a mature industry. He left the company in 2003. "The lab was never packed with genius marketers. Carly told us we had no business sense, and that every project needed to make a profit within three years or less. She usually said that right before the research budget got slashed again and more lab employees were laid off."" Update: 03/19 03:13 GMT by Z : As detailed on the TechnologyReview page, they have retracted the story on the grounds that they can no longer vouch for it.
Kill Innovation (Score:5, Funny)
Does this suprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember Palmer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the unholy tieup with Microsoft - anyone else remember the corporate switch from VAXmail/All-In-One to Exchange on his watch? On the world's largest private network, I am sure that helped Microsoft up the corporate ladder...
Re:Remember Palmer? (Score:5, Funny)
It was all downhill after "Addicted to Love".
Re:Remember Palmer? (Score:4, Funny)
How can it be permissible
She compromise my principle, yeah yeah
That kind of management is mythical
She's anything but typical
She's a crazy bitch and smells like a horse, she's a powerful force
You're obliged to conform when there's no other course
She used to look good to me, but now I find her
Simply unemployable, Simply unemployable
Her style is so powerful, huh
It's simply unavoidable
The trend is irreversible
The woman is incorrigable
She's a natural flaw, and she leaves me in awe
She deserves the applause, I surrender because
She used to look good to me, but now I find her
Simply unemployable, Simply unemployable
adapted from simply irresistable
Re:Remember Palmer? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Alpha? Jeez, what about buying Compaq? Killing Alpha was just part of that whole unbelievable financial screw up. What about when HP cancelled their calculator line? What about getting out of and back into the storage business? What about not paying enough attention to digital imaging when it was exploding? They've got some good consumer level print stuff now, but they are still missing the pro level stuff. What about not capitalizing on HP IP? Jeez, they are buying everybody elses cameras and iPod clones and such. What happened to all of HP's technology?
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then I think that maybe they are simply being bought out to act as scapegoat for somebody else or a group of somebody elses. As CEO, they are perhaps the most visible person in a company and they are natural lightning rods for company's bigger blunders.
This is not to say that Ms Fiorina is not responsible for HP's woes, but maybe, like in Douglas Adams' book, the job of the president is to draw attention away from those who wield the real power.
(I almost typed "draw aggro". Curse you, Warcraft!)
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets be clear, if this $45 million had been chopped into nice neat (average) $250,000 packages to pay house and supply R&D types they would have been able to hire some 180 researchers in a well funded R&D team. Of course the company would rather pay her...
The reality is that this is what is the matter with the whole of US Corporate America. The CEO's who do little or nothing but talk themselves up get the rewards and inventive types get walked down the hall. The reason for this is a simple little bit of US TAX policy which these CEO types demanded and got passed. It seems that the more money you earn for the company the more taxes they must pay or they will have to move the job off shore to avoid the taxes as Ms C. did. Of course if you make any money, you had best sop it up into CEO pay rather than pay stockholders because of US Tax law as well. This is why US CEO's act like companies are their own private cookie jar.
Don't give me any replies claiming that this is Capitalism. It isn't! Capitalism pays its investors. This is Faschism in its purest form. Mods get a life if you disagree because this has everything to do with the sort of thinking that destroys money and not what makes money.
Nope - screw the "new" HP! (Score:5, Interesting)
But somewhere around the time they decided these products needed numbers in the thousands, quality took a nosedive and then came the parade of garbage "consumer desktop PCs".
Nowdays, I rarely recommend anything with the HP logo on it. Their inkjets have the most outdated print-nozzle technology out there for photo printing. There's still nothing noteworthy about their Pavillion PC line, and even their laptops seem like they're generally the size of bricks. (Those HP laptops with 17" displays are just HUGE compared to something like an Apple Powerbook 17".)
Re:Nope - screw the "new" HP! (Score:3, Interesting)
Their consumer grade printers are utter garbage and a nightmare to support; I tell ever
Ramblings of an ex-HPer (Score:5, Informative)
From the start I thought it odd that we didn't actually write our own software. We merely integrated shoddy software licensed at high cost from incompetent vendors. We spent more time "integrating" than we would have just writing it ourselves. And at the end of the day the systems didn't work, and no one (above the engineer level) had the courage to admit we were trying to pound a square peg into a round hole.
In fact no one had the courage to do or say anything that might possibly be considered unorthodox. The witch trials went on, and every quarter or so, more heads rolled.
It was critically important to fulfill the increasingly quixotic demands of The Project Committee, who burned us out on wild goose chases for the sole purpose of jockeying against rival Committees, not for increased budget or employees, but to avoid reductions in budget and the requirement of layoffs. Not that protecting your budget is bad. But when everyone above the engineer level forgets about creating useful products and focuses instead on what Big-Bang, get-rich-quick scheme will help position them more effectively, that is bad.
This atomsphere was only exacerbated after the Compaq merger. All of a sudden every team in HP was in direct competition with its counterpart Compaq team to see which one would get axed. Our normal work week, which already spilled over into our evenings and Saturdays, ploughed on through to midnights and Sundays.
During the years I worked at HP, its spirit and its purpose have both withered, but there were and are still many bright, dedicated engineers working there who still care about HP and take pride in what they do, even if management could care less. If HP is to recover from its malaise, it must move beyond its culture of fear and initiate a return to sanity, a return to caring about its employees and its customers. HP must take its time. Tread slowly, thoughtfully, methodically towards a culture of quality.
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, HP just spent money on buying something to let it die, like everything about Compaq and VAX, for as you can see Tru64 is doing really well with HP's massive backing.
I wasn't referring to the stupidity of letting a good architecture wither, I was talking about buying it to let it wither.
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
And she want's to run the World Bank!? (Score:5, Funny)
So is that it with the planet then? "I'm sorry, the planet is mature, nothing more will happen, history has ended. Please make your way in an orderly fashion to the exits..."
What a boring woman!
Re:And she want's to run the World Bank!? (Score:5, Funny)
Ref. "Everything that can be invented has been invented." (Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899)
Fiorina's comeback: World Bank? (Score:5, Informative)
http://money.cnn.com/2005/03/01/news/internationa
Re:Fiorina's comeback: World Bank? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fiorina's comeback: World Bank? (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if we could get Carly to take over Al Qaeda, in three years goodbye threat of terrorism, and I'd imagine that when you leave Al Qaeda you don't get a 20 million dollar severance package, probably just a bullet in the head and a shallow grave somewhere in the Afghanistan plains.
Re:Fiorina's comeback: World Bank? (Score:4, Interesting)
Globalization, short of virtually every gov't in the WORLD passing laws against multinational corporations, WILL happen. It is inevitable. At some point, governments will do the same thing (EU, perhaps), and eventually, someone will find a way to create a TRULY effective multinational gov't.
The US was an attempt at such. The concept was largely independent states united in an effort to protect themselves from more powerful enemies, such as (at the time) England. Originally (as I understand it), the concept was for states to retain most of the power, but the fed to have power for defense against foreign powers, and to make sure that no state did anything to violate the constitution.
How far we have strayed...
Re:Fiorina's comeback: World Bank? (Score:3, Informative)
Seems like this backfired... (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems like this kind of backfired on HP's "We re-did NASA" marketing campaign, shortly before the Columbia crash.
I had no idea she was that disliked (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I had no idea she was that disliked (Score:5, Funny)
I bet IBM, Sun, and Dell all celebrated, too, seeing HP go down the tubes. What are HP going to do, now? Somehow hire back all the people who knew everything?
I think HP should buy Infinium Labs and go into the game console business. Put an Itanium in them and sell them also as bathroom space heater entertainment center combo units. Bonus points if they put a toilet paper roll holder on top and put an Elmo spin brush in the box.
Re:I had no idea she was that disliked (Score:5, Funny)
So don't make fun of providing toilet paper, especially if it's nice and soft. Hell I'd switch companies if somebody offered me the same pay but better toilet paper.
more D than R (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, this rabid fixation on short-term profits is a bigger threat than outsourcing -- it is killing our ability to make astonishing things.
This has been the case with many companies since the mid 80s. Their R & D is alot more D than R. Many of the most admired technology companies of the 60s, 70s and 80s are gone because they ate their seed corn.
The rabid fixation with short term profits is a problem cut from the same cloth as outsourcing.
Re:more D than R (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, they are related. HP and similar companies are moving their R&D to low-wage countries and getting the same research for less money. Experts are far cheaper there and the laws of physics are the same. Thus, it is cheaper to research say new printing technologies there.
What is going to be more cost-effect and productive: A lab of 50 PhD's in the US or a lab of 200 PhD's for the same price in India or Indonesia? And, they don't need to be "close to the customer" because they are researching physical processes, not customer preference.
The US is becoming a big ball of marketing while the "real" work is done in low-wage countries. If you are a true-blue geek who wants to do cutting edge stuff and don't have a family, then try to move overseas. The rest of us better pick up some Dale Carnegie.
Re:more D than R (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, they are related. HP and similar companies are moving their R&D to low-wage countries and getting the same research for less money. Experts are far cheaper there and the laws of physics are the same. Thus, it is cheaper to research say new printing technologies there.
The problem there is that you end up training a bunch of tech leaders in some other country who then found companies and brutalize us in the marketplace. You get what you pay for.
Re:more D than R (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I think that they are thinking that they are getting the same research for less money. I don't believe that they are getting the same thing.
Re:more D than R (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:more D than R (Score:3, Insightful)
"Only Americans can innovate" is probably a dangerous stereotype. I have not seen any clear evidence of that. Japan has one of the stodgiest cultures around, and their huge
Re:more D than R (Score:3, Informative)
Usually economics are not a zero sum game and I doubt it is in this case.
Mycroft
Re:more D than R (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really kind of heartening to think back to what HP had done, and why so many companies and people still foolishly hold it in high regard. They really were a tech powerhouse in the 70's and early 80's, before they started rebranding iPods with the slogan "Invent." People gave HP a break for a very long time because they had built up a degree of cred, cred which they have been shamelessly squandering for many years.
But people still care about them. It's kind of heartening that way. Like thinking about your Grandfather when he was young, energetic, and happy, rather than the grumpy, senile jerk he has become.
Re:more D than R (Score:5, Insightful)
It's basically a modern get-rich-quick scheme for CEOs and shareholders etc. Get in, cut out any costs that only pay off in the long-term (i.e. R&D), report increased profits, pay out huge bonuses, get out. Company may collapse or suffer badly afterwards, possibly putting thousands out of work, but you don't care because you retired a billionaire. It's become a kind of plague on western economies during the last few decades. These people are just "cashing in" on the efforts of their predecessors. The problem is most CEOs are not going to be around long enough to reap the rewards of the R&D being spent now, and they know it, so there is no incentive for them personally to manage the company well. In the "old days" this wasn't such a problem because the culture was somehow different, you just didn't do that, you thought about the long-term; the trend of bonuses paid out proportionally to 'performance' seemed to cause a kind of cultural shift in the way people think about running companies. CEOs are paid far more disproportionately now, siphoning off massive amounts of wealth from the economy .. most ordinary "middle-class" workers today can't afford to live as well as their parents did even when both husband and wife work, unlike their parents when probably only the man worked .. why is this? Because more of the wealth is taken by the few at the top, and the economy runs less efficient. In theory Darwin should sort this out, i.e. companies that invest in R&D should have greater survivability in the long term, but for now it seems this problem is just not going away.
Re:more D than R (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, most of the time this is pension funds fault which owns much of the corporations today; they are asking companies unreasonable return on investment, about 10%, or even 15% or 20% sometimes, this is compl
Re:more D than R (Score:4, Insightful)
You make it sound like CEOs are forced/pressured to increase profits for the benefits of others. Then how do you explain that it is the executives who are increasingly benefitting personally? Google for "Historical Trends in Executive Compensation": "Soaring executive compensation during the past two decades ..."; "In the early 1940s, average executive salaries fell by 25 percent"; "The real value of CEO compensation grew at 8.4 percent per year during from 1980 to 1994"; "The compensation of the top 100 CEO listed in Forbes's annual survey on executive compensation was 59 times larger than the average production worker in 1979 but 311 times larger by 1999".
Executive compensation has shot through the roof in just the last two decades. This money is not going to pension funds, and has nothing to do with them, this is basically money going directly to the personal bank accounts of the executives. If CEOs were obliged as you say to deliver increasingly greater returns to the pension fund, there would be downward pressure on their personal compensation packages. The opposite is true.
Re:more D than R (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:more D than R (Score:4, Insightful)
Also a corporate raider generally cannot buy enough of a big company (say over $10 billion in market cap) to elect his board and change the company's course. While Gordon Gecko is reviled as a worst case guy, someone like him would have bought up HP years ago and sent Carly packing if it were a $6 billion company rather than a $60 billion company.
Hopefully, once the boomers (who blindly believe that domestic large cap equities excess returns will cover their almost total lack of savings) retire and pull money out of the market, I expect that valuations between public and private firms will become much closer and a decent number of public firms will go private. The problem with cozy boards is that the directors are not generally large stockholders (who they are supposed to represent) the directorship of a company should include large shareholders rather than people who get a few thousand shares granted them annuall (and probably sell them pretty quickly). The tricky part is that what benefits the large shareholders may not benefit smaller shareholders. That balance is a whole lot easier to manage than the current managment shareholder balance that has consistently shifted in favor of managment for many years.
But Carly made money for stockholders! (Score:5, Funny)
I bought 26 shares of HP stock on February 1 at 19.75. Carly leaves, and I dump my stock on the 9th at 21.50!!! [yahoo.com] Woo hoo! I made $45 in just 8 days (minus commission). Just look at that selloff spike. Some of that was me!
Anyone who knew anything about HP was partying that day. Even at Agilent everyone was giddy. If I had known Carly was about to get dumped I would have hurled my life savings into HPQ.
I understand she has a bright future ahead of her in the Republican Party. If the Republicans are smart they'll wait until right before an election to kick her out of the party.
Re:more D than R (Score:4, Insightful)
They didn't "steal" anything. It's a free market. If a Japanese produces a better product then an American company, it's not stealing.
So either play the game, or look to change the game, but either way quit whining.
Re:more D than R (Score:4, Insightful)
American companies have been doing it to businesses in other countries for years. Now that it's happening to you, you start whining.
Re:more D than R (Score:5, Insightful)
Want a really odd example? Consider "Hello Kitty". It's a silly fad right? Except they've actually been around, continuously, producing "Hello Kitty" products for over 30 years! That's some surprising staying power, and is in a large part due to long term planning to keep the brand relevant in a changing world. Were a similar operation being run by a current US CEO it would have unbelievable growth for 3 quarters, saturate the market, fall out of favour, and be dead 2 years.
Never underestimate the power of long term planning.
Jedidiah.
Re:more D than R (Score:5, Funny)
Re:more D than R (Score:4, Insightful)
So they don't have an issue with loosing their braintrust.
Japanese auto industry is going to roar back with a vengence and kick the living shit out of us within 10 years. And Korea, and China, and dare i say Europe...
Re:more D than R (Score:3, Insightful)
They already have. Toyota has surpassed Ford to be the #2 automaker in the US.
Anyone else find it funny... (Score:5, Funny)
No one cares... (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly, if that mucked up your reputation. But inexplicably, IT DOESN'T. Rumors are she's on the shortlist to head the World Bank? WTF???
Nobody on the board of directors (board of fat cats more like it) really cares either. Or possibly they are impossibly dumb.
Look, how many of the "frontline troops" could tell you that the Compaq-HP merger wasn't any good and would amount to not much?
Unfortunately, it isn't just HP. It's nearly every CEO and board of directors.
Hands up those of you on Slashdot who _knew_ the AOL-Time Warner was going to be bust? Yes, those of us in the field and half a teaspoon of wit knew that didn't make sense and was doomed to disaster. Yet the supposedly "wise and experienced" board didn't see it coming?
Fact is, these stupid maneuvers are are win-win-win for the board, CEO's and the stock analysts. They don't give a damn what happens to the company.
Now Mr. Hewlett and Packard, they wouldn't pull this sort of shit because it was their own baby.
Founder of IBM had some pretty good rules too, they treated customers and employees _right_. But since he went, it's been all downhill (except for profits).
That'll happen.... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you earn that type of money, and spend your time around peers that do the same, how can you expect them to see these screw-ups as a "big deal", really? Like you said, it's not their own business, built from the ground up - so they're not coming into things with that background of remembering how tough it was to build it.
A lot of these big-wig corporate types pander more to such things as a peer "taking a big risk". They're going to say "Carly, that was a really bold move you made, merging with Compaq. Didn't really work out, but that's the type of thinking and attitude we like to see in a C.E.O.! I think we can find a new spot for you over here...."
In many ways, I think they approach it like gambling. Sure, the rest of us can say "I can't believe that guy just plunked down a million dollars on the roulette table and lost it all. What a moron!" But if he's got the kind of money where that isn't going to put an end to his lifestyle, and his peers are equally rich gamblers, they're just going to cheer him on. They're thinking in the back of their heads that they're "way above" all those naysayers who aren't "successful enough" to even afford to take those types of risks.
Re:No one cares... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, it can certainly be argued that if someone is on the board of directors of a company that is about to approve such a foolish thing they're getting paid well to know about the technology etc. But few executives actually go down to the floor of their companies anymore, and more and more are losing the pulse of what is going on. They just "don't have time" to get a clue.
CEO payoffs are rediculous. Carly was got roughly 3 million in salary last year. While in my mind a reasonable company would put this closer to 400k or less, 3 million is too high but not insane. But a 20 million payoff plus 20 million in additional benefits [softpedia.com] for running a company into the ground? That's 8 million dollars per year she was there. Giving a year's salary to help someone have time to find another job seems reasonable and just, but giving them 10 years of an already far-too-high salary for getting fired?
All of this stands in stark contrast to what they're telling the people on the front lines. Carly's 3 million dollar salary would pay for 30 great engineers. Her giant golden parachute stands in direct contrast to the treatment of the workers HP laid off. How many of them got 10 years worth of salary? Or legal, financial, career counseling, a secratary, health insurance, a 200,000k dollar per year pension (after 5 years of service)? Or even got to keep their computer?
Of course, if it was an HP computer it might not be worth keeping. But the point is that many CEO's have lost the ability to think about troop morale in any context, and certainly in the context of getting laid off. It's hard for people to hear that we need to cut corners from a person whose income is 95% disposable.
It might be worth it for a big company to put out giant per year salaries to lure great CEO's to the top slot. But so far that strategy seems to have failed miserably.
Re:No one cares... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No one cares... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, she did great things for lucent. They might even recover someday.
Re:No one cares... (Score:4, Interesting)
Chilling. This means she had a key role in the sinking of two of the great American private research institutions.
Let's send her to IBM next. I am sure she can accomplish great things there.
Carly's many failures... (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically Carly's main failure was a total lack of vision. Her main changes were branding and cost-cutting. And in order to cover her major failing, she undertook the merger which would make success impossible to benchmark for about 3 years or so.
There were also countless re-orgs which also serve to make goals impossible to benchmark. While re-branding HP 'Invent' she did her best to ensure that no actual inventing occured... tying HP closer to Microsoft and pushing the actual inventing to other vendors (the HP iPod anyone?) while trying to eck out a living on those thinner margins by cost-cutting.
Now most business units are facing a 10% budget cut in order to finance Carly's kiss off. I don't need to say that morale is a huge issue and HP is largely rudderless (after being firmly steered in the wrong direction for so long this may be an improvment though)
And there is talk of having her run the world bank. I suppose it is typical in the US this day and age to continuously reward failure as long as it's big enough (Bush, Rumsfeld, CIA, Condi etc.) so Carly fits that bill perfectly.
The whole thing disgusts me really...
Re:Carly's many failures... (Score:5, Interesting)
Routinely, the comments on the latest person to be laid off was "this person was the last person who knew how to [some technology or skill here]."
All because Carly wanted a new bizjet. I guess the ashtrays on the old company jets were full, or the steward/stewardesses were too old/ugly or something. About $50,000,000 each for the new ones. You have to fire a lot of people to raise that sort of cash.
Carly screwed HP big time. It will take a decade or more to rebuild and replace the desctuction of Her Incompetanceness. But as the above poster pointed out, we in the US only reward liars, crooks and idiots. Performance, skill and knowledge have been designated as enemy combatants and are busy being rounded up and destroyed everywhere.
It's worse than he's saying (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why the US software patent system must never be exported: if they want to nothing but sit on their arses and sue each other, let them. The rest of us have real work to do.
Oh Woe (Score:5, Informative)
I remember a time when their hardware was second to none, and their software and support were stellar to say the least. I'm serious when I say that I noticed the change in leadership almost as immediately as she took office - and I was just a consumer of their products. Their hardware started going up in price, but failed to move forward. Their software became more bug filled than the Amazon jungle, and their support, well, just stopped existing.
One of the largest problems I saw was how they produced new versions of some of their software packages, writing Windows versions of packages that used to be strictly HP-UX native and then porting them back to HP-UX...this was at best a dumb idea and at worst resulted in programs advertised as being HP-UX native refusing to operate properly, especially anything with a GUI. Program crashes went from almost non-existant to an almost weekly if not daily occurance.
To make matters worse the average hold time I spent on the phone went from less than 10 minutes to as much as 4 HOURS. I'm not making this up! And when you finally did get an engineer on the phone they mostly stalled for time because they knew they had no solution to a problem, or had too much to deal with. As we paid for our service agreement we expected to get prompt service and instead were left sitting for days, sometimes weeks while someone tried to resolve the issue, if it could be resolved. Even when told that issues were absolutely mission critical and costing us huge amounts of money and at times lost data due to failure we still did not notice any change in service.
Like the author, my first calculator was an HP - I remembered being astounded by the ability to graph solutions and solve multi-variable equations. It was one of the first pieces of hardware I learned to program - I wrote a program to switch the in class TV channels back in High School. At one time, before Carly, I even wanted desperately to work for them....I'm glad I didn't.
How Carly ever got into office on anything but her looks(which weren't much) will forever remain a mystery to me. How she was allowed to stay in her position for more than a few months is something I can only blame on investors not having a finger on the pulse of the company. Maybe HP will recover, but they've lost so much ground in recent years, I really can't see it happening.
Carly's Looks? (Score:5, Funny)
With about the same abilities in their respective fields.
Re:Oh Woe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh Woe (Score:3, Insightful)
Google Anybody (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Google Anybody (Score:5, Insightful)
HP on the 'Bacon Sandwich' (Score:5, Funny)
Dammit, what about open sauce?
The article does sprout some good stuff (Score:4, Informative)
He's description of research is pretty accurate:"doesn't have immediate results", "expensive and unpredictable". He is also correct in implying that research is important and often overlooked.
It's a shame that HP has turned out the way it is. It does really seem that its glory days are over. When Carly departed, it was reported that it's not because of her vision which clashed with the directors, but her execution. So, I suppose, HP is going to be like this in the forseeable future. Something drastic's got to be done.
A lesson learnt from the article: Do not let someone with no appreciation of tech manage a tech firm.
Article pretty short on content (Score:5, Insightful)
"Bill Hewlett used to remind us that "The marketing guys said the HP-35 would be a failure because it was too small, and then we couldn't make them fast enough to meet the demand. The marketing folks don't know everything."
Because it was too small. Talk about misreading a market. Computing became ubiquitous entirely because of continuing miniaturization. Of course marketers would argue that they've now learned their lesson. They won't make that mistake again! No. They'll make some other ridiculous mistake. Not because they're stupid people, but because they don't understand current technology limitations and how trends imply change upon those limitations. Presumably, those former marketers thought "bigger meant better". Bigger cars were "better", right? They didn't see the potential utility of a pocket calculator, just as some will miss the utility of some other invention or advancement.
Marketing is fine as a tool for finding products people want. But it's useless for determining if a completely new technology might create or revolutionize a market. See the Dyson vacuum cleaner [salon.com] as another example of marketers misreading how new technology might completely change a mature market. Marketing works best only after the marketers understand a technology and its limitations, in coordination with traditional market analysis. Not prior. --M
Re:Article pretty short on content (Score:4, Interesting)
Marketing is fine as a tool for finding products people want. But it's useless for determining if a completely new technology might create or revolutionize a market.
Marketing is much, much worse than that in a technology driven company because the marketers do not understand even the current products and how they are used.
Re:Article pretty short on content (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know, I bought several of them because I loved the quality and the geekiness of having the latest features. Now I do my calculator shopping on EBay because nobody makes good ones any more. From me personally HP sure doesn't get any recurring anymore sales because their current product is crap. If they came out with something like the 15C again I would be first in line.
Some of these have some real history behind them. The 41CV's were carried on early Space Shuttle missions to take some load off the on board computers. Sally Ride's is on display at the National Air and Space Museum. My Dad has one with a NASA property tag on it. I can't imagine how much that would draw on EBay.
Re:Article pretty short on content (Score:3, Insightful)
Miniaturization doesn't have much to do with calculator features/quality. HP even said something like this when they introduced the HP-41 in 1980 - that for calculators miniaturization had advanced enough so they could put whatever they wanted in the calculator. The remaining issues where making it easy for the user to tap that power. That means attention to human factors engineering and software design.
This plus durability is
Re:Article pretty short on content (Score:3, Insightful)
Eh, gotta love keying in the boot loader from the front panel to get it to load the OS from paper tape. I remember the PDP-11 I used too. Gotta love 12 bit words.
No, I left the PDP-8 behind when I graduated, but I do have a 6 year old dual Pentium II box in my house that I use for DNS/mail etc. services. It will probably hit 8 before I retire it. I also have a 13 year old (HP) laserprinter, a 15 year old TV, and a pair of 25 year old speakers that I reconed myself in s
Re:Article pretty short on content (Score:3, Interesting)
Were? A lot of people still believe that crap. In part this is due to Detroit's misleading statistics that in front impact collisions a larger vehicle is safer. What they fail to tell you is that if you hadn't been in such a large vehicle to start with chances are you would never have been a collision! Smaller cars have much better handling, much shorter break distances and less likelihood of roll over. Just read the stats, for example if you drive an SUV you are much mo
Now she's headed for the World Bank... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Now she's headed for the World Bank... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Now she's headed for the World Bank... (Score:3, Interesting)
Technical Companies Need Technical Leaders! (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a theme you see in education all the time - you don't need to understand or have a degree in, oh, say physics in order to teach physics. Yeah, right. You can't teach something you don't understand at a fundamental level.
This goes to show that people with pure business backgrounds are not automatically assumed success in any field. Mr. Hewlett and Packard made wonderful products, by and for engineers. You can see it clear as day in what they produced. I love my HP48 calculator. I own oscilloscopes and function generators made by HP that dates back to the 70's and the gear still works flawlessly and looks great.
Watch for intel to make the same kind of mistakes - the best leaders for tech companies are those with BOTH business acumen and technical backgrounds.
Hopefully this Carly FIASCO will scare some brains into those who make the big decisions, but maybe I'm just dreaming. Short term profits, damn the cost!
Re:Technical Companies Need Technical Leaders! (Score:3, Insightful)
I work for IBM. Lou Gerstner, a hick from some tobacco/foods conglomerate came in and saved our bacon. A lot of the old timers curse his name, we're still settling a lot of pension disputes, but there is no doubt he saved IBM. We are the premier technology company in the world. I work on a project that originated in a research lab. I feel like my company has taken the "Engineering" mantle away from HP, even though we are traditionally led b
Patnets (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I know the "party line" that one that says no big companies will invent without patent monopolies, but just look at how many items in the average kitchen were really invented by a big company (hint none). Look at the electricity, phone, the PC, the radio, and so on
intellectual "property" is simply fradulent.
Re:Patents (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Patnets (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with your thesis is that it's too expensive and time-consuming for single inventors or small organizations to get patents. And even if they do invest the time and effort to get a patent, they run the risk of having it invalidated by a previously issued, overly-broad, never-should-have-been-granted patent owned by EvilMegaCorp Inc. The fact of the matter is that patents are much more important to large, powerful corporations, because they can leverage them (patents) and their power and money and lawyers, to squeeze out any single inventors or small organizations that threaten them.
Re:Patnets (Score:3, Insightful)
Did occur.
Before legal costs in the US went exponential, and huge cross licensing agreements meant that the big corporations wouldnt sue each other to invalidate patents.
Times have changed.
There is almost no point in small companies filing now. Unless you are about to become bankrupt and want some residual assets for vulture lawyers to take up.
Slashdot is powerful! (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot is powerful! On Tuesday I complained about Carly Fiorina in a Slashdot comment [slashdot.org], and on Wednesday she was fired [google.com]. (See the 6th paragraph of the comment, and the subsequent comment.)
It's about profits, not what the customers want. (Score:5, Interesting)
That seems to sum up the "new HP". Before they were pretty much doing thier own thing making specialized computers, test equipment and some damn fine laser printers.
Now 2/3 of thier profits come from ink and toner sales, thier systems are very unsupported, I know I just talked to a really friendly techie from India who couldn't answer my problem (I have just discovered are due to thier thier latest BIOS...grrr).
From what I saw when I booted this machine is that HP is cozying up to any company with money: Microsoft (XP, only XP), Apple (iPod), Symantic, AOL and other services (spyware/adware/Internet/etc). They seem to be using thier PCs hard drive capacity for garnering advertising, tie-in and lock-in revenue.
Certainly sounds like HP has been reduced to a me-too company, they should expand into the ringtone business, I hear there are big bux there now.
Agilent may prosper (Score:4, Interesting)
Wasn't very popular (Score:5, Informative)
Before she took over, the company was very family-oriented, as you would expect since it was family-owned. I loved going to work because I realized that the kind of work atmosphere we had at HP was very rare. There were a couple of policies that employees somewhat questioned that were family-oriented, for instance having to take a mandatory day off, I believe it was every couple weeks. Obviously there were a few grumbles from some over losing money since they could be working. But overall looking past specific policies, there was an overall feeling of appreciation for the top of HP management for creating such a caring work environment. There was just an atmosphere there that didn't just appear overnight, it was the result of careful planning by those in upper management.
Folks loved working at HP, and it showed in the turnover rate, which was stunningly low. This was worn as a badge of pride by the company.
Enter Carly Fiorina. Look at this turnover rate, it's terrible! We need it to go way up, to cycle new people and new ideas in! Day off every two weeks, that's ridiculous, let's get rid of that as well as cut back paid vacation and benefits to help push up the turnover rate! Firings, and resignations sure did lead to a higher turnover rate. HP stopped being HP. Instead of being a very special place to work for, it was suddenly Just Another Corporation. I left a little later, not with the new company environment as the reason, but at that point I was not sad to say goodbye.
The thing is, Carly took that spirit away from the company, she took away that something very special about HP that made it a privilige to work there, all the while promising results that never materialized. Had HP skyrocketed, few would have complained, but no - she took all these intangibles away, and all the company had to show for it was poor performance. She was a poor leader and a bad decision-maker. The Compaq thing and lack of results afterwards was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
Carly wasn't the real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn Straight! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're pointing out what everyone else seems to be missing; the board of directors backed Aunt Carly, even against the son of one of the founders. They knew full well her business plan was the slash and burn the place and turn it into an IBM-Dell hybrid wannabee. They approved all the way, and fought on her side during the Compaq aquisition.
Good on them for firing her, but if they give a shit about HP and want to own up to their mistake, their next actions should be mass resignations, and an invitation to Walter Hewlett to lead the new board of directors.
Linus Pauling said... (Score:3, Insightful)
Some venture capitalists (which I think Carly was before joining HP) truly understand the nature of the beast, which is why we often hear about companies, crazy ideas, or projects the VCs back that should have never had funding in the first place. Fund lots of ideas, one of them will be a great one.
New slogan (Score:3, Funny)
HP: relabel
I disagree that innovation is stifiled... (Score:5, Insightful)
There has been a truism that is as true today as when it was coined back in the early 1800's: Americans invent as the French paint, or the Italians sculpt.
It is our nature to innovate. If it is not happening at Lucent, HP or wherever, it will revert back to the garage where countless American innovations have started. Analysts that look to HP and Lucent (Bell Labs) for innovation in the future are sure to be blind-sided by the invention they didn't see coming from some garage or shed somehwere in this great land of ours.
Re:I disagree that innovation is stifiled... (Score:3, Informative)
t is our nature to innovate. If it is not happening at Lucent, HP or wherever, it will revert back to the garage where countless American innovations have started. Analysts that look to HP and Lucent (Bell Labs) for innovation in the future are sure to be blind-sided by the invention they didn't see coming from some garage or shed somehwere in this great land of ours.
I'm of the opinion that most of the real basic st
Re:I disagree that innovation is stifiled... (Score:3, Insightful)
Example: software. Sure: anyone can code stuff, but most of the simple things have been done. I'm sure someone in a garage somewhere will eventually find that one or two points ofentry, but most of the big innovations are going to come at very great expense with large teams of people - some doing programming,
Ding Dong the Witch is Dead! (Score:4, Informative)
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/SiliconInsider/sto
The Carly disease is endemic in America and I'm gl (Score:4, Insightful)
The 5 year ramp up time of new product development is fast becoming just a dream. I work in RD. Management complains about our average age of 55 years. Unfortunately the majority of younger recruits with new degrees take as much as ten years to develop common sense and work ethics let alone a working vocabulary.
The real problems are deeply embedded in our society and educational system. Even though our productivity remains the highest in the world, time is running out. In twenty years the leaders will be China and India. The US will become a Third World Nation with Nukes.
Re:The Carly disease is endemic in America and I'm (Score:3, Interesting)
The rot can be in engineer core too....
My dad was a great tool engineer at Boeing (with it was owned by MacD&D before that). He was brilliant at finding ways to save that companie's butts. But there were engineers
Re:Why supprised (Score:3, Insightful)
Google, Pixar, and Apple - are these companies that suc
Re:Why supprised (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, and here I was thinking that what we really need is leadership and not management. This only confirms it.
Re:Why supprised (Score:5, Funny)
...and others are even dumberer.
Re:He's just an angry, old, white man (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe, but what does that have to do with Carly Fiorina?