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.
Does this suprise anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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).
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: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?
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.
Re:Being a slashdotter... (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Why supprised (Score:3, Insightful)
Google, Pixar, and Apple - are these companies that succeed despite dumb management?
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
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.
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: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.
cry me a river (Score:2, Insightful)
Plus, the guy's article runs under the assumption that the R&D Lab is holy and that any attempt to reduce, shape, or in someway modify them is evil.
This is not necessarily true. Xerox PARC gave us the mouse, the gui, and ethernet. Microsoft's R&D Lab hasn't done much noteworthy yet has a $1 billion+ budget.
Apple's innovation shouldn't necessarily even be attributed to an R&D Lab. I remember that Apple emphasizes a research-to-product-development cycle. Apples tells its developers precisely that: "these things better turn into products!"
And this makes simple business sense in some cases. Look at what good those innovations did Xerox. Apple took the GUI and mouse, Microsoft took the GUI from Apple, and 3Com took ethernet.
This article's the typical kick-her-on-the-way-out story. "Yeah, I didn't like her either! She didn't increase my budget! I don't need to argue anymore."
Re:I had no idea she was that disliked (Score:2, Insightful)
>ex-employees open champagne upon hearing
>of your leaving. Wow.
I'm sure the gigantic KA-CHING! of a cash register ringing up her severance package drowned out the cork popping. The first rule of bad management: If someone in the company hates you, they're a "disgruntled employee". I'd suspect Carly dearest subscribed to that notion with a vengeance.
At the time I was an EDS employee on an HP contract; I saw similar (though more subdued) celebration when EDS's Dick Brown left, with sincere hopes that Carly would be next. As is was, the contract left before she did. No matter, I still got a good laugh out of it when she finally took the door.
Re:Anyone else find it funny... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Google Anybody (Score:5, Insightful)
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:No one cares... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bulls**t. When she was hired at HP she had seemingly done a good job at Lucent and clearly deserved a shot at the position.
Turns out she was a fraud, but so were Kenneth Lay from ENRON and Bernard Ebbers from WorldCom, and last time I checked those are males. So do us a favor and take your sexist crap elsewhere.
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: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, 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: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:Now she's headed for the World Bank... (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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.
"Bash a Failed CEO" Game $39.95 (Score:2, Insightful)
The retired HP engineer undermined his point that "a marketing person should not run a tech company" by admitting that tech guys, including him, are no marketing genius either.
Tech industry is a cutthroat business, let's face it. Bashing a failed Tech CEO is a popular game these days, that is why a short article like this gets the Slashdot treatment. But, the smarter people are working on weeknights and weekends, at their basements, in their garages, to come up with the next thing, and I bet they do it quietly.
Re:No one cares... (Score:4, Insightful)
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:more D than R (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, those Japanese, friggin non-stop geniuses.
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.
Re:more D than R (Score:5, Insightful)
Carly wasn't the real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 by marketing and salespeople. Yes, even though they are marketing and salespeople, they are people with a clue. Our current CEO, Sam Palmisano said it best "We don't package stuff off the shelf and have the gall to call ourselves technologists".
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 IMHO why the older calculators are so prized - HP understood that and took the time to get it right. Nowadays you can buy all sorts of calculators with more faetures, including synthetic algebra, etc. But on these modern machines figuring out how to get answers to everyday problems is much harder.
does not mean that all cheap disposable products are bad
Yes, there are times when a cheap, disposable product can make sense to both the producer and consumer. Products such as the daily newspaper that by their very nature are ephemeral. But in general I don't think electronics are in that category.
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 economy relies heavily on cutting edge technology.
If managers encourage and reward high stakes thinking, the employees will respond. Besides, if you have ever been to Vegas you will realize that Asians love to gamble.
Re:Carly's many failures... (Score:1, Insightful)
That's probably about as long as it will take, but in today's market - that's too long. Dell will probably eventually kill them in the low-mid end arena. High end? They've burned a LOT of trust there, and IBM (perhaps even Sun) are quite willing to pick up high end computing needs. No one cares about their unix anymore either.
Sad to say, but a significant part of what people have associated with the name of HP is simply never going to recover. With the right direction, they can revitalize many sectors, but as far as HP and computing goes, they'll be dead in a few years.
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:5, Insightful)
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: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: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.
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: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: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 service.
I went looking for a new laser printer the other day and became kind of PO'ed at the obvious cheapness of current models compared to the one I have. I don't see why it is any benefit whatsover to making a throwaway laser printer. Especially since it's pretty obvious that something made like this is probably not going to even work right when it is new. And the manufacturer is perfectly capable of getting good repeat business through selling cartridges.
Brain dead if you ask me.
I'm going back to Ebay now to look at a nice HP-15C they have offered. I hope the bids haven't broken the $300 mark.
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
She is still some sort of darling super woman to the entire population and represents empowerment to women everywhere. She is a celebrity. No one cares about her performance.
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.
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...
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:Oh Woe (Score:3, Insightful)
We only hear about the dishonest or incompetent ones at the moment because of the shenanigans at organisations like WorldCom, Enron and Tyco. When I look at the CEO's of the companies in which I am invested, I actually feel relatively confident that my investment will continue to grow over time, without smearing their reputation by being investiagted by regulatory authorities.
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.
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:more D than R (Score:3, Insightful)
They already have. Toyota has surpassed Ford to be the #2 automaker in the US.
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, others QA, other hardware, bla bla bla, and a support staff and marketing group to make it happen and give it some penetration in the market.
Another example: nanotechnology. I don't see someone in a garage gettin' down with some electron microscope to build micro-buckyball bearings. Heck - he microscoe would eat up most of the garage, never mind the material science machines that made the damn things, andthe hyper-short wavelength lasers, etc. Back in the 1930s - sure - H & P could cobble together some electronics and build a fucking oscillator in a garage, but the kind of innovations in basic research needed today are mostly beyond the reach of some guy in a garage.
Don't forget that all of us have a huge lead on H&P in terms of knowledge availability (through the Internet), education and tools. You can build your own scanning tunnelling microscope, for example. To build something innovative today takes a greater achievement than it did in the 30's, but we have far more to draw on.
I don't think that it's gotten much tougher since H&P did their work. Consider the state and general knowledge of electronics in the 30's. Like then, to do something innovative today will take imagination, vision and persistence (probably in that order). Lots of work needs to be done by large, expensive teams, but imagination is cheap. And it's imagination that can show someone what he can build out of what he's got.
Re:more D than R (Score:2, Insightful)
So now the upper management of the company has a different agenda. Their priorities place the welfare of the business, its employees, and its products below the welfare of their actual employers, the investors. The founder of the business may still be around, but now he is President, subordinate to the Board, the CEO, maybe even the CFO. None of these people are in the business of whatever the company actually does, they are in the business of making money. Specifically, using the business to make money for the investors. Money, especially the imaginary money of 'creative capitalization', is nothing if not portable and the ability to move money quickly results in a 'what have you done for me lately' mind set. Thus the investors are not interested in the long term health of the company, the lives of its employees, and its contribution to society. These issues are addressed only when it threatens the bottom line, otherwise, its better for the 'numbers' to buy time with the marketing department, cut costs by 'down sizing', or reduce product costs. Any employees not directly necessary to create revenue - r/d, customer service, positions with cheaper outsourced alternatives - become part of a number, the cost of doing business. In the world of accounting, people are not being laid off, research is not being abandoned, and jobs are not being removed from the economy. Costs are being 'down sized.' If the company fails, so what? If the industry fails, so what? It's not like management is really IN the IT(or whatever) business. They're in the money business. There's plenty of companies they can make money from - one way or another. That's why no one even questions that the CEO of a technology company is qualified to run the WB. Upper management knows THEY'RE going to be paid despite the empty pension fund, bankrupt accounts, and long line of creditors. They know because the people who pay them are also in the money business. And that's just the way it works. Don't believe it?...run the numbers.
billy - just cause it's my job doesn't make it right
Re:Does this suprise anyone? (Score:2, Insightful)
of course someone needs to design the products that are sold by Dell (and Walmart, for that matter), but that's not dell's function. it is more sensible for them to let others take the design risk, and simply make money reselling the succesful designs.
Re:Oh Woe (Score:3, Insightful)