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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.
My work here is done.
There have been other shakeups in personel at HP leading to speculation that there is something wrong. You have to wonder if all the animosity she accrued while making the HP/Compaq merger happen has finally been returned.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Here
I hope you die painfully and alone.
See the AP version of the story here via MSNBC.
Even if the role is filled by a woman, it's still called chairman, or chairperson.
and your share price goes up, you know they must have been doing a damn poor job ...
Hey HP, you can stop sucking ass now! Stop pretending the Compaq merger was a good idea. Stop trying to prop up Itanium. Stop pretending dropping Alpha and PA-RISC for Itanium was a good idea. Stop making cheap printers that fall apart if you look at them. Get those scientific instruments and calculator business back. Just stop being a schitzophrenic Dell!
....don't let the door hit you on your way out.
Poor sales for PC's, medical, lack of direction/deliverables of HP/UX-Tru64 / OpenVMS....kinda when really
Is there no love lost between NPR and Fiorina or is it just that NPR is happy anytime a "big wig" gets the boot?
"Charlie don't surf!"
... dept. for a company that outsources so much work to India?)
(is michael on holiday?
why did he stop posting news stories?
could he have picked a more insensitive from the
There's nothing like a good Corporate shake up first thing in the morning to make you feel good!
:P
Oh, sorry about your job.
Pretty Pictures!
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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.
Thanks G-d Agilent is now a separate company. At least something good is coming out of HP
Many dark forces have been working with the HP Board to weaken one of the strongest women in corporate America. It's a loss for us all.
IMO, HP needs to focus more on its enterprise business. The SNAFU with their own internal ERP systems should have been grounds for Fiorina's termination. How can you sell anyone on your ability to give them systems integration advice when you show that you can't do it yourself.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
According to financial news, HP shares have jumped over 10% on the news. I guess partly because the issue (of differences in the board) is resolved, and partly because the investors wanted her to leave too.
S
Shouldn't this have been from the good-riddance dept.? Seriously, the woman was a snake. Glad to see her go.
Well you wern't the first, but lets all sing it together.
I wonder how much her golden parachute will be and how much they had to pay her to get out.
This is truly a great day for HP.
She was the big mover behind HP's merger with Compaq, even being accused of underhanded deals to get the vote pushed through. Like all such mergers, things rarely go as well as people anticipate. And with the loss in recent years of the "HP Way" that they were famous for, she basically failed. I'm not a bit surprised she was forced out.
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.
Now that you're possibly out of a job (voluntarily), I hope you don't feel your entitled to a new one, bitch!
This is great news! Now HP can get up off it's laurels and do something inovative for a change. This woman has been a stick in the mud for far too long. Way to go Carly!
that woman did more damage to HP than you can possibly imagine. Short term vision excellent, long term vision totally blind...
MP3 Search Engine
...HP technicians report that the new HP Flying Glider prototype and flight suit are missing, and a lab tech has been found dead. It is rumoured that a cackling evil-looking figure was seen flying around on the missing glider screaming for "revenge".
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Just goes to show that a great company with a great reputation, skilled professionals, and a solid product line are no match for really bad management.
[Insert pithy quote here]
...she lasted this long.
While the spectacle of the Compaq deal gave her an inordinate amount of visibility, not all of it was good. Her own profile also seemed to clash with the well-established corporate culture of HP (which from what I undertstand was exemplified by the mostly low-key and self-deprecating style of Lew Platt).
There were simply too many gaffes, and I really am somewhat impressed she weathered it this far.
Carlton Sneed Fiorina, whatever shall you do now...
Because it was clear the only reason she got the job was because of gender.
She certainly would have never gotten the job if she was not a "she".
... and I did not like what she said. She was ultrasupportive of IP rights nonsence etc. For a technology company it looked too short sighted to me. Like the Sony with their ATRAC format, well they had Sony Music as a reason at least. Will the HP strategy change once she left?
My emotions as an HP employee...
Ding-dong the witch is dead
Which old witch? The wicked witch
Ding-dong the wicked witch is dead
Wake up you sleepyhead
Rub your eyes, get out of bed
Wake up the wicked witch is dead
She's gone where the goblins go
Below - below - below
Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out
Ding Dong' the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low
Let them know the Wicked Witch is dead
Amen!
Seems to me that Carly took HP, which was a tightly-focused, highly successful printer (and other peripherals) company (and let's not forget those fancy calculators!) and turned it into a colossal mess. Buying Compaq was a bust (shocking, considering the the only thing worth getting from there was the last vestiges of DEC).
Look at HP's stock price this morning... up, what, 10% already? Looks like this moved disappointed very few folks.
They need to refocus on what they did best, and spin off the rest.
Best wishes to Carly, and hope she doesn't blow it with the next company she runs.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
HP CEO Carly Fiorina dies, and she goes through the usual process of defending her case in front of the Divine Jury. It is not clear what happens exactly and where things go wrong, but when the jury comes back and the sentence is read, it turns out she is admitted into Heaven. So Carly is filling in the usual paperwork at the HAO's desk (Heaven Admission Officer): non-disclosure agreement, legal disclaimers, non-competition clause, etc...
'Congratulations and welcome to Heaven,' finally says the angel. 'Go down the corridor, first door on your right.'
Carly walks to the door, pushes it open... and staggers back. Through the flames and behind the door, all you can see are countless devils inflicting the most horrible tortures to screaming souls. She rushes back to the Officer and waves her admission pass, breathless. 'Must be an error, this thing here says Heaven!'
'Oh yeah,' says the angel, barely looking up from his/her screen. 'Forgot to tell you... we merged.'
It is expected that she will now accept a post in the Bush cabinet. There was a lot of talk about it in November.
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".
half. HP + Compaq = company that lost market share in nearly every segment they had a (combined) presence in! Fiona was probably one of the (many) CEOs who have forgotten basic math. I blame not her , but the stupidity, gullibity and greed of the Board of Directors and the shareholders.
BP http://www.card-central.com
That word makes me think of one thing... FLASHDANCE!
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Interesting that Dunn has no technology experience whatsoever
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/
Somone else posted a yahoo finace chart showing HP, IBM, dell. and oh my sweet fucking god, I added Sun to laugh at the steep slope to down, and their share price is going up. So, to get my 'steep slope' kick I added SCO as well...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5y&s=HPQ&l=on&z=m& q=l&c=ibm%2Cdell%2Csun%2Cscox
You will forget this sig before you next see it
CNN also has the story. Looks like about 500 people beat me at submitting the story ;)
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Why should I care? Does this affect me somehow? OK, a CEO of a big computer company stepped down. Big friggin whoop.
These aren't the sigs you're looking for.
I wonder how much money she got to be fired, how many millions? Its sick that employees get fired with not much more than a kick in the butt, but execs who do a horrid job get millions on their way out the door.
(Sorry, rather bitter laid off HP employee)
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
(I am sure my employer could not co-ordinate a website update with a press release this fast :-)
Fiorina was recognized as a marketing genius at Lucent and that's why she got the job at HP. Fact is it takes more than a marketing genius to make the turnaround. HP lost its edge on innovation, plain and simple. It got obsessed with out-marketing companies like Dell, which were operating in a pure commodity model with a low cost advantage and knew how to market its brand, and also how to sell its products. Though it's true innovation in marketing is desirable to get an edge, it was clear that Fiorina didn't have it. She was using too much techno-babble to get to the CEOs of potential clients and no one else. Those CEOs were not buying it, they just cared about how much it would cost. So HP now has the option to get a true marketing genius to sell these commodities, or return to product innovations like Apple has done. But perhaps it's too late for the latter.
...will unfortunately be so expensive it would've been the same price to buy a new company. That and they have to replace ALL the Chief-level executives, you can't just change one.
It seems their printer business affected them more than they realized.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
CEO of Lucent Technologies Inc.
Patricia Russo
(http://www.lucent.com/corpinfo/bios/russo.html)
CIO of Lucent Technologies Inc.
Ruth Bruch
(http://www.lucent.com/corpinfo/bios/bruch.html)
Board of Directors
http://www.lucent.com/corpinfo/leaders.html
"Best wishes to Carly, and hope she doesn't blow it with the next company she runs"
Its like wishing Nixon luck next time he's president.
No, she screwed up the company big time.
Her strategy was Ink and DRM.
My goodness...is that vision? Is that why people like her get paid hundreds of millions a year? To sell rebranded Apples and Canons?
She's not a symptom of the problem, she *is* one fo the problems.
Oh wait, I actually don't care.
Woo hoo!!! Ding Dong! The witch is dead!
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Time to focus on your core products which are instrumentation and printers. Becoming a PC company in a time of commodization was a mistake.
HP was the original "founded in a garage" company. The actual garage is sort of a shrine in Palo Alto. Several subsequent Palo Alto companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Google have claimed this mantle too.
Maybe she can go to India and look for a job. After all, she understands that no one is entitled to a job.
I hope she doesn't catch a horrible disease!
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.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I work for IBM*, and we quite liked what Carly was doing to HP.
[*As a geek, not a flack, so don't get any silly ideas that IBM agrees with anything I say.]
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
So this is what my math teacher meant when he said "Addition by subtraction"
See ya Carly
I wonder if Shrek's princess Fiona was modeled after Fiorina? Hahaha
It's sad when a formerly great company like HP has been reduced to re-badging other company's products. Even if you think the iPod is cool, HP could have done better than just sticking its name on another company's product. What happened to innovation?
I wonder what company she'll grace with her presence next? Dump that stock quickly...
Holy crap!! That didn't take long. That kind of fast revisionism woulda made Orwell smile.
It's kind of sad that her section on HP's site has been removed. Click on the very first link. Nothing there. Hah!
:D
Though you can still email Carly! Let's send our best wishes to one of the worst CEOs in recent years!
A blog like any other.
HP will now begin the big breakup dance, splitting off the Printer division into it's own business. Test equipment and computers will now have to stand (fall flat) on their own.
Every single problem HP has now was predicted before they let that saleswoman who has killed every company she touched, take over and run them into the ground.
Only someone with too much estrogen could figure that you could combine too large disfunctional companies into one successful organization. Every board member who stood behind Fiorina was voting with their dicks, not their brain, because they bought her bullshit.
Where will she go next? Maybe SUN can hire the bitch? Only she could fuck them up more.
15:53 09Feb2005 RTRS-UPDATE 4-INSTANT VIEW-Stocks-Fiorina out as head of HP
NEW YORK, Feb 9 (Reuters) - Hewlett-Packard Co. on Wednesday said Chairman and Chief Executive Carly Fiorina resigned from those positions. The news sent shares of HP, a component of the Dow Jones industrial average, immediately higher in premarket trading, and U.S. stock futures rose as well. According to the latest data, HP shares were up 10.6 percent at $22.27 on Inet. They had closed Tuesday at $20.14. Following are comments from analysts, fund managers and equity strategists about Fiorina's departure.
SHANNON CROSS, ANALYST AT CROSS RESEARCH "This is a good move for the company. I would say there will be a boost to employee morale, because internally people had become frustrated, certainly within the printing division. "There is obviously going to be uncertainty which is never a positive as you wait to see who is going to be the new CEO, and that will add a level of uncertainty to the stock."The chance that they will split the company up just increased, but its not a given."The problem is that the Compaq merger failed to provide the results that people had expected ... and the stock price languished. Competition from Dell is increasing, especially as Dell gets in the the printer business. The quarters have been mixed ... one up quarter one down quarter."
JOHN PERSON, PRESIDENT OF NATIONAL FUTURES: "This is big news. This is a good step forward for Hewlett-Packard. With her departure, the company will look forward to having new leadership and that is why futures are stronger. So the market is looking at this as a positive for stocks, especially the tech sector."
JOHN PATRICK, PRESIDENT OF CONSULTING FIRM ATTITUDE L.L.C. AND A FORMER IBM EXECUTIVE: "Whenever there is a change of some significance, it always presents an opportunity for competitors to make inroads. Certainly, she was very visible, much more so than her predecessors. When a visible leader departs for unknown reasons, that always gives customers a reason to pause and provides an opportunity for its competitors to take advantage."
RICHARD CHU, ANALYST, SG COWEN: "The fact that everything is back on the drawing board, with respect to partitioning the printer business makes the stock more attractive."
PETER SORRENTINO, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER, BARTLETT & CO., CINCINNATI: "This is a change in strategy because I think Carly very much personified the strategy that the company had embraced in the past several years. With her departure, it signals to me that they've elected to take a whole new course of action, and that they've decided that this was not a strategy she was in support of."The best possible use, our feeling was, for the company was that they focus on their imaging business and defend that turf and this move hopefully will move to something along those lines -- that they will hopefully rationalize the company and focus on their core franchise. "HP has never had a cost-effective model in terms of the PC business they've frittered away their lead in imaging, and their move to services never really panned out even with the addition of Compaq."This was a move that we had long hoped they would take -- we thought the stock just from the imaging business is worth $24 a share, and you were being impaired as a shareholder because of the other businesses."
MARC PADO, U.S. MARKET STRATEGIST, CANTOR FITZGERALD & CO.: "It's not an event that has coattails such as Cisco's numbers, which are far more important than what's going on here. If the reaction is for such a big jump people felt she was taking some part of the business down a path that wasn't worthwhile. It will impact the Dow but on broader basis it won't do much to the market. I think there are much bigger factors today such as the semiconductor index above its 200-day moving average and it faces some cautious comments out of Merrill."
((Wall Street Newsdesk, 646 223-6110)) Wednesday, 09 February 2005 15:53:10RTRSI am not a former HP and Compaq employee but this is one job I like to see being lost after the mergers. If let to go on, Fionrina would have completely bankrupt the company.
;)
She is a destructive CEO. That is what you get for hiring someone who's first degree is Medieval history!
The only reason that the company was "well" off was with her is that it was a relatively strong company to begin with. She in no way, has the ability to build up a company like HP or to re-create it.
Fiorina was too unbalanced in her descisions. She would vote something out, people would be fired, and then she tried to retract saying "That wasn't such a good idea".
As someone who sells HP printers - as well as other brands - its sad to see the current state of their printer division. They are no where near as good as they were. The old printers were built like tanks. It gets harder to recommend their brand (unless someone insists).
Someone with direction and a vision needs to take over.
So she's forced out. Now she can write a book, go on speaking tours, appear on CNN, possibly serve as a lobbyist. Her career is far from over.
But she laid off tens of thousands (literally), destroyed the legacy of Digital in Compaq, turned HP into an offshoring shell, and damaged HP's reputation. Brilliant!
Her short term management style, however, is the American management style. Quarterly profits matter more than profits five years down the road. Acquire to destroy your competition, pursue that dream of oligopoly. Oh, and send as many jobs overseas as possible so you can keep your workers in line.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
What HP?
The _real_ "HP" is now called "Agilent"!
This also works: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/fiorina/in dex.html
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
When you update your resume, is that Orwellian? When a company updates its list of current executives, is that Orwellian? I mean, holy crap, she doesn't work there any more - of course they're going to change the bio pages.
And the fact that they obviously had some advance notice and went ahead and wrote the html doesn't mean squat.
"Orwellian", my ass. "Revisionism", my other ass. Orwellian revisionism would be to say that Carly Fiorina *never* worked for HP, that Robert Wayman has *always* been the interim CEO.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Wayman should fit in much better.
A lot of the posts ive been reading have been flaming (ding dong the witch is dead is one in particular). i didnt realize you guys had such raging hardons for hp. if i remember correctly, with the exception of some of their printers, everything about them pretty much sucked donkey dick for the past decade or so. i dont see anything new or positive coming out of hp because of this. or maybe its because you guys have a problem with your masculinity. there's a fucking flame for you /.
Evil snake carly has signed a deal with hbo to usurp my beloved Edie Falco....
It was a big jet. A really pretty jet. There were lots of complaints when she bought it, but she stuck to her guns and bought the most adorable jet you've ever seen.
Who will they tap next to run the company? Jessica Simpson?
The mere fact that you put her gender above her (lack of) accomplishments (trashing out two significant companies isn't something you should be proud of) justifies every ill will I have towards most feminism/affirmative action.
She performed poorly and deserved to be canned. Her gender is immaterial.
I'm not sure that is necessarily a bad thing. Without much technological experience backing him, if he's any good at his job, he's going to be more willing to listen to those who work for him until there is a new CEO, such as the people who actually work with the technology and create it.
In addition, did you see how long he's been around? Since 1969! I'd like to think that maybe he's seen whats gone wrong over the years and may start to turn it around before a real replacement for the CEO can be found. Not a permanent solution, but probably starting to move on the right track.
-Gamma
HPs stock price begins steady climb upward. Carly was a biotch.....good riddance.
Carly Fiorina's Husband: "Honey, what are you doing home so early?"
Carly Fiorina: "I got fired"
Carly Fiorina's Husband: SLAP!
And how was your day?
This is after Fiorina squandered all of the combined resources of DEC and Compaq...Her "plan" to port the world+dog to Itanium would never have worked out; the world+dog was already on its way to commodity X86 hardware. Basically, she was on her way to building a company on ink. Overpriced ink. She should have been relegated to a taco stand in Tijuana years ago...
Being a woman in the role doesn't excuse poor, inept performance- and Carly's certainly guilty of that. If you're worrying about the fact that she's a woman in the top position of a major corp, you're worrying about the wrong things.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Carly worked at Lucent Technologies before she became CEO of HP. This is interesting!
Will we see all the good stuff from DEC, Compaq and HP again ??
Having destroyed HP, she slinks out the back door like the rodent she is...
I keep seeing how HP was just a "printer company" when Carly showed up. No, they were also the premier test equipment company on the planet, where individual items command six figure price tags. And companies bought them, because such things are indispensible in electronic design. So that gets spun away as Agilent, and HP dives head first into already saturated markets with razor thin margins. Great.
HP also used to make the best calculators on the face of the Earth. Yeah. Calculators. The things REAL engineers use instead of gaudy, buggy, inefficient pocket PCs or PDAs. They made *RPN* calculators. When God was figuring out the initial conditions of the Big Bang, He used an RPN calculator. ;-)
Now HP appears to be competing with Mattel for the "My First Calculator" market with colorful plastics and hip angled keyboard layouts that are just the bomb or the shit or whatever the preschoolers (or those with the minds of preschoolers) are calling things these days. :-\
I've said it before, and I'll say it again until I am forced by act of Congress to stop: NEVER hire a CEO with a last name that sounds like a pizzeria.
And I still say in the right light Carly looks like Edie Falco.
--- Ban humanity.
Maybe it had something to do with scolding potential customers? http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/speeches/fiorina /ces04.html
"You've heard of Moore's Law. Digital piracy has brought us Kazaa's law. Kazaa's law states that our sense of right and wrong doesn't evolve as fast as our technology. Just because we can do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. Just because we can steal music, doesn't mean we should. Just because we can take someone's intellectual property for free, doesn't mean we should. Just because you can do it and not get caught, doesn't mean it's right. It's illegal, it's wrong, and there are things we can do as a technology company to help. And here is what HP intends to do."
Now, HP, here is what you do next:
Successful execution of the above will put you back on the map and in the datacenter. When you've done it, adopt the slogan "HP - when you want the very best." Don't adopt the slogan before you can back it up.
The whole thing smells like a palace coup. Of course the PR droids will spin it to make it sound nice.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The correct spelling is "a lot" (two words). "Alot" means something else.
Ok...just observing the comments, I can tell that most people either loved her or hated her. That's got to mean something. I'd rather be loved or hated than just there all Luke warm like a glass of milk at room temperature. (yuck).
She must have done some things right to make her company some money and she must have pissed some people off, too.
No matter what you feel about her, she has more money than any of us and she's gone. She wins.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Yeah, and Lucent is run almost as well as HP.
I'm sure Fiorina had to have had a lot of very strong business experience before she was hired. But all the featherbedding and powergrabbing has been such a disappointment. And yes, comments about the golden parachute she's sure to get are very apt.
Carly - was it always only about YOUR money?
Now they are back, but some years ago I wanted to kill that woman.
I know its hard for you to not be stupid, but try. Try to focus.
But HP is one of the great american tech companies.
Carly fucked it up.
Therefore Carly fucked up a great American tech company.
So we're glad she's gone.
We only have a little hope now. Before there was none.
I'm wondering what will Carly do next? There seems to be a lot of pr0n sites these days that focus on older "MILF" and "GILF" type models.... perhaps Carly would consider posing nude?
Already taken down. That's fast!r ina.htm l
P qKOcJ: www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/bios/fiorina.html+Carly +Fiorina+bio&hl=en&lr=lang_en
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/bios/fio
Google's cache is from the 7th of February, BTW:
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:PX8f_t
Anyone notice how paticularly venomous the antipathy towards Fiorina was? Even more so than the like of Ebbers and Lay?
Basically all major news outlets has used the phrase "step down". The Inquirer, being its usual frank self, instead writes "HP's Carly Fiorina fired".
Yes, this was not a voluntary step down, she was fired.
For her replacement, I nominate Bill Joy. Maybe then HP can go back to being an engineering company.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
about how Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounces California.
I can't even understand the HP/Compaq merger. It was an astoundingly bad idea from an M&A perspective, seemingly without strategic intent.
Clearly from this thread she had other faults besides bad judgement, but I disagree with those who think this had anything to do with her being female. I've known a number of female technology executives who got it, some of the best I've worked for in fact.
I can say I'm categorically pleased she's leaving, but I suspect HP's troubles are far from over.
My cat can eat a whole watermelon
Could this have anything to do with HP's board of directors change two days ago? See SEC filing: http://www.shareholder.com/Common/Edgar/47217/4721 7-05-35/05-00.pdf
"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,"
You were right Carly, goodbye.
- sigs are for wimps.
She was great in Mallrats and Antitrust. Her role in The Rock was small but I just didn't buy her as Connery's daughter.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
They should have stayed focused instead they were all over the map and lost heavily.
I said from the beginning this was an appointment made for politcal correctness and in the end, I guess I was right.
I know, I'm an uncaring mysogynist right?
Please... with every right, there is a responsibility. Her responsibility was to return value to the shareholders.
She failed
This *idiot* has done nothing for HP, she ran Lucent into the ground. Good Riddance.
This bitch needed to be spayed a long time ago..
"NO job is America's God-given right anymore" -Carly Fiorina
I hope she has a good time at the unemployment line.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
And nothing else!
Here's part of an email I sent to a friend who works there. We both used to work at Digital...
Saw the news that Fiorina was axed. At least from the outside, it appeared that she was ruining a great US company (or three great companies)... A strategy of rebranding cheaply made Chinese products and throwing in some service sure seemed lackluster. Decimating the high performance computing and storage product lines was turning HP into an undistinguished company in the eyes of IT types. I wonder if the board still wants to split the company into three commodity companies and still not go after those markets? Hopefully there will be some sort of new game plan- one that's truly innovative and not just a bunch of marketing hoo ha that caters to Wall Street.
There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore. Isn't that Right BIAAACH. ^_^
wouldn't you like to see the announcement read:
"having helped drive a successful company into the ground, Ms. Fiorina will be expected to reimburse HPaq for her time spent with the company. Further, having been branded with the Corporate Mark of Cain(tm) she will be starting a new career as a Wayne Newton impersonator in Vegas."
Btw, according to the accounts in the business media (I know, less reliable than benchmarks) when she took over, she'd actually been a disaster at Lucent as well; just good at burying the bodies.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
I remember talking to an HP engineer who worked for the non-profit side of the company (only the printer division was making any money at the time). He was complaining that the company was not doing well enough to give any of them raises or bonuses but it was doing so well that Carly was getting multi-million dollar bonuses.
When you divide her bonus by the number of employees, it would have been at least a couple thousand apiece. She treated the employees as an expense to be controlled and pretty much ruined the engineering tradition at HP that I think made the company what it was. Now it is just another soulless corporation
I first learned to program on HP-45 and HP-67 calculators which my father brought home from the university Mathematics Department. The HP-67 featured a card reader which could store programs on small 3-inch magnetic strips. HP was a true innovator in the pocket calculator world. HP also gave us the LaserJet II, the first reliable laser printer.
I expect to see new innovations from this company as employee morale improves.
signature pending slashdot approval
She was the worst thing to happen to HP (and Compaq) in recent memory. She destroyed those companies and everything they worked for.
http://news.com.com/HP+Were+not+changing+Fiorinas+ job/2100-7341_3-5547456.html
... Guess two weeks isn't considered the "near future", huh. How much money do you make, Roger? I hope you're being paid for something useful.So it seems that rumors and whispers are often a much more useful prediction of stock performance than industry spokesmen and analysts.
You're Fired!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"Stating this year, we'll strive to build every one of our consumer devices to respect digital rights."
-- former HP CEO Carly Fiorina
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Carly Fiorina's performance was below average.
Many many industry pundits, analysts, and new reporters had a vested interest in ignoring her poor performance because they wanted to promote a female.
As long as HP is MS' bitch they will never amount to anything to what they once were. Sheesh... only supporting NT4 when it came out and ditching UNIX... shame on you SHAME on you and let you NEVER rise again unless you reconcile and ditch the real bitch.
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up - sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead. She's gone where the goblins go,
Below - below - below. Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong' the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know The Wicked Witch is dead!
-- The Wizard of Oz
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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.
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
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
This was going to be about how Arnold Swartzeneggar pronounces California
Why talk about her at all? She's already killed that company ded (d-e-d, ded). And she already ran off all the braintrust there, so who could ever resurrect it? Somebody send her to Gateway next.
rogerborn
writing.borngraphics.com
sorry, no refunds
Say what you will about her policies, Fiorina was still one of only a handful of significant female CEO's in the world today
Who cares if she was female?
CEO's are hired for their policies, not their gender. You're saying that sure, her policies were bad, but she was a female CEO. So what? She sucked at the only purpose she had in the company. She made a bad CEO, and any CEO with her policies would be a bad CEO regardless if they were a man, woman, alien, or whatever.
An employee should be judged by their skill alone, and their race/sex/sexual preference should not play any part in that decision, since it leads to discrimination.
I still remember all of the flap when in reference to overseas outsourcing of tech jobs, she said that no one in the U.S. has a right to a job. Well, I guess she was right afterall!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
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.....
What is it exactly that you've got against the Department of Hoeland Security? Do you hate cops too?
She's doing a good job. Maybe you've heard of Xerox?
This article suggests that the board was considering breaking up HP. Interesting. It doens't rule out the possibility of a future breakup either.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Hewlett-Packard ex-CEO Carly Fiorina was the person who said: "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore."
s /m essage355214-1.html
http://www.codecomments.com/Computer_Consultant
cheers
front
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.
than her employment status. She left a stain that won't be going away anytime soon. As for her career previous to HP, look it up sometime; it's a trail of destruction.
You're putting the cart before the horse. No one wants HP in its present state. Just wait a year or so...you'll see the various business divisions spun off and/or bought out by other companies.
No one company will buy HP, but most of HP will be bought out anyway in three years. I'll likely buy stock in whatever division gets to get the printers...they are profitable as hell!
Apple should aquire/merge w/HP, and Steve can head up the combined company?
emt 377 emt 4
She was a kind of inspiration and role model for other women CEO of tech companies, such as one Ms.Bartz of Autodesk. Now, what about them..?
Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up - sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead. She's gone where the goblins go,
Below - below - below. Yo-ho, let's open up and sing and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong' the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know
The Wicked Witch is dead!
Mayor: As Mayor of the Munchkin City, In the County of the Land of Oz, I welcome you most regally.
Barrister: But we've got to verify it legally, to see
Mayor: To see?
Barrister: If she
Mayor: If she?
Barrister: Is morally, ethic'lly
Father No.1: Spiritually, physically
Father No. 2: Positively, absolutely
Munchkins: Undeniably and reliably Dead
Coroner: As Coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined her.And she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead.
Mayor: Then this is a day of Independence For all the Munchkins and their descendants
Barrister: If any.
Mayor: Yes, let the joyous news be spread The wicked Old Witch at last is dead!
But what about the TWO jets she bought? who gets to keep thoes?
bitch
gee.. aim i bitter much?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
What about Carly's feelings?
Didn't Carly once quip, "The HP Way is not about a job for life by any means."
an ill wind that blows no good
At first I thought that was an in-order list of her next appearances:
1. Sell effects associated with HP on eBay.
2. With time write a cookbook and biography,
3. appear on Oprah to promote them.
4. Spin off the residual fame promoting Avon products.
5. Show up in the gossip sections of Hearst Mags and eventually
6. pose in Playboy.
But, I forgot about the context. Oops.
Maybe now HP will be able to put some resources into its Linux projects, like handhelds.org. I mean, c'mon, Stormy Peters is a sweet girl, but she doesn't have a budget! Give her a few million bucks and free reign to create some whoop-ass love for HP among Linux users, and you'll see HP become the new darling of the open source set.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
SFGate is running a picture with this story that is just... well... suggestive.
"And this, my fellow board members, is how we please our customers..."
I can't help but think that this isn't entirely unintentional on the part of the editors... were it Boston.com, I wouldn't feel that way... but it's sfgate... known for their tongue-in-cheek methods.
*yawn*
How will Martin Lukes react to this news??
For those who don't read the Financial Times, the Martin Lukes column is a horribly spot on satire of a man completely brainwashed with all that trendy business thinking. (Creovative, anyone?) He names his baby daughter after Carly Fiorina.
Finally, revive the pocket calculator division, and let them design and build some high quality RPN calculators.
In particular, I'd like to see a next-generation HP16C, so I could have a spare...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It is right that geeks tend to worship the "coolness/utility" factor at the expense of making good business decisions. However, the calculator business HP had was profitable. It is a valid question as to whether that would stay that way, as you point out: TI and PDAs could have cut into this heavily. But TI didn't have a monopoly on the market until Carly gave it to them. Despite the popularity of PDAs (and, indeed, many calculator-fans also happen to be early adopters), the calculator isn't dead either. Now people suspect that the cell phone business is going to continue to eat at PDA sales. But few are getting out of that business. Even if they were, a cell is even less suitable as a calculator than a PDA. In short, it was not for business reasons Carly made her decision.
Personally, I think she left a business that she personally didn't understand (professional research-grade electronics) to one she thought she did (consumer-level computer equipment). The truth was she didn't understand either the culture of HP or what the market wanted from HP.
The most crippling evidence that killing the calc line was a bad decision was that they are now back in the business! I do not know how much it cost them to change their minds. Obviously if HP shared your confidence that it was a good decision to abandon the calc-line, they would have stayed out.
I know they recently reaped a lot of money on the 33s, which was the only RPN calculator in production approved on various engineering exams. It was actually late to market & they ran out of stock, so they could have done better. Niche? perhaps. But a profitable niche.
Hey Eisner take this woman as an example, you can deal with the job, so step down already
MIT's president Susan Hockfield.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Mark Jen Indeed Fired for Blogging
n 30 .html
I could confirm yesterday that blogger Mark Jen isn't working for Google anymore. There was still some minor doubt he was fired, and that his blogging was the cause of that, but Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo talked to him and it turns out that this was indeed the case (emphasis mine):
"Believe it or not, I met Mark tonight (...) and had a chance to chat with him about his brief time at Google and various other things. I'm not going to reveal everything we discussed, but I would like to clarify a few things and respond to John's request for [comments].
First off, nothing Mark said surprised me. Yes, he was fired from Google. It was directly related to his blog. He was employed there for just a couple of weeks.
Mark's a good guy. He doesn't believe he was doing anything wrong (neither do I based on what he told me). In fact, he wasn't even aware of the blogosphere's Google obsession - or at least the search bloggers who watch every little thing Google does - until this happened. Let's just say that he was surprised by his sudden fame."
http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-02-09-
I don't want a printer you have to send away to change the ink cartriage!
At least !!!! ...) ... funny, when at this very moment, her highness was on its way back to Le Bourget (local business airfield) with her chopper, to take the company jet back to new exciting adventures ...
After six very long years messing around in a company once great, she's on her way to scrap !!!
She provided poor decisions, made HP mess everything they get involved with (Alpha, IA64, Open VMS, PA-RISC, HP-UX, Linux,
I remember seeing this poor bitch having trees cut in front of the building of the local HP facility she decided to visit (because her highness couldn't stand a limo for a 10 miles drive), so her chopper could land.
Then she came and ask people there to 'do the xtra mile' and 'use every company cent as yours' we even has an HR employee explaining the proper use of the company phones and Xerox machines
oh, yes, this was Les Ulis, in France
I had the sad priviledge to try (and didn't buy) the horrible local management put in place there, stupid arrogant bureaucracy, Stalinian behaviour, and self-sufficieness.
Although the main thread of this nice and gentle family moved away, and that the former Compaq management came over, I fear that the scars will remain for long
Michael, if you can read this, I'm the guy for which you bought the Cosmos1999 DVD in the US (thanks again, btw)
I hope HP will recover now, if possible
Tonigh I'll call former HP folks and DEC/Compaq survivors, and dance with them.
I hope she'll end up offering blow jobw by the Sunset Bvd to make a living
Lucent, HP and Compaq... very few people can claim stake to gutting three tech titans!
with her midieval degree she must have really studied the Machiavelli.
Lets hope Steve Ballmer has the foresight to pick her up, Microsoft could really use her magic... well, it would be fun to watch.
> While I regret the board and I have differences about how to
> execute HP's strategy, I respect their decision," Fiorina said in
> a statement.
Of course she respects the board's decision. As she told us last year:
> "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,"
> Carly Fiorina, chief executive for Hewlett-Packard Co., said
> Wednesday. "We have to compete for jobs."'
Maybe they just outsourced the CEO job to India
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
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.
1) run company into ground
2) resign and watch stock price bounce up
3) PROFIT!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Congrats to my compadres at HP... Hope the new CEO is a more sensible one, not a number jockey for wall street
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
She will get the typical "screw the company up, get fired for horrible job performance, but still get the trillion dollar severance package."
What a job!
Carley certainly isn't the loser here. Let's not shed a tear as she gets the foot in her ass out the HP door. Wall Street realizes what a drag she was for the company and now HP's stock is soaring.
Feel sorry for the poor slob HP worker who finds his/her benefits slashed because Carley needed a different SL65 for each day of the week, and HP footed the bill. Carley needs to stay out of business and back to baking cookies and taking care of her home.
It appears, with a name like Carly, you gotta be first sexy no matter what stupid shit you pull.
All the other links have been really bad. Just glossing over the obvious. This actually says there will be more changes coming.
Dude, I wouldn't hit that with CmdrTaco's dick with Timothy pushing.
:P
Foul. It's not even 9am. I really did not need that visual this early in the morning. Catch me after lunch.
so much for 'it doesnt matter if she is a woman' threads above. obviously you do care and got voted 5 up about it.
HP was a $50B company. Compaq was a $20B company. They "merge". They decided to only keep the best products from the two companies. Let's see how that ended up: 1) They kept Compaq storage. 2) They kept Compaq handhelds 3) They kept Compaq laptops 4) They kept Compaq servers 5) They kept HP printers Oh, yeah, they RIFed all of the HP people. Soooo, this begs the question - If all of the HP products and people sucked, how is it HP was more than twice as big as Compaq?
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Not!
-== FeriCyde Chat ==-
raging hardons...sucked donkey dick...you guys have a problem with your masculinity
I think it is you who has a penis fixation, young man. Obsessed and very very stupid - an unfortunate combination. Still, there's plenty of time for you to grow out of it before high school.
I wonder what the final straw was?
People are not "created equal"
So you deny that there's any veracity in the phrase "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" ? Are you perchance a US citizen? Perhaps you're going to quibble over the use of "men" rather that "people"? Have at it...
- Unpredictable in time, money, and outcome, and
- Often tells you things you don't want to hear.
The current generation of Harvard MBA CEOs fears innovation for these reasons, and Carly was a prime example. The damage done by her and her ilk to the future of the US tech economy has been considerable: Bell Labs, the former DEC labs, and HP Labs constitituted the bulk of well-referenced (eg, important) computing research in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Without that innovation, the US computing industry isn't competitive with production in Asia, period.A good example of the Fiorina touch was the closure and large layoff of the former DEC Palo Alto labs (SRC and WRL); they had a clear net positive investment track record of over 1000%, but of course that was over 20 years. Three weeks later, HP announced the opening of a new lab in Singapore, because "we couldn't find enough qualified researchers in Silicon Valley"!
...-.-
Here's what I've gotten from her end:
1. The Compaq deal had NOTHING to do with market share or "growing the company". It had EVERYTHING to do with labour. The HP my wife signed on for back so many years ago was a VERY well paid and excellent place to work. That was expensive to HP, but it made for some of the highest productivity and (yes, it was true at the time) innovation in the industry. Carlyu, like the rest of the ultra-greedy industrial plutocrats in history, saw all that as an expense. By merging with Compaq, the FIRST thing they did was adopt Compaq HR policies, which meant my wife LOST a week of vacation, and was no longer in the middle of her pay curve, but was now at the top, and wasn't going to see a raise for YEARS, if ever.
This resulted in massive gains to the bottom line of HP. This was followed by massive layoff. Between the layoffs and the destruction of the HP HR system, morale went to the bottom of (pick a Pacific Trench of your choice). Anyone left was marshalled into doing 3 persons of work, and the work of well paid, family raising computer programmers with mortgages in Palo Alto were replaced by well paid family raising computer programmers in India. This didn't add anything positive to the mood at HP.
2. The merger's cover story of "synergy / growth / blah blah bullshit to become #1 copmuter maker" finally unravelled when it was revealed that after all was said and done, they were STILL #2 behind Dell.
3. The HP branding of iPods has been a waste of time, and has only served to "debase the currency" of the HP name and moniker "HP: invent!"
4. The spin off of the Scientific division (now known as Agilent) was in the works for a while, so Carly isn't to blame for the failures associated with that, but the bizarrely mishandled aftermath IS her fault, and is one of the direct reasons the Compaq deal got any traction at all.
Basically, Carly raided HP for millions of dollars for her own greedy ass self. She got huge bonuses while the company declined. While thousands of people lost their jobs at the height of the tech recession, she gave herself a $37million raise. She, and all the plutocratic shitbags like her is the reason why this country is going down the shitter at warp speed. What I'm hoping is that her criminal decontruction of HP (calling it mismanagement doesn't begin to tap the suffering she caused for so many thousands of people) has been nipped soon enough, and that HP will somehow be able to regain the trust of its customers and employees.
I remember when you bought an HP PC, It Was A Good PC. Built like a truck, reliable, and even if it was running a crappy OS like Windows, it did so competently. And when you bought an HP printer, it worked. (The Macintosh drivers always sucked great steaming tourdes, but that's a minor quibble - if you were on a PC, they worked GREAT.) And it worked really well.
Now, if you want an HP MP3 player - you do get a GREAT and reliable piece of gear: BUILT BY APPLE.
They need to take the kind of quality that separates Apple from the rest, and apply it to the PC world at a reasonable price. THEN they will be bigger than Dell, and who knows? Maybe my wife will get a raise for the FIRST TIME IN YEARS.
And I remember when you worked for HP, it was like working for Apple, only without the Kool-Aid effect or the Reality Distortion Fields. You were On Top of the pile - maybe not the bigest, but certainly the BEST, and everyone knew it. I hope those days can return to HP. With Carly gone, they just might!
Oh, and Carly, if you're reading this: Fuck Off.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Fiorina may have been recognized as a genius at Lucent (formerly Bell Labs, the R&D arm of AT&T) but not many people highlighted the fact that she was married to a VP of AT&T.
While it's undeniable that she outshined his career, I am curious if there was a conflict of interest at the time and if she was promoted in that marketing position only for her qualities and not for her connections.
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this? (Plutonite)
Not that I mean to flamebait, but IMHO no one was willing to acknowledge the elephant in the room. She _sucked_ as CEO and made a once-good company go from bad to worse. If she had been a man she would have been crucified but it seems nobody wanted to look like a misogynist.
Shares of HP (Research) jumped about 9 percent in heavy trading on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday morning on the news.
As others here have already pointed out, it says something about the quality of your corporate executive when firing her makes your company 9% more valuable.
she would receive severance pay -- and a company spokesman told CNN she'll get a payout of $21.1 million, not including stock options.
Appropriate that her parting act is to suck even more money from HP.
Fiorinia was the classic corporate parasite and the HP corporate immune system was too slow to react. But I am glad to see that it rejected her before she killed the host. Like John Scully at Apple, Ms. Fiorina's two greatest skills seem to have been corporate infighting and self promotion. She has modeled her career on the tapeworm. It was only after years of thinning revenues that enough people recognized the problem and sought treatment. But then there are lots of people who recognize a problem only after their pets have lost weight and appear quite ill and then have them dewormed.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The financial calculator is a nice toy when you work in the industry. Your computer is busy doing other things, your screens (up to 4) are full, you don't want to run another app for a standard calculation. A calculator is great for this.
See my journal, I write things there
Breaking up HP into a lot of much smaller businesses is as good an idea as merging with Compaq was a bad idea.
Seastead this.
Wall Street doesn't understand a lot about high tech. However, when they took the calculators that the analysts were using to figure NPVs and so on, they started wondering what she was doing.
See my journal, I write things there
Robo said it better than I could have.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I hope moderators smack you hard, you offtopic monster.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I understand you're bitter about the decline of your favorite products, but it's not like there are no alternatives. I keep hearing that TI has done a lot of the cool stuff that everyone was hoping would happen with HP calculators.
Funny, but my HP 15C still runs like a charm decades after the competitive TI calculators are landfill. The newer HP models have been similarly superior; the HP culture of rock-solid best-of-breed equipment works very well for engineering equipment, and those calculators are definitely engineering equipment.
HP was always, always less successful in computers 'cause they didn't quite understand the market, and it was a commodity market (I worked there, and heard this discussed often; we always knew this.)
Low-margin lowest-cost stuff was never HP's forte; it was best-quality gear that engineering folks would pay a premium for 'cause it was more than worth it. Agilent does well 'cause they are the core of HP's original bread and butter business and still follow the original plan.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Let's not forget that she and managers like her also helped make Lucent what it is today. Oh, wait ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
does this mean that Scott Adams will have to start actually working to come up with plot lines? Doesn't the above excerpt *scream* PHBness to you?
Now that Fiorina is gone will Dilbert's tie lay flat for once?
I know it is just a cartoon, but it is funny in a horrifying way for a huge number of people. There's a good reason for that.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
I totally agree. When Keuffel and Esser stopped making slide rules, I was stunned. With advances in materials and optics, they could have produced new offerings to compete in the market, but, no, they just quit. People have become too calculator-centric these days, and I guess that tools for engineers take a back seat to popular marketing.
If only Carly Fiorina had stopped thinking about marketing and outsourcing, I wouldn't have to buy used slide rules on eBay.
The best thing HP could do right now is follow the Apple business model. Make Ipod ripoffs at half the price and profit enormously. Then, create a stable O/S for their computers and sell them at 75% the cost of Dell PCs. Integrate the Cell chip into each PC and blow away Intel and AMD.
Oh and also, sue Carly for 'underperforming' and get back all the money you wasted by hiring her in the first place. Hire a regular Joe as CEO and let him/her make decisions that help the workers in the company, not the security of their golden parachutes.
I too worked at HP at the trailing edge of what is widely considered the "glory days", probably about the same time as Omnigeek.
HP was a great company. I was in a position to lose my job there when minis such as the HP3000 started to lose their grip (and more important to me, the move away from field software support). I was offered a position at the phone support center, but turned it down (bah! I thought).
After a succession of ho-hum jobs, I regetted that decision for quite a while, but finally got settled in a position I liked. But after Carley took over and started selling everything valuable bits of the company and it's culture off, while merging with a competitor (who was also struggling), I was glad I was out.
I hope this bodes well for the future of HP. The people that work there deserve it.
After this and Lucent, will Carley get another plum job? Seems unlikely to me, so probably, yeah...
Finally.
;) BUH BYE BITCH.
She was hell bent on outsourcing the entire industry. Her answer to outsourcing was "deal with it and retrain America"
She had such great insight!
Does this mean i can get an inkjet 78 cartridge for under $30 ?
If you think
Aside from being an actual technology-loving geek type, I can guarantee an immediate increase in profits if you hire me.
How? Well, I'm willing to work for a measly one million dollars a year. No need for stock grants or options, either, though I will expect a good health care plan (I've got a family to take care of, after all).
Think about it, will you? I mean, I can't possibly be any worse for your company than Ms. Fiorina was. I have a five year old daughter I can bounce ideas off of, so that should help me avoid "pulling a Carly" - you know, doing something collosally stupid and "visionary", like buying Compaq and killing off core parts of the business.
Be honest, now: even if I sat in the office twiddling my thumbs all day, my tenure would still to be a net improvment over the past few years.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Yep, falling fast, and deservingly so.
Your cultural ignorance and bias is so monumental that is not even funny watch such shitty arguments fall to the ground.
So you don't want your daughter to have leadership traits? Great, I hope she enjoys her 50 years of domestic servitude, mine will hopefully lead others.
And as for CEOs being humble, I frankly don't know in which galaxy you are living, but must be quite a special place...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
First, don't feel sorry for Carly. She's made at least $50 Million from HP, probably more. This is a good time for her to make her exit, whether or not she's had a disagreement with the board.
Itanium, upon which HP has been a partner with Intel, is a disaster. HP transferred its Precision Architecture (PA-RISC), the basis of Itanium, to Intel, transferred its silicon designers to Intel, shut down chip foundries that it had spent Billions to build. All of this was tied into their Itanium partnership with Intel, which HP thought would be producing the dominant microprocessor architecture. Now it is much more likely that Itanium will return no significant revenue to HP.
Intel, eager to save their own ship after having bet their company on Itanium, has transferred Itanium innovations to their Pentium line, which they can do without any significant return to HP. Indeed, due to Intel's court-compelled cross-licensing with AMD, we might even see HP technology pop up there.
HP must be starting to see some delayed negative effects of the merger - which was always a daring bid with many naysayers. I think you can read IBM's attempted sale of its PC manufacturing division to a Chinese company as an indictment of the HP-Compaq merger strategy. Where HP chose to "fix" a marginally profitable division at great expense, IBM did not see that its forte was competing at the low end.
Over 6 or 7 years we have seen HP in a transition from a high-margin to a low-margin company. Computers are becoming commoditized, and the 70% margins that we used to pay for workstations are gone forever. But now HP does have to compete at that low end, a very difficult business requiring an almost ruthless focus on efficiency that is opposite of the corporate culture with which they went into this change.
There is also the problem that much of the innovation that drove HP left when they spun off Agilent. That was a high-margin, low-volume business that required a lot of innovation. It wasn't very much like HP's main profit-centers, but it created a lot of ideas that transferred to other divisions.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
Uncultivated persons are not up to date in important current affairs, so I certainly think you should not care about this.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
For what it's worth, history is the most popular degree among CEOs of Fortune 500 firms. IBM CEO Sam Palmisano has a BA in history. Patricia Russo (Lucent) has a bachelors in history. So does Donna Dubinsky (Handspring, Palm). I could turn up more names, but I don't have time to go through every CEO's bio.
To complete a degree in history, you need to have strong research, analysis, writing and verbal communication skills (for presentations). You have to be able to identify patterns, form strong arguments, and pour over huge amounts of reading material. Those are skills that any business person needs, especially in the tech sector, where things change rapidly.
Disclaimer: I have a BA in English, followed by an MBA.
-- SYS 64738 --
One of the articles I was reading this morning mentioned that Litvack retired early from the board and was replaced by Perkins last week.
Methinks Carly's support on the board was thin and the new guy changed the balance of power. Either that or perhaps the quarterly financials, coming out next month aren't looking good and the board is preemptively killing the scapegoat.
You mean she doesn't have to stick around for six weeks to train her replacement?
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
When it came to towing the company line, Carly was amazing at corporate doubleplus good duckspeak. Interviews with her in pc trade publications was liken to reading a comprehensive technical buzzword dictionary, interspersed with the occassional conjunction. It sounded too perfect, too premeditated to be natural. But that was her job, to personify the type of intelligence and professionalism of HP.
Carly's a smart, charismatic woman. Maybe now she can let her hair down (I mean that literally) and be the sparkly and personable person I believe she is.
Oh, and if you're single and reading this Carly, disregard the duckspeak comment. I was only whoring for karma. Drop me a line and let's get to know each other!
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Could you expand on that? I'd just love to hear your theories on the eugenics of corporate executives. I'm sure they'd be informative and enlightening. Perhaps you could also tell us where a moron like you fits into the race/ethnicity food chain. Huh?
I read that she is receiving a "paltry" 21 million dollars for leaving. Add that on top of the booty for destroying Compaq and I have to say what value is there in coming to work and trying to do a good job? She has totally hosed the company and I doubt (but hope) that they will be able to turn-around the disaster. Her next statement will be something like, "I am leaving to spend time with my family." That is the usual CEO line for "I just got fired." Instead of rewarding Carly, they should file suit against her for her botched management of the company.
As I recall, Lou Gerstner didn't much tech experience prior to IBM, and he's widely credited with saving IBM in the 90's.
http://www.ibm.com/lvg/bio.phtml
My favorite Carly-ism was shortly before the first round of layoffs. "Let's all pull together as a team," she cried, "we need you to voluntarily take several days of vacation to get the time off the books. This will help us to avoid layoffs."
Then after everyone "voluntarily" burned their vacation time, they rolled out the layoff plans, which had obviously been in preparation for several months.
Sorry, sucker, but you won't be getting any cash for that saved up vacation time!
Mac OS X is currently the greatest challenge to Windows on the client.
If OSX applications could run under an OpenVMS cluster... and never go down, do you think that Apple might get a bit of traction on the server?
Thanks, Bruce.
I was hoping we would see your take on this event.
I was also wondering whether HP had anything left to resuscitate:
Seven billion dollars' worth of investors apparently think that Carly did NOT fire all the talent at HP, and that HP has NOT lost all its viable markets to Intel and the Asian computing-commodity producers.
Do you agree?
At age 30 and 2/3 of the way through an engineering PhD at an 'elite' school my thoughts are the following:
1) Culture really matters to techies. It really really matters. The culture that says fuck you if you are not a power-broker ass kisser is essentially murderous to actual innovation/implementation of any sort. I envy my indian/chinese colleagues...at least their countries have actually embraced product development.
2) Glad to hear many more people talking about the diminishing ability of those who specialize in technical fields to raise families in America. Raising a family is what it is all about. Given the current trends I wish I'd done the law school thing. Sue successful companies rather than attempting to develop new and successful ideas like engineers do...
3) My experience with the business leadership in the older larger companies tells me that they are mostly like Carly. I will start my own company because I do believe we all ought to be able to raise a family on a hard day's work. My feeling is the current leadership - more than in the recent past - has taken those philosophical notions of amoral behaviour to heart...
4) I will start my own company because I feel the current leadership - in addition to lacking sound principles - is fucking up. I can beat them. My company will be built on the premise there are a lot of guys out there who just want to raise families and will succeed if given a fair chance to do so...Carly and her ilk were and are not about anything real to 99% of us.
Her time as CEO was the least productive time for the company since it was invented. In that single time they shifted from creating new wealth to reselling the same thing everyone else was. Nevertheless she was there longer than most CEO's.
HP's Mom is a Stupid Bitch in D minor:
HP's mom's a bitch, she's a big fat bitch,
She's the biggest bitch in the whole wide world,
She's a stupid bitch, if there ever was a bitch,
She's a bitch to all the boys and girls.
On Monday she's a bitch
On Tuesday she's a bitch
On Wednesday thru Saturday she's a bitch
Then on Sunday just to be different,
Shes u super king kamehameha bitch
>...she stated that the most important thing for any working person was
>to first make yourself financially independent. Then you can make the
>decisions you really believe in, without fear of being sacked.
It makes a difference if the rich^Wfinancially independent person makes decisions that created a fear of being sacked amongst those employees who *weren't* financially independent. A fear that became a threat, which became reality. You logic works just fine if your decisions don't affect other people but that's rarely the case, especially when the decisionmaker is the megalomaniacal narcissist heading a multi-billion dollar company. Now we all have 5 years of hindsight to learn ways in which solipsistic plutocrats can really ruin something great. Naturally, Carly will be right there on the sidelines waiting to take credit for something someone learned as a result of her idiocy.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Having worked for this company during the tyranical rule of Carly, I have to say that outside of being full of crap, speaking nothing but corporate speak that simply made no sense and had no point, the only people she lied to more than the people at wall street, were the employees of the company.
She should've been fired for instigating the first massive layoffs in the company's history, so that she could purchase Compaq. She never told the truth when she was there, and as my friends at HP stated in reply to an email asking what they thought, "So far I have yet to hear of anyone who was sorry she's leaving."
I wish I can run a search for frequency of the term 'bitch' among the comments for this story. While it seems many of you disapprove of the direction she took with the company, I think it's pretty evident that she's taking a lot more verbal abuse than if she was a male (i.e., I doubt there would have been as many instances of terms like 'asshole' and 'jackass' for a similar story if the subject was male).
Keep it up if you want to keep the nerd stereotype (I mean the nasty ones). Or look in the mirror (mental one, that is).
Yeah, I know where I am posting. Can't blame me for trying, though.
The last thing she heard from the board was:
....be off! Before someone drops a house on you....
It could be worse, Carly--you could be in Jail with Martha and Lea Fastow. The golden parachute you're getting should buy you a small country somewhere.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Carly was hired by the Board of Directors. If something went wrong let's be sure we understand where the fault lies; the fault belongs with the BoD. The next question is, why does it take so long for the BoD to act? When someone can explain that, I'll be listening. If you want to blame a person, perhaps that person is Dick Hackborn. As I understand it, Carly was Dick's project. So, along with Carly, perhaps Dick Hackborn needs to resign/retire/be fired. As for why was Carly hired; She rose up with the dot.com bubble and she seemed to be a genius. It's too bad the BoD didn't wait to act until a point after the bubble had burst. At that point, Carly's 'accomplishments' wouldn't have looked so good. Too bad.
Best regards.
That interview is bullshit, and it's obvious why: the interviewer is deliberately setting up Carly for embarrassment.
In that situation, it doesn't matter how brilliant or miserable Carly is in the capacity of a CEO, because the jackass interviewer will attempt to discredit everything she says. The dialogue reads more like a debate than an interview.
Actually, the whole exchange might be just made-up. I can't find anything that says "Adaptive Enterprise is like a faucet."
Or maybe not -- they killed their calculators, right?
I just scanned this thread all the way to the bottom, and I only have one comment.
This thread should be made required reading for anyone contemplating bringing Carly on board in a position of management high enough to be able to effect company policy or direction.
I think it would result in their rethinking on the thought of hiring her, rethinking to the extent that she gets told, sorry, but we're looking for someone with more forward looking ideas than *your* track record seems to show.
OTOH, if she invests her ill-gotten severance package wisely, I'd say she could turn herself into a lifetime party of one, and stay sloshed the rest of her life.
Maybe, just maybe, I'll eventually be able to call them with a warranty problem on a $5k printer, and actually get, A: someone who speaks english, B: someone familiar with the product and its warts, and C: my problem actually fixed.
Such has not been the case even with their high end printers and/or storage products since Carly was given the reins. In case you hadn't noticed, serviceing dealer accessability to parts is sufficiently restricted that even that $5000 printer on a maintainance contract can only be restored to productive use once.
Even then you will be forced to put it in a closet to muffle the screaching and squawling it makes when all those non-replaceable plastic bearings are worn beyond calling them a bearing. No human who has to be able to interact with anybody else, in person or on the phone, should have to listen to that, its like fingernails on a blackboard...
Then, and only then will HP be able to recover some of the PR ground lost under her watch. IMO they must recover some of that before the buying public will return to considering their brand name as being better than what we can buy from some cloner at WallyWorld.
My $0.02 is the starting bid here, do I hear $0.03?
--
Cheers, Gene
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/09/1 352218
She's taking $21.1 million as severance according to the WSJ. Now, how can that be justified for her or anybody getting fired?
She didn't step down, fer cryin' out loud, they threw her down the stairs.
too bad she already killed The HP Way... and HP... blec!
I fart in your general direction Ms. Fiorina. I doubt HP will even try to become what it once was, the bridges are burned... the Q is already in the HPAQ.
-pyrrho
Yes many MBAs are a waste of time, but engineers cannot run a company well either. It takes a real leader and it does not matter what they know as long as they understand the business they are in. Steve Jobs knows about as much about computers as probably a 2nd year CS but he knows enough. He is more a salesman who understands technology and what makes it "cool" or what makes it crappy. He also is product focused, running a place like HP he would never allow half of their products out.
China cannot beat the US either because they will destroy themselves by trying to save on infrastructure. Just remember it is not a myth that the American worker has 10x productivity of the average chinese worker.
HP needs a visionary who like Steve Jobs is product focused, if they can find this they will be able to crush Dell and other technology imitators like the bugs that they are.
'nuff said
Firing employees to save money is like withdrawing fire engines from streets so that less accidents happen (due to rushing fire engines).
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
"Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?"-Monkey Boy Slim
...that we outsource Carly's old job to India, where it can be done better at a fraction of cost! Who's with me on this one?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Many posters seem to forget that the HP before Carly was not some magical kingdom. "The HP Way" was not faithfully observed before Carly anyway, so she can't "ruin" something that didn't exist. Many of the initiatives now blamed on Carly can be traced to Lou or his predecessor. AFAIK, Carly inherited Itanium, and HP had a plan to phase out HP-RISC processors *before* she showed up.
BTW, a lot of people blame Carly for the layoffs. So what. I've contracted at HP before, and I would blame the laziness of many HP workers for the layoffs. They had too much dead wood and too many career PHBs in my opinion. Those people were around before the stupid Compaq/HP merger. It's unfortunate that some good people got swept up in the layoffs. The layoffs were still the best thing she did.
She's no saint, but she's not the Antichrist either.
+1 Insightful
You know laser printers come with starter cartridges too?
Let's see. Yahoo puts HP's market cap at $66B. Stock jumped almost 11% immediately after the sacking occurred.
66 * 0.11 == $7B.
She sure was worth a lot more gone than present I guess.
Oh, and she "only" got a $21M severance package. I guess the board didn't think she was worth much either.
Its too bad HP had to be partially distroyed these past few years just because she was such a political leach. She's fat with blood now, she leach on to some other company and bring it down too. Good riddence - never more!
The Bush administration had been courting her to hold some position(blurb even hit slashdot if I recall). As if the US wasn't already disintegrating fast enough.
She didn't rack up in that department either... Well enough for me!
Ummm, Carly is (was) the Chairman of HP, not the "chairwoman" -- is that even a word? (quickly checks AskOxford.com ... NOPE! not a word!)
/ 2005/05interim.html?mtxs=home-corpH&mtxb=B1&mtxl=L 1
You will also note that Patricia Dunn now holds the non-executive ChairMAN job.
Both of these facts are available at the HP press release URL: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/feature_stories
There are NO "chairwomen" at HP (sounds kinky!) -- only good old fashioned Chairmen.
May the politically correct roll over in their graves, but those familiar with the etymology of the word "Chairman" know it has nothing to do with gender or the presence of testes.
You know, it seems completely lost on the people that are quoted in that article that BEFORE Carly, HP was doing fine financially. Her culture change screwed that company in many ways, the financial included.
I think I now have an inkling of the feeling those in a country with a deposed dictator.
Perhaps this is the start of a new era. The rays of light are shining in! maybe Bush is next.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Wikipedia has become a bad habit. For whatever reason, I looked her up on it and was all, "Woah! One of her middle names is Sneed?!?"
"... 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..."
Reminds me of EDS (and a couple other tech companies).
Those guys are the worst. I don't know what kind of dense brains they have but you just don't gain anything by treating your employees like trash.
Carly set women in business back a decade or two. What a joke. If not for affirmative action she'd have been gone a long time ago. The Hillary Clinton of the business world, she accomplised squat.
But to be fair there have been a lot of baaaad male CEOs of tech companies. Like that a-hole who wrecked SGI by trying to tie their hardware to NT, and then goes and gets a job at Microsoft!
HP48SX
I bought one, 12 or so years ago.
It cost a mint at the time, but it is the _BEST_ most _BRILLIANT_ calculator I have _EVER_ seen or used! It absolutley craps over everything else!
No, it doesn't have a calendar, colour screen or polyphonic sound, but it does everything I need.
At a seminar it outperformed 20 laptops with Excel: a few lines of RPN and I got the answers faster than the custom spreadsheet that took days to prepare.
Bring out a worthy successor and I'll buy it!
Carly was gonna cut the PC division if the Compaq merger didn't come off...so what did that leave when the merger did complete? Just a husk.
1 22 5&tid=140
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/18/071
-- Sig meltdown immine...
> Hence, it becomes easy to understand why :)
> people like her would dump entire and
> profitable divisions. Actual work is a dirty
> enterprise that has little do with business
> chic.
> Hopefully she will fall back into historical
> academia where she can't hurt as many people
> ever again.
ROFL. Spot on! Both on Fiorina style management and academia. You are on a roll today...
It is kind of unfortunate that the board didn't find out what was wrong 4 or 5 years ago.
It is also great news for the US, as Carly's goal was to be the next Republican candidate for US presidency after Bush she now lost her marketing vehicle.
(well Hopefully this doesnt mean that they just decided to change the constitution to add more terms to the "war president").
The real issue now is that the top managers that are still at HP are the ones that wherent pushed out. Now the real test will be to see how many managers are called back, and especially are those managers content or industry focused (those where pushed out) or just some more territorial barons (the kind she liked to keep).
He put the wrong stock symbol, it's SUNW not SUN. Sun Micro (SUNW) ain't doing too hot either ...
- sigs are for wimps.
"Boycotts in general are mostly useless."
Boycotts work by keeping the issue alive in the media - ie they stream negative PR for as long as possible. Agreed, the economic sanction itself is almost worthless.
Gee.. I wonder if its any coincidence that on day 'n' the CEO steps down under pressure and on day 'n+1' HP announces its new lineup of Athlon 64 systems, making it the first big manufacturer to finally wake up. http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/compute r_series.do?series_name=d1000e_series&seeAllSpec=t rue&tab_switch=true&tab=specs&catLevel=2&category= desktops/hp_pavilion&storeName=computer_store
apparently, being an incompetent troll is a profit-generating line of work...
The example that always cracked me up here is that of Ben & Jerry's. The Vermont ice cream company abandoned a long-standing rule that capped the highest salary in the company at no more than 7 times the lowest salary. The reason given for the change was that they couldn't hire a top-quality CEO for a salary around $120K/year.
A couple of years after hiring their new deluxe-model CEO, they sold out to Unilever, with their sales flattened out and profits considerably reduced.
Maybe she should have just stuck to that part of the business.
The killer for me was when it was delared that HP now stands for HP and not Hewlette Packard, the two great guys who were an inspiration that defined the spurut of the true HP.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
nt
Now, I love hp calcs. But as the inventor of the "pocket" scientific calcualtors, they never stopped to make inexpensive RPN calcs, or solar powered calcs. (inexpensive being less that $20) Granted, an hp could last you the rest of your life, but you can't find some "N" cells for it at your local convience store. How come I never got the solar powered RPN calulator? I'd pay more than $20 for it. Could you make it with non-volitile memory? The hard core graphing calc is going away, replaced by computers and PDA's. Long live HP calculators.
And that's coming from somebody who was a CPQ person. Most of the CPQ managers I knew voted for the merger simply because they felt the merger was "too big to resist". The only people that it was good for were Capellas and Fiorna. They did it to "streamline processes" and employ "scales of economy". GIVE ME A BREAK! They also said they're selling all of the land across from the former CPQ headquarters to "streamline processes" too. Let's call a spade a spade. It's for the MONEY. Somebody is getting paid and that's the ONLY reason it's happening. They (Capellas & Fiorina) paid themselves a $14m-16m CASH BONUS, as a pat on the back, for making the merger happen. That right there is complete BS! If you're a CEO and you want "cash" because you're too scared of stock options, then what equity do you have to make the company great?? NOTHING!!! Pfieffer was kicked out of CPQ and Capellas came in and at the same time Capellas was named CEO, Ben Rosen stepped down as CoB for the BoD. I knew right then and there that things were about to change drastically. Ben was one of the original investors in CPQ, and for him to sign in a new CEO and split at the same time means he gave up on CPQ. Capellas was there long enough to put a "For Sale" sign in the front yard, strike a cash deal with somebody and then split. Fiornia saw it as a change to make herself even richer, because after all, the prize is BEING a CEO. She continued to pay herself cash bonuses while laying off THOUSANDS of employees to meet the companies financial objectives. If that's the "HP WAY" you can take it back to California and toss it in the Pacific for all I care. She continued by buying a couple of new Gulfstream jets because "it would make the company more competitive". Custom built Gulfstreams aren't cheap so she had to lay off a few more thousand employees to pay for them. Why she couldn't LEASE them like any other rational CEO is beyond me, but I'm not/was not in charge. Each quarter she provided herself with a cash bonus (in the millions, $1m-$4m typically) and continued to lay off people. Talk about GREED! She should have been paying herself in options that whole time. If the company went into the ground, atleast I know she'd go with it and have some stake in it. Now she's gone with an ADDITIONAL $21m IN CASH just for saying "Buh Bye HP". She RAPED HP, she RAPED CPQ, and she's got her MILLIONS of dollars. Do you think she cares that HP is in the ditch? The next CEO is there to do damage control. He, or she, will most likely part the company out, sell of the bad, and keep the good. What's a shame is that in the process several good people lost what used to be good jobs with a good company. ...former CPQ'er that was cut during one of Carly's shopping spree's...
When I threw in the towel is when they asked me to turn in my pager. I refused and offered to pay the bill myself because in the end, if my services weren't available, it was still my ass on the line whether or not I had a $10/month pager or NOT! The next round of cuts I was given a package.