Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
Honestly, having seen the inside operations of how HP is run, I can tell you, they're happy simply because Carly is gone. She's cut corners like you wouldn't believe. Did you know that their consumers have better computers than what's in their tech support centers in the Houston RDC?
Carly has taken it on herself to ensure techs are NOT able to do their jobs by implementing stupid tools like "ATM" or the Automated Technology Manager to replace the MMC snap-ins for Active Directory. VPN support for employees is utilized only through a "signed" proprietary program which is a pain in the ass to support because it either breaks or totally f*cks up a person's NT account. Their financial center is run completely on VMS and locks out users repeatedly. As for pager/cellphone support, the company gives you one, but you have to pay for the services. If you don't want a pager or cell, they give you a Blackberry which is linked to their own Blackberry service towers running Blackberry Server v1.0 while the rest of the world has upgraded their software 10-fold. I only say this as an example of how she's neglected certain aspects of the company's functionality just to put a couple more nickels in her purse.
I don't know about you, but when I get home, there's a beer with my name on it!
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
How about Meg Whitman of eBay?
SiO2
eBay
Mary Kay
Oprah
Avon
Hearst Magazines
Playboy
ObDisc: I work for HP, but clearly I'm writing here in a personal capacity
Carly has taken it on herself to ensure techs are NOT able to do their jobs by implementing stupid tools like "ATM" or the Automated Technology Manager to replace the MMC snap-ins for Active Directory.
WTF? Dude, ATM long preceded Active Directory. The Atlanta team had ATM operational back in 1997 when I joined the company. And ATM feeds the Enterprise Directory, which is not AD based. Yes, we have more than one directory, because AD is inherently tied to NOS operations, whereas ED is tied to internal operations.
VPN support for employees is utilized only through a "signed" proprietary program which is a pain in the ass to support because it either breaks or totally f*cks up a person's NT account.
VPN support is via the Nortel Contivity box, which is IPsec based. Yes, the certificates are signed - what else could they be? And it's not tied to your NT account in any fashion, since it needs an ActivCard OTP to work. The newer VPN is just vanilla MSRA (although the old Compaq PPTP is still around).
You want to cut into Carly - go ahead. Don't bother me none. But leave tech decisions which predate Carly's time out of it. Blame her for the merger, the stock price, the ink cartridge strategy or whatever - but individual IT decisions? Sorry - that isn't something that can be laid at Carly's door.
--Ng
PS: And if my other HP colleagues could hear me say all of this, they'd have me slammed as the worlds worst hypocrite for all I've bellyached and bitched about Carly.
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.
That's a good question. The partial answer is that for the 2 years after she was hired in July 1999, HP's share price climbed. Of course, this was part of the general market "irrational exuberance", but as far as the executive class was concerned, they were being rewarded by the market. After 2001, of course, the stock entered an era of decline that continues today.
The other part of the full answer is that Fiorina should have been fired by late 2002 or early 2003. She had had more than enough time after the general market crash to "show her stuff" and demonstrate that HP can innovate itself out of a general market malaise. She failed. And we can then firmly blame the BoD for not removing their highly non-performing CEO at that time.
Fiorina's departure in early 2005 -- FOUR YEARS INTO THE ERA OF TROUBLE -- only demonstrates the sheer incompetence of HP's BoD. If the stockholders have any real balls, they will replace the entire Board, invite Packard back, rebuild a Board around him for lean times, and then give the general order to go head-chopping through the HP-Compaq executive class (since there's another class of non-performers).
Do HP's stockholders have the minerals for it? I'm betting "no".
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
And I quote the greedy bitch: "Americans have no God Given right to A job".
A true representation of what's wrong with the pin stripe suited paracitic pukes that take multimillion dollar bonuses while laying off thousands of workers.
Fuck her and the horse she rode in on!
End of rant...
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd