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.
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.
What must be really depressing for her is that (as of this writing) HP's stock is up more than 11 percent in pre-market trading today. That's nearly a $7 billion increase in market cap - how depressing for her. She was worth negative $7 billion to HPQ's value.
More
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 :-)
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 used to work for Compaq under big Mike. Then after the merger left, we had Carley. She was an absolute nightmare. Thousands of people laid off. Everyone demoralized. Nobody liked going to work anymore (yes, back in the day work was exciting and the people inspired by a culture of inquisitiveness and curiosity).
Finally after surviving round after round of layoffs and being told again and again that I was next...I began to plan my future around my severance package. I was a walking zombie by that point. Everyone was. I couldn't wait to leave. It was then that evil management told me I'd be retained and my performence expectations raised three-fold.
I quit the next day.
Carley wasn't directly responsible for firing me or not; but she was directly responsible for running a campaign that sucked the life out of every free-thinking individual with a pulse in the organization.
Now that she's gorged herself on the spirit of thousands, no doubt she'll float down to another company via her golden parachute and repeat the process there.
Good riddance. Colleagues still at HP report that there is open celebration in the labs and cube-farms.
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.