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Forbes Now Thinks Carly Saved HP
Justen writes "It's been nearly a year and a half since Carly Fiorina was fired as CEO and chairman at HP. Now, Forbes is saying Mark Hurd and HP today are reaping the success of the strategies she developed and decisions Carly made. 'Fiorina's demise was chalked up to bad execution of bad strategic moves, most notably the 2002 Compaq acquisition. But Hurd has always said there was nothing wrong with Fiorina's strategy. He seems to be hewing close to it. He rejiggered the org chart but said he'll keep the company together instead of breaking it up along premerger lines, as Fiorina's loudest critics suggested doing.' Forbes adds that HP's revenues, profit, and market share have held steady or improved since Hurd came aboard, but asks: 'Whose results are these? You could make a case that they are as much Fiorina's as Hurd's. The effects of strategic moves like buying Compaq stretch out over years.' So, which is it? Did Carly kill the HP way? Or did she save what was left of it?"
Perhaps the long-term strategies of Fiorina and the short-term management of Hurd have paid off. A joint effort...
If you had to name the two most popular HP products, I think you'd say these:
*HP Printers
*DL series servers
They are certainly the only HP products I use (at my company we use only Dell workstations). Obviously the DL servers came in with the Compaq merger - and having used a wide variety of Dell, Sun and IBM servers, I'd certainly call the HP DL360 and 380 the most engineer friendly webserver hosts going.
Without Carly where would HPs server arm be, and would I only be talking about the printers in this post?
Wasn't it under this woman that HP started offshoring everything they do bigtime?
Of course firing every american you can and hiring sweatshop workers will increase your profit margins.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
She seemed to thrive on making enemies within the old guard management, including the family (though history will show they are a bunch of nut cases running around California forests naked et. al.), and really how much of it is her being a woman? If a man came in with her attitude, he would be hailed as a financially responsible hero who was out to "save" HP.
That said, there are still some unanswered questions around her dealings at Lucent during the meltdown. She participated in some Worldcom/Enron type dealings while VP of sales and that has somehow been swept under the rug... probably never hear the true story on that period of history of her career.
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/rejigger
Carly was a nazi manager. She expected all employees to be "yes-men/woman". If you were an executive and did not agree you were out the door. If your division missed numbers you were out the door, even if it was her fault. Most of the exiled execs went to other companies to kick HP's butt. She lost all respect from the rank and file with her queen attitude and work ethic. Just the typical case of "do as I say, not as I do".
Yes, Hurd probably does not deserve the credit. When Carly left, HP employees litteraly threw champagne parties and were motivated again to work. So I guess the credit goes to the board for finally having the guts to kick her out the door. They gave her way to many chances and they should have done it after her first year with HP. But HP has always been extremely AA sensitive and they did not want to boot the first woman CEO HP had.
Both the Enterprise Server Group at HP, responsible for HP9000 servers, and the DEC Alpha team, were completely decimated by Carly. I spent 7 years at HP, sadly 4 of which Fiorina was in charge. I have never seen such a mass exodus of top-level engineers leave a company. People with 20+ years (often more) IT and computer engineering experience, folks who had technology patents and some of the most novel thinking around computing, OS design, and engineering.
Now, the HP9000 servers are 3rd tier behind IBM and remarkably Sun (which regained marketshare and scrapped their way back into relevance soley because Carly fucked up HP's UNIX system strategy).
The only thing she did right was recognize the Imaging group as a cash cow and not screw with that. But that was because of total fear of the institutional investors backlashing and sending her packing (with her $MM golden parachute) sooner.
No, Forbes, you're wrong. Carly was the WORST thing that could have happened to HP, next to the Compaq acquisition itself. HP should have bought out the DEC division from Compaq and left the low-margin, low-cost PC business altoghether.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
Of course she burnt down two villages- but let's not get bogged down with nostalgia and "facts".
What is music when you despise all sound?
I think selecting Carly was a symptom of HP's decline, not the cause of it. The company was well down the path of losing its way by the time Carly came along. Look at the history of HP to see what I mean. The original culture and values of the company instilled by Bill and Dave were all about innovation, quality, community, employees ... basically the vaunted "HP way". And this recipe worked extremely well as is evidenced by the financial performance and growth of HP over many decades, through boom times and slow times. No long term debt. Very high margins. Unparalleled customer and employee loyalty (extremely low turnover, no layoffs). Unequalled product quality. This is the company that brought us such hallmark products as the scientific handheld calculator (the venerable HP35 and its follow-ons), the logic analyzer, the inkjet printer, the laser printer, the "Pisces" emulation systems, the HPIB instrument interconnection bus (now better known as IEEE-488), 360-series PC board test stations, phased array cardiac ultrasound systems with color flow for non-invasively measuring blood flow ... the list of notable, first-in-class (as opposed to me-too), commercially successful products is indeed long. But as Bill and Dave moved into retirement the company began to evolve (devolve in my opinion). Innovation mattered less than "time to market". Quality mattered less than "cost". Employees mattered less than "efficiencies". Engineering mattered less than marketing.
So, by the time Carly was hired as CEO of HP, they had already spun out the intruments and medical divisions - basically destroying the diversity of HP, leaving it as a computer company operating in a viscious low-margin market. They had already moved away from the concept of autonomous divisions, towards big, bureaucratic, centralized behemoths. They had already abandoned the fiscal discipline whereby all growth was self-funded and moved towards funding growth with long-term debt. And isn't it obvious that the company that was once HP is now just another computer company - nothing special. Sure, they have lots of shelf-space at CompUSA, and they move lots of boxes for a small profit. But the breakthrough, innovative products are no more. The reputation for quality is gone. I don't blame Carly, nor do I give her credit "for saving HP", since the HP I knew is long dead.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I had respect for HP. Their products USED to be good. Not perfect, but good and when you needed help, there was an engineer who knew that exact product inside-out and would honestly tell you what and how to solve.
Recently I had a nasty performance problem (especially writing) with the MSA500 external RAIDs from HP (should be old compaq stuff).
The first, second, third and forth thing I was told was that it is MY fault.
First firmware; then configuration; then drivers; at last, they said I had to use Kernel 2.6.9 and RHEL4 because anything else is NOT supported.
For 3 weeks I went thru all loops (they didn't exspect that) with people who would say "please try this-and-that". Quickly I would ask "Can you guarantee me, that this will help?".
The answers ranged from "maybe" to "one can try". Further, no one seemed to know whom to talk to for e.g. the Linux drivers and if there are any issues.
I have never spoken to more frustrating and technically inept people ever. Even upper sales people knew about my issue. After 3 weeks I was assigned a technical engineer.
After I did ANYTHING they told me, in the afternoon the very SAME technican would admit when there were simply no excuses left: "OK, this is highly inofficial. But your numbers are not unusual."
It turns out 1) they knew they have shitty hardware and 2) they are advised not to tell.
That is not what I call a "saved company".
If she was any good she'd be the CEO of another great company instead of doing BS speaking engagements. HP survived Carly.
You think that's bad? What about "Mark Hurd".
It should be GNU/Mark Hurd.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
She doesn't deserve any more credit for HP's success than she gave to all those she laid off.
Look, I know you CxO types are very busy and super important people [sarcasm] but lets not invent new words shall we? All the CEO is supposed to do is look good and say forward thinking things like "We intend to make profits this quarter."
....
It's the actual engineers that make companies like HP and Compaq move forwards.
TRY to run a company with engineers, and see what happens. Engineers build products, not businesses. They just don't operate at that level - it's not a question of intelligence, it's one of focus, perspective, and education. Check out this "fable" by Joel Spolsky for a good illustration.
I don't care how much marketting you spin on your new laptops, if you don't put a screen in [for example] it's not going to sell. Or if the damn thing weighs a ton, or the batteries explode or
It's not the engineers that decide features like weight, batteries, screen... that's what the marketing department should be doing. They determine what the customers want and balance market demand and operating budget with the engineer's estimate of what it takes to build these features and how they impact each other. (At least in an organization that's functioning - I'm making no claims either way regarding HP). They aren't (or shouldn't be) just about trying to "spin" poorly-wrought products.
Some of Dilbert may be right on, but you know... it's not gospel. Some of it is just comedy.
Carly was one of the worst things to hit corporate america since Ken Lay. I watched her run HP into the ground and line her own pockets while doing it. Division doing well? They can obviously cut costs and headcount. Look, next quarter, they have higher margins, so give yourself a bonus, and repeat in Q2. Division doing badly? Cut people, and reorg. Tough decisions deserve a bonus.
Carly was about polishing her own star, from putting herself in front of the company when there was capital to be spent, cash or political, to building a cult of personality. Ask the people shoved out of the way by her bodyguards IN THE HP HQ! Ask the people who installed an executive bathroom in her plane hanger, normal bathrooms wouldn't do there, oh no.
Ask the HP Australia people about the world class logistics operation they built, and then completely outsourced without adequate contract provisions. Look at how much the Magellan contract cost them, and the reasons for losing it. If you want real fun, look at what the board told her before they handed her ass walking papers. Tis to laugh, no tis to feel sad for the greedy ruining the lives of the hardworking.
Hurd, who on some levels I am no fan of, has spent the last year and change completely undoing all the things Carly did. The difference is that Carly had all the shyness and hard working mindset of Paris Hilton, while Hurd gets the job done.
Anyone putting the sucess of HP on Carly rather than Hurd is an incompetent researcher, revisionist historian, or has an agenda. Oh wait, this is Forbes, you know, the ones who are still defending SCO. Replace the 'or' a couple of sentences ago..... Also look at the politics, this has all the hallmarks of a paid for image campaign to prep her Carlyness for a senate run. Forbes isn't shy about politics, and it would take a political strategist with long term thinking in a high place to do this. I won't name names though.
I was privy to a lot more of HPs dirt than I wrote about, and even then, I wrote a lot. I honestly can't think of a more worthless, to the corporation, manager that had the company survive their tenure. The only reason it did was a long history of innovation (real, not MS), good people, and good product lines. Most of that is gone now, but Hurd looks to be bringing a lot of it back. It is an uphill climb, but if you look at Dell vs HP right now, it is the correct thing to do.
The article that prompted this is several shades beyond sad, and completely ignores what Hurd has done. Do the research people, ask HP about the changes, they are real, but they are not spun for the benefit of the general audience like the old days. Then ask yourself why this would be coming out right about now, and from whom.
-Charlie
I don't know who saved what but I know that the modern generation-4 HP DL385 server (which borrows heavily from both HP and Compaq technologies) kicks the spit out of every comperable machine out there. Whoever came up with the physical design is an effing genius and I'd like to shake his hand.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
That's a bunch of crap. I'll buy that a CEO is something you need, but there are any number of business school graduates who'd happily take on a CEO position, and many of them are highly skilled. And there's no way that a CEO is worth 400x what a good engineer is worth.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
They don't nee to be paid off. Publish something controversial, and you sell more magazines.
1) Ruined Compaq
2) Removed faith in HP as a company. (Hello, my name is Habib, how may I assist you?)
Did I mention the talent lost due to "right-sizing"? Sure I did.
When did Forbes become a credible source on technology? The old Forbes was pretty good source of business info & investment ideas. Stevie-boy's rag has agendas other than helping its readership, IMHO. I won't touch it anymore.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
There was a time when the market valued innovative technology and outstanding design. That time has passed. "The HP Way" evolved in an environment where companies could sell premium products at premium prices. That environment no longer exists. If customers want low prices and are less concerned about quality, manufacturers will churn out low priced shit. When specialty businesses become commodity businesses, the high quality/high cost producers tend to get squeezed out. Carly didn't cause this shift in the marketplace, she just didn't have a fucking clue how to respond to it.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
She was smart, well spoken, and made solid decisions for the *long run*, not knee-jerk decisions, that are typical of CEOs of public companies. She made hard decisions that will keep HP going for a long time to come. Long-term thinking is a rare comodity in an increasingly A.D.D. world. The next time someone jumps all over a CEO on Slashdot for making rash decisions driven by "what the stock market needs this week", I hope they think back to Carly's reign at HP and see the difference.
I don't know what it is with forbes, they love to suck up to big name execs, and look straight down their stuck-up noses at lowly techies. Forbes seems to absolutely despise anything F/OSS.
IMO: forbes is a zero credibility rag for exec worshiping wannabes.
Thats the problem with you manager types- you don't realize that you really are that bad.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They probably think this post is about them.
Oh wait, that was Carly Simon.....
I quote others only in order the better to express myself. -- Michel de Montaigne
Who cares? It's now a boring company that makes boring products.
As a nerd who cares about "stuff that matters," what HP chooses to do or not do is about as interesting to me as what Whirlpool Corporation or Caterpillar, Inc. or Citicorp do.
If I'm buying a computer, sure I'm interested in whether HP's product is marginally better or cheaper than Dell's. If I'm investing money, sure I'll pay attention to whether it's making money or losing.
But when I'm wearing my nerd hat, nothing HP does is likely to matter very much to me. The days of engineering innovation are long over. Whether that's good or bad for the bottom line, I wouldn't know—although, looking at U. S. automakers, I'd at least suspect it's good in the short run, bad in the long run.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
TRY to run a company with engineers, and see what happens. Engineers build products, not businesses. - yeah, you get the original HP.
It's not the engineers that decide features like weight, batteries, screen... that's what the marketing department should be doing. They determine what the customers want and balance market demand and operating budget with the engineer's estimate of what it takes to build these features and how they impact each other. - the original HP hand held calculators was an engineering idea and the marketing department saw it as a useless one before they started selling as hotcakes.
You can't handle the truth.
Maybe you should look at who Hurd has worked for in the past and the legacy of his predecessor, Lars Nyberg. If you think Carly was bad, this guy may just bring the 1990's NCR disasters over to HP instead of bringing back the "HP Way". With the company gutted after Hurd and Nyberg, he's proven himself to have a worse reputation. He had a chance to prove himself different, but he failed in that respect up to this point.
He is not the "blue collar" person that you think he might be. He was one of those who helped destroy that part of NCR.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Thats the problem with you manager types- you don't realize that you really are that bad.
That's quite an assumption. As an engineer, I would think you'd be a bit more objective & logical about this. Because I debate an assertion that all managers are bad and all engineers are superheroes who can do anything makes me a "manager type"?
Let's get rid of all those management types who wants lot of money and do not do ANYTHING productive!!
Now THAT is something I can agree with. I'm all for pay being highly linked to performance; from the CEO down to the janitor.
Carly axed HP's calculator division. The division now making their calculators is a completely different one. I sort of recall hearing it was one of their consumer laptop divisions, but I could be wrong. It's been a while.
What I can find is at http://www.hpcalc.org/hp49gplus.php, which implies that HP calculator development is now outsourced to a third party.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
All this means is that there are known, effective ways to run a company and make a reasonable profit, and do so for an indefinite period. Those ways have been known for a long, long time. The real problem came in when, for a variety of reasons ranging from malfeasance to overreaching investors, unreasonable profits became the goal of corporate existence. Everything can ultimately be traced back to that ... as always, follow the money. Once you sacrifice the long-term wellbeing of your company and its workers for short-term financial gain, you have no right to complain when you go the way of the Dodo bird. I guess what astounds me is that the people who ran these companies into the ground, the Carly Fiorinas, the Ken Lays, the Bernie Ebbers' ... all of them were rich beyond dreams of avarice. Yet, they still couldn't resist the temptation to make more money no matter what the cost to the companies they were paid (and paid handsomely!) to protect and develop. The only conclusion I can draw from these debacles is that, while a corporation must profit by its activities in order to grow and repay its investors, focusing on money to the exclusion of all else is destructive. Stupidly obvious, I know ... but not so obvious to the folks that were paid hundreds of millions to manage these corporations. Nor is it obvious to Wall Street, which to this day can't seem tell a crook from a CEO.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
... No matter how much Forbes is trying to rebrand her character.
This is _Forbes_ running this piece. They had Dan Lyons who thought that SCO would win. Based on, what? Well it sure as hell wasn't research and it read suspiciously like they were reprinting SCO press releases in lieu of doing actual investigative work.
In other words, they're trolling again because they want more people to read the insipid article. But don't worry, you're _not_ missing anything. You'll never miss anything by not reading them. They're clueless halfwits who regurgitate press releases and attempt to stir controversy just to get noticed.
So move along, there's nothing to see here. As usual, Forbes doesn't know what the hell it's talking about so I certainly hope you're not looking to them for investment advice. I'd rather trust monkeys with dartboards than Forbes.
HP had to pay this person tens of millions of dollars just to get her to go away. At the same time they were firing long-term dedicated employees and offering them re-hirement only as perma-temps with no benefits! This was Carly's policy. The woman is a thug and thief. Good riddance.
Now I realize that this standard operating proceedure for America's managerial class. But it doesn't change the fact that it is insane. We had all thought that this plantation mentality didn't hold with the high-tech industry. Boy were we wrong! They wiped out the entire industries stock value and threw away the best workers like used toilet paper.
Carly is simply the flash point of this madness. At least she wasn't assassinated like Kenneth Lay in order to keep her from talking about where all the money went and which politicians got paid off under the table.
(Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. Read on ...)
... All under Mark's leadship.
...etc.)
...etc.)
I can't comment on Carly as a CEO since I never worked at HP. However, I can comment on Mark Hurd's past career.
Mark took the helm at NCR after being groomed by Lars Nyberg, one of the worst CEO's NCR had in its 130+ years. Lars came to power following another (perhaps worse) CEO, Jerre Stead. Jerre was a televangelist type who was all showmanship and nothing else. He tried the motivational angle, and co-authored a book (Flight of the Buffalo) with another corporate consultant (Jim Belasco).
This was when NCR was an AT&T company. Jerre jumped ship when the numbers were really going south, leaving the company for a year in the hands of someone from AT&T who did not care, and fled to the mother ship as soon as the trivestiture (where AT&T spun off Lucent and NCR) was announced.
Lars was a cost cutter in the real sense of the word. He shutdown or sold much of NCR's computer division to focus on ATMs, Point of Sale and Teradata. We froze development on NCR's UNIX SVR4, and stopped making PCs, servers and pretty much anything in generic computing. Teradata has been bought by NCR when AT&T took over, and had really neat technology, albeit a niche market (decision support).
Lars made Mark Hurd head of Teradata, after being in sales for 20+ years. We kept hearing every quarter and year: Teradata is our flagship product, Teradata will pickup, Teradata will change things, Teradata this, Teradata that
The stock value under Lars continued to languish, and while tech companies were making money from the bubble, NCR was stagnating (we did not capitalize on our presence in banks,
A few years ago, Lars was evicated by the board (remained on the board) and Mark replaced him. The word in the company from people who worked under him is that he "decided to be a rock star".
Hurd co-authored a seemingly content-free book with his mentor Lars Nyberg. Here is a brief on the book The Value Factor: How Global Leaders Use Information for Growth and Competitive Advantage, and here is the Amazon link. The Register made fun of it because it had things in it like "information isn't aligned". The book is of course influenced by Teradata being the information store of a corporation, and how it can be analyzed and capitalized on. It must have helped advertise Teradata too.
To his credit, NCR's stock climbed and even split under Hurd, in stark contrast with the Nyberg era. This may be due to his rock star approach and getting more media and analyst attention.
NCR's size is about the size of HP's printer division alone. HP is too big for Mark, around 10X as big.
So, Mark cannot take all the credit. His advent may have boosted morale in HP because Carly was much hated, but her strategies are the ones in effect today (merger with Compaq,
HP was an engineering company selling to engineers, starting from their very first product, an audio oscillator. It should come as no surprise that engineers have a better idea of what enginneers want and need than marketing personnel do.
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...let's replace every reference to "women" in your post with "black", and see how it sounds.
"I know I'm going to get modded down as a "racist" for saying it, but this is hardly uncommon with black bosses. The last company I worked at had a black CEO, and he was an absolute NIGHTMARE to work with (as were the other two black people I had worked under in the past). He was an absolute control freak, could take NO criticism, let his personal vendettas rule his hiring/firing/demoting decisions, etc.
And, yes, I've worked for some asshole white people in my time too. But none of them even COMPARED to the nightmare of working for the black people."
If you had written the above post, it would get modded down to -1 so quickly it would make your head spin. Furthermore, I'd go so far as to say you wouldn't even bother writing it, because you would immediately be shunned by the people responding to your post, and it wouldn't be taken seriously.
So how is it that you get modded as "insightful" by saying something that is obviously anecdotal, and furthermore, applies to 50.8% of the population? Something that you likely wouldn't even dare apply to the 12.8% of the population that is black.
I am sure there are women boses out there who are tyrants. There are male bosses out there who are tyrants. There are black, white, yellow, red, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and God-knows-what-else bosses out there who are tyrants. The fact is that your anecdotal experiences regarding more than fifty percent of our population cannot be applied as a blanket statement.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Hey! I think you're being unfair to Caterpillar here. Maybe Whirlpool, too. There's still some tech in both their products.
Wish I could still say the same about HP.
That is all.
Canon's printers are fantastic - the ink is cheaper, and the printers are more reliable than the crap from HP. True story: I bought one of HP's top of the line multifunction printers. It was nice, but I could not send a fax. Receiving a fax is trickier, but sending a fax should be straightforward. Besides, the old fax I had was able to send a fax with no problem. So I exchanged the HP, and the replacement didn't work either. I bought a refurbished canon for less than half the cost, and it was a workhorse. I can buy a 4 pack of Canon ink cartridges at Costco for $42. You probably will spend that much on one HP cartridge.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.