Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina Hired By Fox News

neutrino38 writes "The International Herald Tribune reports that Fox News hired Carly Fiorina, ex-HP CEO. Such an interesting move will certainly bring support to those who viewed her as the over-hyped CEO who killed the original corporate engineering culture know as 'the HP way.' The article, off course, does not elaborate on this aspect of things. Slashdot has previously reported her demise from HP and some comments mentioned some HP employee dancing in the cubicles then."

Comments

A Question for Current HP employees..

[pentalive]

Do you think that the "original corporate engineering culture know as 'the HP way'" is returning or has returned to hp?

Re:A Question for Current HP employees..

[rubycodez]

no, they finished laying off all the good engineers over a year ago, they're going down the crapper. still pushing technology customers don't need and don't want, like itanium2 and freakin' ethernet NFS/CFS NAS appliances in front of fibre SAN for "high performance databases" to protect the customer "from having to deal with complexity of fibre SAN and disk arrays".

Re:A Question for Current HP employees..

[gaffle]

I agree with this totally.

As an employee of HP only because they bought my company, I can attest to the fact that HP is no longer a monolithic institution, but rather a bunch of components jammed up against each other operating largely autonomously.

It's what the stockholders want I guess, and will only become more prevalent as HP continues its pace of rapid acquisitions.

Last Days of HP

[Nom du Keyboard]

I was a contractor at HP for 2-1/2 years that covered the last days of Lew Platt and the first days of Carley. From what I observed, the decline had started, due to the economy weakening during that time, before Carley.

When I started at HP they were much like the way Google is described to be now. While I'd have to say that Google is HP on steroids, since HP offered great coffee, tea, and often sweet rolls in the well-equipped snack nooks around the cubical farms, and a well-subsidized cafeteria -- in contrast, Google offers free meals and transportation, among other amenities -- but the idea was the same. HP employees had a lot of freedom towards arranging their own transportation to other HP sites as they determined their requirements to be, specified and ordered their own personal computer equipment including printers, and generally were given a lot of freedom to do their jobs.

Over the next year and a half under Lew, much of that went away in ways that make it clear it would never return. It was belt tightening time, and a lot of it happened in areas like this one, including two job freezes.

When Carley did arrive, she was very warmly received by all of HP. There was great enthusiasm -- and perhaps not too much looking back at what she'd (un)accomplished at Lucient. Right up to the time I left, pretty much everyone was behind her, and much jazzed about having a woman CEO -- and a relatively young woman at that.

Yes things got worse after that in ways are that well known. But in fairness, I saw the first signs of decline before she ever arrived.

Best Carley joke from that era: After she visited our facility (contractors not allowed to attend the actual meeting) we were told that the lovely palm trees in the courtyard were going to be cut down after Carley had found out that they weren't going to meet their 15% growth target for the next year.

Re:Last Days of HP

[DrVomact]

It is true that there was a period of increasing frugality at HP just before C. Fiorina's advent, but that was truly due to economic conditions, and HP was handling the crisis in its traditional way: instead of laying off employees, HP was saving money in other ways. After all, this was the company that once temporarily cut everyone's salary by about 15% instead of having layoffs. (The reductions were restored when times got better.)

It was only under C.F.'s reign that layoffs were first introduced. However, I do not believe that the reasons for these layoffs were primarily economic—they were moral and political. HP had a well-skilled cadre of professionals with high self esteem; these people thought they mattered. C.F. perceived this as a problem; thus, she proceeded to show the technical staff of HP that they were a disposable commodity by decimating them. I use this word in the old, Roman sense: to instill a proper fear of management, to restore discipline to the level desired by the commanders, you kill a tenth of the men at random. This has a most salutory effect on the survivors.

I worked at HP during this time. Like many, I had been an employee of a company that was bought by HP. At first, the change seemed to be benign—HP was not quite as good a place to work as my old one had been, but it was still pretty decent. That changed with the advent of C.F. It's hard to describe the feeling of helpless despair that became prevalent in my workplace as wave after wave of layoffs swept through it like a series of plagues. The first couple were justified as "getting rid of the deadwood", and you were supposed to feel good that you were not classed among the victims. With successive layoffs, the reasons became progressively thinner, until they achieved total transparency. One layoff was actually announced by management as being "random"; we were supposed think that this meant "fair".

As any student of Josef Stalin's methods knows, the best terror is random terror. If people do not know how to behave to avoid being struck down by the Centurion's truncheon, they become paralyzed by fear. They become docile, easily managed victims that have no self-esteem, make no demands, and are neurotically eager to obey their masters. They become perfect corporate employees.

This was not a phenomenon isolated to HP; HP merely furnishes a particularly egregious example of how the corporations dealt with a perceived threat to their sovereignty that emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century—the rise of a new intelligentsia, composed of technically savvy "knowledge workers" who acquired a sense of empowerment through their understanding of how the new computer and communications technologies worked. This "geek" intelligentsia thought of itself as autonomous, as being outside the old paradigm of boss and peon. But the essence of corporatism is control; consequently, the corporations moved to suppress the intelligentsia using a variety of methods, both subtle and (as in HP's case) not so subtle. Today, their victory seems complete.

Lest I be accused of digression from the topic at hand...I wonder if C.F. had to take a 25% pay cut at her new job, compared to her HP salary, as did I?

In fairness to Carly, she was correct.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

Maybe you could argue that she was just a stupid, bleached-blond bimbo who randomly stumbled upon the correct course of action, but in fairness to Carly, her vision was correct: Only the large [really the massively, monstrously gi-normous] will survive.

HP's choices were to continue to grow [with the acquisition of Compaq] or to die.

[Cf Tuesday's Register article about Gateway: Gateway failed to grow, and now Gateway is dead.]

And the stocks have proven that she was correct:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=HPQ&t=my&l=off

-versus-

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=A&t=my&l=off

At HP, Carly faced two dilemmas:

1) Everyone is in the business of selling commodity computers these days, and only the largest will survive at that game [in particular, HP needed the higher-margin server business which distinguished Compaq from the rest of the competition], and

2) Like it or not [and most Slashdotters aren't going to like it very much], there just isn't any money to be made in the sale of scientific equipment, as the history of Agilent's stock proves.

Now you can argue that it would be really "nice" if a big company like HP could subsidize a bunch of really "neat", cutting-edge research [the way that AT&T used to do with Bell Labs, back when AT&T was a monopoly, or the way that Xerox used to do with PARC, back when Xerox was a monopoly, or, to a lesser extent, the way that Microsoft & Google appear to be doing now, while they are still monopolies], but Carly's duty was not to the scientific community: Carly's duty was to her shareholders, and her vision proved to be correct.

Heck, just compare the results of her vision with the current state of affairs at IBM, whose stock has been absolutely stagnant for the last eight years:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=IBM&annual
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-04
Total Revenue: 96,293,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-05
Total Revenue: 91,134,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-06
Total Revenue: 91,424,000

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=HPQ&annual
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-04
Total Revenue: 79,905,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-05
Total Revenue: 86,696,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-06
Total Revenue: 91,658,000

QED.