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Sources Say Meg Whitman To Become HP CEO
MrCrassic writes "Looks like HP needed yet another remodeling, as they are tapping Meg Whitman to take Leo Apotheker's chair by this afternoon. From the All Things D article: 'Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is poised to be named CEO of Hewlett-Packard later today after the markets are closed, said multiple sources close to the situation. The full board of HP, which is meeting today in Silicon Valley, has not officially voted on move and the situation could certainly change, but sources said it is nearly a done deal.' Cringely got this one right."
Maybe HP will actually try to compete with somebody, again.
Who is going o buy HP next year?
If you are an HP employee, I would seriously consider getting the hell out on your own terms, and soon.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Another "brand is everything, fuck product" CEO? Another CEO that never ventured anywhere near an engineering department or shop floor?
Another CEO that thinks selling technology is like selling colored sugar water? Another Scully, but for HP?
Short HP. Short it to 0.
--
BMO
Most people don't know that Meg was with Dreamworks during their heyday and she directed eBay to some amazing success.
She's 100% awesome.
I think this is a great move for HP and I hope that she can fix the company that Leo Apthaker broke, mostly because I really like HP and I was really sad to see them going down the wrong path.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Titanic going down, replace the captain? That's how a committee / board thinks.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Hopefully Meg will work out well for HP ... but the revolving door CEO the last couple of years is pretty sad - gotta wonder about the Board and the whole pretexting scandal by Chairwoman Dunn was pathetic ... Hewlett and Packard must be rolling in their graves over all the drama at HP.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
So HP, fresh on the heels of several disastrous CEO tenures, one of which happened to include a certain would-be politician running the company virtually into the ground, decides that hey it's time for a fresh attitude, let's find another failed female politician to come set things straight... Is there ANYONE at HP with a memory that goes back more than 5 minutes?
I thought this article was posted on the Onion at first.
You know, this is why I need to land me that first CEO job. It seems that no matter how badly you fuck up, no matter how many pooches you screw, no matter how toxic you are to shareholder assets or confidence, and no matter how much of a buffoon you make of yourself, as long as you've been a CEO, you will always get hired.
"During her ten years with the company [eBay] she oversaw expansion from 30 employees and $4 million in annual revenue to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue." - wikipedia.
Yeah, she really dropped the ball there.
Frankly, if I were her, I'd think long and hard before attaching my name to the trainwreck that is HP.
So that you actually get someone who understands the company and the products, in that doesn't...
Dvorak on Doomtech
Someone in a previous article mentioned that Cringely predicted these events back in February:
http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/why-leo-apotheker-will-be-fired-from-hewlett-packard/
He said "Meg can knock back brewskies as well as any man and will probably fill those CEO shoes even better than Apotheker."
She will probably put the reins on the death spiral that Apotheker only accelerated.
...and I mean that sincerely, not as in "WHAT ARE YOU THINKING??"
Is booting Apothaker a rejection of his strategy to drop webOS and stop building PCs? Were they not consulted about that huge shift in direction beforehand? Do they want to continue the direction Apothaker has set, but feel the need to axe him to be the fall guy for an unpopular but (in their view) necessary decision? Does the board just reflexively fire the CEO once the rate of unpopular articles about HP reaches some threshold?
Selling it now cheap! Only a thousand bucks!
Seriously, there's nothing left here. Unless Meg has an amazing trick up her sleeve (and she doesn't), there's no saving this downward spiral.
Last I checked, she's just another MBA with no idea how to run a technology company. She's *not* Steve Jobs, who actually can bring a company back from disaster.
And that's what HP really needs. A Steve Jobs type, someone who can turn a company around and move it into a new market. HP has been, for more than a decade now a "me too" company with dwindling fortunes.
Unfortunately, "Steve Jobs types" are not easily discovered.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
will be to announce that HP will accept payments only in the form of major credit cards or PayPal.
Get your HP short positions in order!
You know, this is why I need to land me that first CEO job.
It's all who you know. It's an exclusive club that won't just anyone in - kind of like an aristocracy.
Why, no one really thinks we're upwardly mobile in the US, do they?
If you think that you can be smart, work hard, and show ambition and get to that level, well, I have a lottery ticket from Nigeria that'll pay millions of dollars and all you have to do is send me $5,000 for fees and bribes and you can have the ticket because if I cash it in, I'll lose my spot as the next king.
HP (not Hewlett-Packard anymore) needs an inspired engineer or two--with dominant shareholdings--to run the company. They will never get that. They will die. RIP HP.
A company populated with brilliant hardware engineers would be well-positioned to make a fortune as the robotic age dawns. That kind of HP is dead.
Their leadership is dead. Their board is just a bunch of greedheads looking ahead only as far as the next quarter's stock price.
Gr8 ceo,xcellent profit maker ,highly recommend AAA+
"Thbbft!" - Bill the Cat
The vast majority of HP's revenue comes from enterprise markets, which Meg Whitman has zero experience with. Any experience she might have had dealing with end users kind of got a bit less important when HP decided to ambiguously throw the PC division under the bus. HP makes both eBay and Dreamworks look like tiny, insignificant companies. And eBay already had pretty much a monopoly in online auctions since day one; all she did there was not screw it up. (She also bought PayPal, which turned out well, and Skype, which didn't.) By the time she left eBay, as a mature company, it was adrift with no path to growth. HP is already a mature company and any growth is going to have to come the hard way, which she doesn't have any experience with.
I'm not saying she can't pull it off, just that she has no background in HP's primary markets to help her along.
And it wasn't Leo that broke HP. That started with Carly, continued with Chainsaw Mark, and we simply have no idea what would have happened with Leo, since he hasn't had the job that long.
Actually, what it tells me is that being a CEO is very difficult. Creating "shareholder value" is much easier said than done.
So go ahead and land that first CEO job. I hope you do. Really, I hope you do and are amazingly successful.
Just please don't pretend that it's easy. It isn't.
If I was an HP shareholder, right about now my first thoughts wouldn't be "should we fire the CEO"... it would be more along the lines of "this fucking board has got to go..."
For chrissakes, we're talking about one of THE great Silicon Valley companies here, a company whose printer line alone still commands the industry. It's like the entire leadership has gone completely insane.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Frankly, if I were her, I'd think long and hard before attaching my name to the trainwreck that is HP.
It all depends on what they want her to do. Oversee development, manufacturing, logistics and retailing of hi tech consumer products for a global market? Maybe she should think about it carefully. However if they want her to auction off the assets of HP then maybe she wouldn't need to think about it as much.
I'm just going to assume HP is some kind of fraudulent enterprise at this point. Although I doubt there is any left there who is clever enough to pull off another Enron or Lehman Brothers.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Dumbass karma whore: if the stock plummets to 0, you won't be able to cover your shorts and get your money back. The stock market is not a zero-sum game.
In all likelihood, your broker would cover your shorts for you well above the 0 mark. When they lend you those shares, they can take them back any time. And they will take them back when they start losing money, because they loaned them to you out of their own inventory.
Didn't both Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman run as tea-party candidates last year?
Bought by GM in the 80s
Spun off into its own company in the 90s
Bought by HP in the 2000s
And now? We're in the next decade, time for something to happen. Will this be some kind of a record?
It's an exclusive club that won't just anyone in - kind of like an aristocracy. Why, no one really thinks we're upwardly mobile in the US, do they?
Yeah, some people actually think that an American hippy college dropout who's big ambition is to visit India on a quest for spiritual enlightenment could "grow up" and become the CEO of the world's largest (briefly) corporation. I have no idea why anyone would think something like that is possible.
...it's who you know.
I work for a company that supports other companies, so I get to see a lot. I've seen a few people succeed on merit. I've seen a lot more succeed on relationships. I've seen a wife hired as a technical team lead. Problem was, she literally knew nothing about anything. I mean, she couldn't even type. One of the junior engineers was assigned to "assist" her. She got all the title, credit, and salary. He took all the blame. She took her string of "successes" and moved on to a higher management position, having established her technical skills. He got saddled with a lousy reputation for screwups and had to start over at a different company. We got called in to put out the fires and clean up the messes and billed them like there was no tomorrow, so we kept rooting for the trophy wife.
I could also tell you about the son of a company president who destroyed a network, had his Dad call us, and then got all kinds of kudos for a brilliant job recovering and redesigning the company's infrastructure during a crisis. No one ever asked what caused the crisis, of course.
Like I said, we're "hired guns," and we get paid, so we're happy. But my college delusions of meritocracy and the rewards of hard work and skill have not survived contact with the real world. :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
In related news, HP's soon to be not yet CEO Meg Whitman announced a plan to spin off every line of business in HP's portfolio but calculators. "We see a tremendous opportunity in handheld calculating devices," Whitman stated, in a not actually quite yet a CEO interview with selected members of an online calculator forum. "The value of physical buttons cannot be over-emphasized. Take that, iPhone!"
In separate interview, almost pre-announced HP CEO Meg Whitman announced a patent suite against Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Facebook and IBM. Two patents are at issue. The first describes a "method and apparatus for summing two numbers." The second concerns "A cookbook recipe for making calculator keys feel nice and clicky without necessarily indicating a successful registering of the keystroke."
The announcement was coupled with a new video depicting Google CEO Eric Schmidt as a bizarrely garbed wolf among a flock of hapless calculator toting sheep.
(credit to Howard Owen)
Fuck, if anything, HP needs a completely product focused CEO. Forget the sales, leave that to the President or one of the VPs. HP needs a CEO that is just going to focus on getting new, innovative, desirable product, and getting it out the door.
After that it became stuck in the mud. A Sloth etc.
HP didn't know what to do with Compaq.
At the time, Compaq was in a mess because Compaq didn't know what to do with DEC's Consulting Business.
For example, we were being measured using the same metrics as if we were assembling PC's.
If that is not totally stupid then I'm not a grumpy old HP(Compaq(Dec)) pensioner.
Compaq walked away from some very protifable emerging markets. We were told 'They are to difficult to sell in'. Funny that, because the worked just fine for Dec.
The last 15+ years has been a total waste for HP. They should have killed Itanic years ago but HP was just too stubborn.
Bitter? Yep.
Brand is everything if you think about it. A brand is just the attributes that people use to describe your product or company. If you sell shitty product, then you'll have a brand of shitty quality products. Let's be honest, most consumers don't understand technology and even fewer can predict what's going to be the next big thing in tech, so consumers use brand to differentiate products and reduce selection complexity. They assume that the higher the price the better the quality, be damned if it doesn't work. Apple is a great proponent of brand utilization. Often times, their products are under specced and priced higher than the competition. Even though there are far technical alternatives that on a apples to apples comparison make Apple products look 5 years old, they price their products so high that only a select few can purchase them, the products become a status symbol instead of providing utility, and they develop a brand that equates to high quality. Real computer science nerds know the difference but the average soccer mom does not, nor do they care. If Meg can change HP's brand to be the high quality standard of beige boxes, then that's good for consumers and great for investors. If HP continues the strategy that they're getting out of the PC and consumer device market to focus on consulting, then she can develop the brand that SBU managers know and trust for their tech needs in the way we trust IBM and Accenture now.
According to Wikipedia:
As Hasbro's Playskool Division General Manager, she oversaw global management and marketing of two children's brands, Playskool and Mr. Potato Head starting in January 1997. She also imported the UK's children's television show Teletubbies into the U.S.[17]
NOT ONLY Mr. Potato Head, BUT teletubbies too!!
I can not think of someone better qualified to bring HP out of it's nose dive... than the manager of Mr. Potato Head's manager.
Clear sailing for HP
Man, I really hope HP can pull it out... it was always one of my favorite companies, oh well...
It's the board that approved the mistaken purchases, the board that perpetuates this isanely rapid thrash of CEOs. I don't believe she's anywhere close to being the right person, but more, I don't believe that rapid major changes of direction and leadership are anything close to sane.
Well, there go more US Jobs overseas ! Seems HP is bent on self distruction.
And she has proven that she isn't good at it, so why exactly do you think she's getting hired again?
Speaking of the Onion, I read the headline as Meg White was taking over as HP CEO... which would be a news worthy improvement to their management.
Not full tea party candidates, as that would never really fly in California.
Frankly, if I were her, I'd think long and hard before attaching my name to the trainwreck that is HP.
Actually there is minimal risk. HP is currently such a mess that if it fails on her watch many would accept the notion that it was inevitable, that HP was beyond the point of no return. However if she turns it around she may be viewed in a manner "comparable" to Steve Jobs 2.0 at Apple. As an investor may say, there is far more potential upside than there is potential downside.
You can use your newly released HP 12c Anniversary Edition (or 15c Limited Edition) to calculate how much stock you want to sell and/or short. Hopefully the company doesn't tank and take the calculator division with it before selling it off.
Controlled flight into terrain
is that she best not cancel my Sargasso Sea-becalmed TouchPad order, or I will get plumb sideways with righteous fury.
but what makes you think the original poster is a mindless stooge who only knows how to screw over others for a quick buck.
It seems that no matter how badly you fuck up, no matter how many pooches you screw, ... you will always get hired.
I have been saying the same thing for who knows how long, but I usually say, "They could film these people eating live babies and someone would still hire them because of their "experience"."
Of course, this is also the fourth way to be successful; be a failure. It seems the more you fail, the greater you are wanted.
In case you are wondering, the first three ways to be successful are be attractive, be able to sell ice cubes to Eskimos in January and blame someone else.
For some light reading and the answer to why you don't get anywhere. The fourth part I haven't added but I may make an addendum in the near future.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Well, creating shareholder value is easy. Just fire everyone you can, close as many departments as possible, collect your bonuses and leave the company before shit hits the fan. Business today is all about huge short-term profits.
Even a moron can do that. What is really, really hard is to get all the connections and friends that will land you on a job like this.
CEOs are kind of like movie directors. You're going to spend $100,000,000 on a movie, so do you hire the guy who's made a string of flops but also made one movie which made $1,000,000,000 profit, or do you hire the new guy who's never made a movie? If you hire director A and he screws up, you pass the buck onto them, whereas if you hire director B and he screws up, you take the blame.
We live in a society where leaders have been replaced with MBAs and empty-headed politicos who look good on camera, and rule number one is 'Pass The Buck!'. Once you realise that, most of the seemingly insane behaviour of modern 'leaders' makes perfect sense.
The HP board really knows how to pick 'em, doesn't it?
It is a testament to the employees resourcefulness that HP is still as strong as it is after this remarkable serial abuse by incompetent top management. Not sure how much more abuse the company can take.
Good luck!
if we're talking about Steve Jobs, you've missed the mark; he's where he is because he's a ruthless narcissist. When you're as driven as he is, you can make anyone accept anything.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
So why is this that at many colleges (UC Berkeley and Stanford are a couple good examples), do you see many of the CompSci faculty using MacBooks? Why is it that at many of the better known tech/software firms in Silicon Valley do you see many of the engineers using Macs?
Why do you think that a laptop priced in the 1K - 2K range is priced so that 'only a select few can afford them'? For someone who uses a computer for the majority of their work, the cost of hardware is trivial. Maybe the specs you are using for 'utility' are not so relevant when choosing a workstation computer for many people who can be fairly described as 'real computer science nerds'.
Instead of anecdotes, let's look at statistics: "Study: CEO pay negatively linked to profitability."
That doesn't mean we shouldn't "allow" people to be Steve Jobs, it means we shouldn't let a bunch of overpaid pretenders ride his coat tails.
Why is American business dying? Because our stinking rich business leaders are now a bunch of incestuousness nepotistic numb-nuts. Hiring Meg Whitman is such a bad idea that I half expect Mr. Packard himself to rise up out the grave and eat the board's brains (as little as they have between them).
HP is all but dead. Tablets are going to eat PC and printer sales and that will be that.
But what bothers me most is that HP is taking webOS, arguably the best platform out there, down with it.
:T:R:A:N:S:
if we're talking about Steve Jobs, you've missed the mark; he's where he is because he's a ruthless narcissist. When you're as driven as he is, you can make anyone accept anything.
You are making a different claim than the GP. The GP claimed there is no upward mobility, clearly false. You are merely describing one path of upward mobility.
DING DING DING.
The board of directors is a bunch of CEO cronies (ask yourself why Meg Whitman is even on the board in the first place, does she own 5%+ of the stock? Does she have a vested interest in the company succeeding or just padding her resume for another failed political bid?). Oh there are one or two actual shareholders on the board but not with the voting power to actually right this ship. The board of directors of most of the fortune 500 are populated by other CEO's. That's the demise of American capitalism. You wonder why CEO salaries have increased at about 100% a year and why golden parachutes exist? This is why.
Personally I blame mutual funds that own 75% of these companies and take no vested interest in the company or it's management.
We live in a society where leaders have been replaced with MBAs and empty-headed politicos who look good on camera, and rule number one is 'Pass The Buck!'. Once you realise that, most of the seemingly insane behaviour of modern 'leaders' makes perfect sense.
Actually, the MBA no longer matters anymore to get into the country club. In a recent showing of "I Almost Got Away With It", a con man with only a GED read a few books on finance, learned some lingo and forged a resume and credentials to become CFO of a medium sized company. Had he not embezzled from them, he would have been kept on, as the CEO said he was one of the best CFO's they've ever had!
Dumbass karma whore: if the stock plummets to 0, you won't be able to cover your shorts and get your money back. The stock market is not a zero-sum game.
In all likelihood, your broker would cover your shorts for you well above the 0 mark. When they lend you those shares, they can take them back any time. And they will take them back when they start losing money, because they loaned them to you out of their own inventory.
do you even know what a short sale is? you have made so many incorrect statements i don't even know where to begin...
It all depends on what they want her to do.
Bingo. If they are looking for someone to fill in for a few months in the CEO chair while they look for a long term replacement, I could see Whitman doing that. She knows what it's like to be CEO of a big company and while she has little enterprise experience she could keep the parts moving for a while without blowing things up. Big companies generally can operate on autopilot for quite a while regardless of who is the person in the corner office.
On the other hand if they want her to be more than a short term (months) interim CEO, then the board is likely making a huge mistake in my opinion. I'm not remotely convinced she would be the right person for the job long term. EBay was lightning in a bottle - right place, right time, right situation. HP is a much different animal. Maybe she could do it and I'm wrong but I very much doubt it.
If you think *that's* funny, do you know who Google recently hired as head of their Apps security division? If you guessed "a former TV-psychic" congrats, you win!!!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
eBay was a fast-growing company with a near-monopoly in their market. HP is a mature giant that is flailing for direction and leadership.
Somebody whose major skill is "getting out of the way" is going to ride HP into pathetic oblivion, joining other once-great IT companies like DEC. (Which, incidentally, HP currently owns the remains of.) HP needs major change and a leadership infusion and it needs it last year.
That's the lottery ticket mentality. For some reason people have no problem spotting it among inner-city youths neglecting their schooling in the hopes of becoming an NBA star - yet they're blind to the same syndrome among wanna-be plumbers who are just sure they'll be running a big prosperous business one day and want to slash taxes right now, just in case.
The problem with your argument is that there are far more self employed millionaires. Replace "NBA star" with "doctor" and the flaw should start to become apparent. Upward mobility exists.
... self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires. Also, three out of four of us who are self-employed consider ourselves to be entrepreneurs. Most of the others are self-employed professionals, such as doctors and accountants ... About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent."
"Who is the prototypical American millionaire?
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/stanley-millionaire.html
Instead of anecdotes, let's look at "Study: CEO pay negatively linked to profitability." That doesn't mean we shouldn't "allow" people to be Steve Jobs, it means we shouldn't let a bunch of overpaid pretenders ride his coat tails.
That is a different topic. However there is a flaw in that study. When a company is failing they often have to pay *more* for a highly qualified individual. Without extra compensation the potential CEO would not take on the extra risk. The study seems to be missing the classic requirement of statistical comparisons: "all other things being equal".
Steve Jobs was a "Computer Guy", and Lee Iaccoca was a "Car Guy."
Lou Gerstner was a Snack Food and Cigarette Guy. He was brought in from the outside to run a flailing technology giant. (And one in the same market position; IBM was the #1 in Revenue IT company then, and that's where HP is now.) IBM, too, was on the verge of splitting up into smaller pieces.
It doesn't make any sense to say that the OEM'd LaserJet was the beginning of HP's downfall when it's the only part of HP that is working well right now! And Carly, via her doubling-down on the PC and commodity server business by buying Compaq, can most certainly be blamed. It's tough for one company to do well in both Enterprise high-dollar HW/Services markets and simultaneously do well in commodity/consumer markets. They took their eye off the ball and are suffering from a leaderless morass in both markets right now. Just ask IBM, Apple, and Cisco how well that works. (MS pulls it off, sorta, but they haven't exactly been thriving the last few years either.)
BTW, the House that Bill and Dave built still exists; it's called Agilent.
Instead of swamping the retail channel, the next time HP decides to unload their latest failure they can put them on eBay!
Now, preventing such mistakes would take someone more qualified but, you know, baby steps.
You are right and this makes me sad. Time to go back to slogging it out with programming language semantics.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
No, he does not. Don't let it keep you awake at night.
Cisco and HP are toe-to-toe right now, but Meg and John Chambers are close personal friends. I'm interested to see how that might evolve, if she really does become the HP CEO.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I have to say, that would be extremely interesting to see what Steve Jobs could do at HP. Even more interesting to see the competition between him at HP and his proteges at Apple.
Another far fetched but slightly more likely scenario would be that Apple buys HP. Business schools teach that there are two ways to grow, organically and through acquisition. Apple could acquire HP to become a major player in the enterprise overnight rather than try to crack open the door with an iPad.
HP doesn't really have an engineering department anymore. Carly Fiorina fired them and spun off all the people who knew how to make stuff into Agilent. All downhill after her.
From what I've read, Whitman is a placeholder. She's a director and is going to step in and run things until they find a permanent CEO.
If they consider making her permanent...Whitman is the wrong person for the job. She spent 30 years in consumer tech and HP is trying to focus on enterprise IT. Unless they plan to ditch that and do a 180-degree change and go back to PCs, tablets, and phones, she's a bad fit.
She is also an idiot. eBay buying Skype was one of the dumbest moves of all time.
Advice: on VPS providers
Steve Jobs was a "Computer Guy", and Lee Iaccoca was a "Car Guy."
Folks around here may be more familiar with Steve than Lee. Lee Iacocca wasn't just a car guy, he was one of those behind bringing the Ford Mustang to the market in 1964. Also, like Steve, Lee started out doing technical stuff not marketing.
Vladimir Putin was born to a factory worker and a navy conscript. Every society has upward mobility.
Hewlett and Packard are probably spinning in their graves.
The problem is tech branding is running into ODM take over. Those companies actually making product starting to sell direct and cur out the empty branding companies. The inevitable death of of shoring guaranteed.
So what can HP do now, attempt to get back into actual manufacturing rather than contracting and advertising, merge with an ODM seeking expansion, a stock shuffle. The CEO needed for that is basically a do nothing and cash your check type and let the banking and investment corporations handle the deal.
A face and reputation to sell the deal to the investment public. Meg Witless is now a major loser after blowing millions of dollars (way out spending her opponent with one of the most absurd election campaigns) on an ego driven political campaign and that taint is going to last for ever, not the face you want to drive 'new and exciting' business prospects.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
They could film these people eating live babies...
Give it to us raw and w-r-r-riggling... Gollum, CEO
the 90's called, they want their apple stereotype back.
Mentioning Meg Whitman is offtopic in a discussion about Meg Whitman? Classic mods on crack.
Offtopic? Tangentially. But I think it is worth looking at Meg's failed 2010 gubernatorial campaign.
Being the nominee for a big party is much like being a CEO of a big corporation. There's hundreds to thousands of people at your disposal and it's you(r vision) they have to sell. You have to manage resources and finances.
Now...let's look at the campaign. $170 million spent, $140 of that her own money, a campaign record, and she loses to Moonbeam by more than Fiorina lost to Boxer. She could've bought votes cheaper. That does not look, to me, like she managed her campaign very well.
Wow, I knew HP Board was out of touch with reality, but this just is stupidity beyond anything I could have imagined.
Do you think the CEO took any lessons from that?
Not the "I got bamboozled" lessons, but the deeper lesson that maybe the reason the fake CFO was so good was that in reality, he was an outsider and not a product of whatever B-school/corporate sausage machine produces CFOs.
And that perhaps in hiring employees, rather than simply accept the next drone from the MBA/corporate assembly line, the CEO ought to think outside the box.
Probably not.
...about overweight pasty-faced guys sitting in chairs typing while griping on the phone. :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Another proof of the predominance of 'Doofus Factor' In Corporate GovernanceBoards and Top executives.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/17/2237256/evaluating-the-doofus-factor-in-corporate-governance
She will be hired at a great salary and bonus and golden parachute, she will cut HP further down, will be terminated shortly, and handed $$$.
That's because he can see the problems coming down the line.
from cnn money: "NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Hewlett-Packard's board on Thursday ousted CEO Leo Apotheker after just 11 months on the job, replacing him with Meg Whitman"
..and get a decent golden parachute when they kick you out. Even calling the board names after they fired you doesn't seem to hurt that compensation..
It's official - NY Times reporting Meg Whitman was named to lead Hewlett-Packard
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/technology/whitman-expected-to-be-named-at-hp.html?ref=business
Allthingsd and CNN are reporting that Meg Whitman is the new CEO of HP.
http://allthingsd.com/20110922/its-official-meg-whitman-named-hp-ceo-apotheker-out/?mod=tweet
http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/22/technology/hp_ceo_fired/index.htm?source=cnn_bin
I think HP should hire Michael Dell, he could then sell the company in bits and pieces and return the money to the shareholders.... Oh wait...
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
I have been saying the same thing for who knows how long, but I usually say, "They could film these people eating live babies and someone would still hire them because of their "experience"."
Nestlé springs to mind.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
... and this news comes right after HP published this article titled "Is HP Competing for 'Worst Board Ever' Honors?"
Lou Platt came up with the Agilent divesture. Carly's baby was the Compaq acquisition.
If you think *that's* funny, do you know who Google recently hired as head of their Apps security division? If you guessed "a former TV-psychic" congrats, you win!!!
Wow, I cannot believe this distortion got marked as "Informative". By saying "TV-psychic" it makes it sound like he was a 1-800 number psychic and he was chosen for that ability. It would be more accurate to describe him as competing on a magician/illusionist game show/reality TV show.
I don't know how good of a security researcher he is, but I sure as heck hope you don't judge everyone this way. His abilities as a security expert are completely unrelated to his abilities as an illusionist. To think otherwise is just ugly prejudice. Just because you are a techie, doesn't mean that if you have a non-tech related hobby you lose your "tech card". In fact, it opens your mind to an entirely different world---and maybe his knowledge of misdirection and subtle deception gives him a different way of thinking about security.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman. :-)
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
So long HP.
I met you in the eighties; my college days. I bought an 11C calculator when I could barely afford to eat, learned the stack, and had much respect for the engineers who built that tech. My first analytical chemistry job was running a 1050 HPLC, and I still remember how well-built that equipment was. You brought that stack paradigm to chromatography in chemstation software, which I thought was fantastic. I STILL have an HP2100M laser printer that I believe will out-live me. In summary, your engineering hardware used to be the standard in more than one field.
RIP
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
And even by the standards of those boards, the HP board of directors is looking fantastically out to lunch. Just about every analyst I've read today says that HP very likely has the worst board of directors of any publicly traded company in the United States, maybe even the industrialized world. It's not even that they are apparently incompetent and negligent, it seems that you might even legitimately question their collective sanity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
At least that's what I thought when I saw "Meg Whitman" and "HP."
In the CEO world, you can't fail down. Only upwards or sideways.
I thought this article was posted on the Onion at first.
You know, this is why I need to land me that first CEO job. It seems that no matter how badly you fuck up, no matter how many pooches you screw, no matter how toxic you are to shareholder assets or confidence, and no matter how much of a buffoon you make of yourself, as long as you've been a CEO, you will always get hired.
There's a simple explanation for this. If you're a board, and you hire a guy who's done it before but he fails, well, you've done your best. You've failed the ordinary way. If you hire a young guy who seems smart, but doesn't have the wings, and HE fails, well, you're an idiot. You've failed unconventionally, and it will be embarrassing.
This is much the same as in any superstar industry. (CEOs shouldn't be in that category, but guess what, they are!) You see this with journeyman sportsmen. They move from club to club never finding success, but someone always hires them, because they've tried it before and they won't make their boss look stupid. That's why it's very hard to break into sports: if you don't get through the eye of the needle at a certain age, you won't have the credentials, and someone would be taking a big chance on you. On the other hand, if you did make it on to say a Premier League soccer team at age 18, you won't fall too far.
"... they've made so many bonehead moves over the last decade..." Agreed.
The HP board of directors has shown itself, over many years, to be utterly incompetent. This is one more example.
When a CEO is incompetent, the board of directors gets a new CEO. When a board of directors is incompetent, how can the problem be fixed? Does the problem go on and on, until the company goes bankrupt?
Hey a mentalist, not a "TV-psychic". There is a small difference. Psychics are frauds, mentalists are entertainers. Think Ms Cleo vs Darren Brown or the Amazing Kreskin.
Oh well, had a good run with HP, time to sell all my shares before prices reach the holy nought.
So life would be better if bums with self-esteem issues ran everything?
That reminds me of a joke I made in 2008 about preferring Michael Palin to Sarah Palin. 2012 version: Katy Perry instead of Rick Perry?
(Yes yes, Michael Palin is British and Katy Perry is several years younger than 35...)
I can't think of something for Michele Bachmann though...
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
While you make a good point -
"In October and November 2007, Raven was one of ten mentalist contestants on the primetime NBC series Phenomenon, which was hosted by Tim Vincent and judged by Criss Angel and Uri Geller.[2] He finished as runner-up on the series, after performing dangerous demonstrations of mentalism involving razor blades, snakes, scorpions, and nail guns.[3]
A demonstration with Holly Madison went wrong when Raven was bitten by a snake on live TV[4] and had to have his hand bandaged, but decided to continue.
During rehearsals for another demonstration Raven was injured which resulted in multiple ruptured disks in his back. He used a wheelchair for a period and a cane for a period thereafter. He has commented that he will reattempt this demonstration [5]"
This guy seems to have some "issues" with his "hobby" that I would consider fair game to discuss when he is put in such an important position of a leading tech company.
When will the real inept bunch here be noticed which is the Board. HP is a great big company that can take some serious hits across its bow but this is ridiculous and I don't think it'll be able to take many more of this for much longer.
Richard Bachman? (Stephen King's pseudonym)
A laptop priced in the 1k-2k range is definitely not priced "so that only a select few can afford them"; that's a normal price for a business laptop. I think my Lenovo (purchased in April) cost over $2k.
What would be interesting for some journalist or author to investigate and write a book or article about is why we don't see this kind of stupidity in large foreign corporations very often, whereas they're an everyday occurrence here in the US. The big Chinese corporations, for instance, are making smart move after smart move, and taking over markets that were formerly dominated by Japanese and American companies. You don't see them making bonehead moves (maybe the smaller ones do and we don't know about it, but the really big companies can't hide their missteps so easily).
So discuss them, but the discussion is: "Boy, this guy has a stupid-ass hobby." It still has nothing to do with his abilities as a security researcher. The closest argument you could make is something along the lines of "he'll get himself killed and then you have to find and integrate his replacement" -- which is still pretty weak.
Because claiming you prefer Bachman–Turner Overdrive is no good?
Weren't there laws passed in the late 1800s or early 1900s against interlocking directories, to deal with this very problem? What ever happened to those?
Yeah, I'll have to go with single-N 'Bachman' here. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Nah Meg Whitman is actually a fairly good person to have as a CEO, eBay buying PayPal, major credit there.
Buying Skype, it seems everyone who's owned Skype still hasn't figured out what to do with it. When eBay had it, it did improve, but it mostly just started getting support from PayPal, where it before had to make more expensive arrangements with credit card processing.
Realize the reason for Meg leaving eBay had more to do with a political ambition that ultimately failed and less to do with eBay itself. eBay didn't run itself into the ground.
Now, the question is, will she save HP? Only if she pulls a Steve Jobs and starts axing all the losing product lines (Do they really need 30 different laptop models? Can't they get away with maybe just 5?) I think it was the right option to kill their Tablet hardware, they have no way of competing, and their PDA business has been failtastic for years.
Though IMO HP is probably too big of a ship to right, and any significant change isn't going to improve the company for 2 years.
That's because big Chinese corporations play a longer game than US companies do. US companies plan only for the next quarter.
It even goes to society in general, and in government. The Chinese government thinks in terms of 10 years or more, where our politicians are only thinking about the next election.
--
BMO
I think your opinion of Apple products might be a little off. I'm not an apple fanboi by any means, and have yet to own one of their products, but from what I've seen, for the most part, apple products are easy to use and just work. And when they don't work, you take them back to the apple store and they fix em for you. That, and a slick interface is something you can build a brand on.
Car companies know that pretty well... Toyota and Honda built a brand reputation on reliability, the Italians on sexiness, and the Germans on engineering. After selling out in the 80s, Ford figured it out and started rebuilding their brand image... Pretty successfully I might add.
But... Exclusivity is by no means the basis for Apple's success.
It doesn't speak to his technical proficiency, but it does appear to touch on general decision making and rationale which leads to how that might influence him as a security researcher at Google. I acknowledge Google is not known for hiring knuckleheads. But it does seem to be an odd hobby with several questionable incidents for someone in his field though.
if we're talking about Steve Jobs, you've missed the mark; he's where he is because he's a ruthless narcissist. When you're as driven as he is, you can make anyone accept anything.
Drive is necessary but not sufficient. Plenty of egotistical narcissists with brains end up homeless and living on the street and legions more end up living a humdrum anonymous existence. Some become rich. Some people win lotto too. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to play.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's a simple matter of choosing the right parents.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As if this is a surprise. Seriously why would you expect anything original out of silicon valley. The same incompetent people get there jobs because of personal relationships and people feeling comfortable with a person not because they can do the damn job. The valley is littered with recycled junk CEO's. You would think that maybe someone inside HP might have a better clue as to a vision and running the company. Ah nepotism I see you have found a home at HP. I give her 14 months or less.
Exclusivtivity is just one attribute of Apple's brand. It's one way Apple differentiates itself from other computers. It's not the basis, just a part. My explination was just an example of how Apple leverages their brand to push product that on a tech/price comparison gives Apple a way to say "Apple products are more than just computers."
What's really funny is how American corps seem to be all about getting out of making stuff because they want to "climb the value chain" or some such.
So it's left to Chines companies to actually phones, touchpads, computers.
Next time you look around, everything in your home or office is made in China.
Then when Chinese companies start climbing the value chain (coming up with a ERP package or something), what are US companies going to do? Sell Shakira ringtones?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Nice comparison there. The myth that Apple is overpriced for the spec has been consistently shown to be groundless. Maybe last century, that was the case, but not since they started using Intel.
And as for status symbol that a select few can afford? That would explain why they have sold increasing numbers of Macs throughout this recession we're having.
Everyone's got an iPhone. They are about as exclusive as trousers. The guy who works in the corner shop has got one. The bus driver has got one. The schoolgirls at the back of the bus have got one each. Having one makes me about as special and high status as ..... everyone else.
HP also used to make quality hardware. It was high-spec, and therefore expensive, in just the same way as Apple's products are. Their printers were like Rolls Royces. Their brand was synonymous with quality.
And then they went mass-market (or "cheap"), and their kit was terrible.
But if you're going to make high-end stuff, then you've got to give people a reason to buy it over the cheap crap. Sadly, few Western companies seem interested in making (i.e. designed and branding) hardware these days, leaving it to the Far East, and concentrating on "services" and software instead. Shame.
Yes and some people like mountain climbing and come back with bruises. Long distance runners always some sort of injury if they do it on a consistent basis. People who jump out of perfectly good plains normally die and rarely get injured when something goes wrong. People get killed all the time cycling to work. The possibility of injury is always a factor especially when it comes to physical hobbies. Then again anyone could be struck by lightning.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
From the Wikipedia article on "Mentalism":
Performances may appear to include telepathy, clairvoyance, divination, precognition, psychokinesis, mediumship, mind control, memory feats and rapid mathematics. Hypnosis may also be used as a stage tool. Mentalists are sometimes referred to as Psychic entertainers.
That sounds like it goes way beyond an entertaining illusionist and well into the "I have psychic powers, watch me bend this spoon!!" territory. It's pretty telling that Uri Geller was one of the judges on his reality show.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I think it interesting that Eran Raven was hired in to a position as the head of the Apps security division. The guy by repute is a mentalist and mastering that trade takes a fairly high minimum of intelligence and dedication. Also one would imagine that he has a lot of scamming/ social engineering experience and knows how to think out of the box and see risks before they happen.
On a conspiratorial note he may have been hired for a different job than is being publicized I am sure Google has other uses for his talents also.
They'll go out of business.
I saw someone else here make a great post about this very topic, but it was many months ago; I wish I could find it now. But basically, when you manufacture things that require any kind of technical ability (i.e., more than just armies of humans manning sewing machines), it's unavoidable that you'll "climb the value chain" as you put it, over time. You can't just do the design work, farm out production to someone else, handle sales, and reap all the profits. The people who do production are going to learn everything from you and eventually take over your market. It starts with manufacturing; this takes more than just some basic training, as for highly technical things you need manufacturing engineers on-site to run the factory and keep the processes optimized. Pretty soon the offshore company is doing more and more of the design work (PC boards, etc.), and pitching that to the US company how they can save them money by outsourcing that work, plus it's a natural fit since the manufacturing is right there and the design engineers can talk directly to the manufacturing engineers when there's a problem. This keeps moving up the chain to higher and higher levels of design, until pretty soon the US company has laid off almost all its engineering staff and just has some airhead managers and a few architects coming up with ideas. But unless your ideas are really new and groundbreaking (most aren't, in most industries they're just further evolutions of already-existing products) then the offshore company knows how to do everything, so they find top-level engineers to work for them, or they just start doing it on their own and selling their own products, which are just as good and much cheaper than the US company's, so that company simply folds or is bought out.
(I wish I could edit a post...)
As a quick example, check out HTC. Prior to just a couple years ago maybe, I had never even heard of this company. Now they're a major manufacturer of cellphones, and you can buy their products (with their brand name) in probably any cellphone store in the USA. According to Wikipedia, they were founded in 1997, not that long ago, and started out making notebook computers, probably with someone else's brand on them, and later manufactured the Palm Treo 650 and the iPAQ. Now, less than 10 years later, they're a leading cellphone maker all by themselves. Where are Palm and HP that they used to manufacture for? Palm has vanished, acquired by HP, and now HP is on the brink of collapse as we've seen in the news the last few days. (HP just hired ex-Ebay CEO Meg Witless as their CEO, the bimbo responsible for the disastrous Skype acquisition, and who just ran a disastrous Gubernatorial campaign in California, so don't expect them to be around long.)
Here's something interesting from the Wikipedia article:
This sounds like exactly the opposite approach most American-run firms have been taking in the last 30 years. I guess pretty soon, all us engineers will be working for foreign companies, if present trends continue. I guess it beats being managed by drunken frat morons like at the American companies.
But not everyone can be bitten on live tv, performing some stupid stunt for an audience. That speaks to his mental capabilities, in my opinion.
More people are killed by deer every year than bears. That stat is just as relevant to your use of his hobbies as a gauge of his mental capabilities.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
All good mentalists are experts at social engineering. A mentalist who isn't trying to scam people (and there are many) is a good example of a socially acceptable use of the tools of a con-man.
I've been looking for a good book on mentalism for ages, Penn and Teller include mentalism in most of their magic books, but only in a limited way.
"Set a thief to catch a thief" as the saying goes.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."