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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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait, the moron who bought Skype - and didn't bother to check to see if she was getting the patents - is going to somehow turn HP around?
Yeah. Right.
Meg Witless could barely run a taco stand, let alone HP. She made Carly Failorina look competent. eBay was a great idea - which she had nothing to do with - and Meg rode that idea along with the dot com boom to "success". Once the boom ended, so did eBay's growth. It's been pretty much stagnant since.
The only smart move eBay has made in the past decade or so was buying PayPal, and that was a no-brainer everybody and his brother suggested eBay do. Their attempt to become another Amazon has only succeeded in devaluing their core auction business.
will be to announce that HP will accept payments only in the form of major credit cards or PayPal.
Building a website based company is completely different from running a hardware company. Witness Carly Fiorina's tenure for an example of how that goes, and even she was kind of selling hardware at Lucent. Ebay had no supply chain to deal with, HP is nothing BUT supply chain. Also, let's not forget that the explosive growth of eBay was one of these right place right idea right time once in a lifetime things.
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.
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.
Didn't both Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman run as tea-party candidates last year?
...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."
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.
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...
Because that's the only metric to go on, right? To say nothing of the fact that she squandered $2.5 billion on Skype, she oversaw upheaval of the rules that led to mass exoduses away from eBay, and really just kinda rode the dot com boom up to the top.
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.
You have to look a bit deeper than that.
The HP Way is dead. Inventing cool stuff is no more. That got spun off as Agilent. Now it's just another soulless corporation waiting to suck the soul right out of you.
And they're offering you 10 percent more for the privilege.
--
BMO
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!
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.
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".
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!
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
Hewlett and Packard are probably spinning in their graves.
I fully agree with the aristocracy observation.
Included in that is the inbreeding that eventually leads to ineffective and insane members. Many are fully functional, but a few are just way out there.
Brought to you by: "Al"toids - the curiously weird mint.
To be fair, most dot-coms, even those with "good ideas" didn't survive. Ebay and Amazon did something right to make it into profitable long-standing businesses.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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"
You're not going to be in the movie, good looking people will play your parts.
Only I can judge you.
I love you all. Seriously. This made me laugh tears.
The HP board of directors has shown itself, over many years, to be utterly incompetent.
And Meg Whitman was on the board of directors.
Breakfast served all day!