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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."
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.
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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.
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
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.
...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."
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
It's meaningless to say "80% of millionares are first-generation" because $1M in 1980 is equivalent to $2.6M now. If you start retirement with $1M in the bank right now and a 3.5% withdrawl rate (which is reasonable), you'll only be taking out $35K/year to live on!
Runaway wealth accrual is not caused by people who have accumulated $1M during a career; we're talking about people who get ten times that much every year even when the business fails. The lowest of the top 5 hedge fund managers in 2010 made $1.4 billion, which is obviously 1,400 times as much, in a single year, as the entrepreneurs and professional to which you refer accumulated over the course of a career. Doing the math, that's the same as equating somebody who makes $100,000 per year with somebody else who has a net worth of $71. Are the people I'm talking about really thousands of times more productive than the people you're talking about?