How Steve Jobs Outsmarted Carly Fiorina

HughPickens.com writes: Carly Fiorina likes to boast about her friendship with Apple founder Steve Jobs but Fortune Magazine reports that it turns out Carly may have outfoxed of by Apple's late leader. In January 2004, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina cut a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple's wildly successful iPod and sell it through HP retail channels but HP still managed to botch things up. The MP3 player worked just like a regular iPod, but it had HP's logo on the back and in return HP agreed to continue pre-loading iTunes onto its PCs. According to Steven Levy soon after the deal with HP was inked, Apple upgraded the iPod, making HP's version outdated and because of Fiorina's deal HP was banned from selling its own music player until August 2006. "This was a highly strategic move to block HP/Compaq from installing Windows Media Store on their PCs," says one Apple source. "We wanted iTunes Music store to be a definitive winner. Steve only did this deal because of that."

In short, Fiorina's "good friend" Steve Jobs blithely mugged her and HP's shareholders. By getting Fiorina to adopt the iPod as HP's music player, Jobs had effectively gotten his software installed on millions of computers for free, stifled his main competitor, and gotten a company that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was a superior inventor.

Comments

Re:weakly disguised hit-piece

[Anonymous Coward]

You may not be aware of this, but Fiorina has been citing Jobs to deflect criticism of her for being fired by HP's board. She says that after she was fired he called her up and said "been there!" She's implying that because Jobs was fired and came back even stronger, her being fired from HP is proof she's a genius just like Jobs.

Since she brought up Jobs to make herself look good, it was inevitable that Jobs would be used to make her look bad. She opened that door.

Big Whoop

[PopeRatzo]

A three-legged cat could out-fox Carly Fiorina.

http://www.politico.com/magazi...