Sources Say Meg Whitman To Become HP CEO 277
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."
Bring back WebOS please (Score:2)
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Sent from my Palm Pre Plus
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Worst. Idea. Ever.
You thought Carly was a disaster? Just wait. Someone needs to clean clock over there. Now.
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Actually, they've made so many bonehead moves over the last decade that I become convinced that the whole company is some sort of Producers-esque scam and the board is intentionally trying to crash it. Appointing Meg Whitman, who was notorious at eBay, pretty much confirms my suspicion. If Rod Blagojevich wasn't facing prison time, they probably would have appointed him. Hell, they still might.
Next up is putting Lindsey Lohan in charge of marketing and launching the HP Goliath, they'll tout as the "World's
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The HP board of directors has shown itself, over many years, to be utterly incompetent.
And Meg Whitman was on the board of directors.
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Because android's user interface on tablets is horrible and webOS's is way better.
And I'll just assume the windows tablet stuff you mention was a joke.
So the enxt question (Score:2)
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.
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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
Really? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Really? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's not what you know... (Score:5, Informative)
...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. :-)
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I think it's who you blow. :)
Or:
Sometimes you have to give a little head to get ahead.
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I have to know what amazing company you work for. And then I also want to make a movie about this.
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I love you all. Seriously. This made me laugh tears.
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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
Re:Really? Really? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]!!!
Counter culture hippy to CEO of largest corp ... (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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80% of affluent are self made ... (Score:3)
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, su
"Who is the prototypical American millionaire?
Re:80% of affluent are self made ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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. [mint.com] 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?
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I couldn't follow the link without a subscription.
I apologize. I don't know how I got in the first time. When I repeat my google search and follow the link I too get the paywall.
But anyways, we are talking about different classes of income. 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!
If you are retired then you probably have already paid off a mortgage and have fewer expenses. $35K may not be so bad, especially when augmented by social security.
That said, I get your point. However the regrettably paywalled article also said that about 14% (IIRC) of the self employed are making $500K or more a year. I think the notions that there is no upward mobility and tha
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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.
It would be nice if companies would promote people on the basis of having at least some inkling of experience in what they're managing. I can't tell you how many "project managers" I've worked for that could never program their way out of a paper bag, and therefore have no sense of scheduling. I got an MBA so that I could use my experience in development to move up *just one* level in an IT organization. But no. No amount of relevant experience and credentials were enough to break the glass ceiling. Th
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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.
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Re:Really? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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!
Probably not easy for you (Score:2)
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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.
Nevermind the facts (Score:2, Informative)
"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.
Re:Nevermind the facts (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Re:Nevermind the facts (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Maybe she will auction off the parts ... (Score:3)
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.
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If there are any parts [slashdot.org] left to auction by the time she gets moved into her corner office.
Leo must have seen this one coming [cringely.com]. In many companies, its common practice to have a security guard escort employees on their way out to make sure they don't sabotage something. Why not in this case?
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Because it would be easy to find him and sue his balls off, he has a lot to lose whereas joe-schmoe hasn't got squat.
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Interim CEO only (Score:2)
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
Re:Nevermind the facts (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Actually there is minimal risk (Score:2)
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.
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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/ [cringely.com]
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.
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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.
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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 wo
Dreamworks (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Dreamworks + eBay != HP (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Dreamworks + eBay != HP (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of HP's revenue comes from enterprise markets, which Meg Whitman has zero experience with.
OK, I just have to jump in here. CEO's, on the scale of businesses like HP, don't deal with end-users, enterprise or otherwise. They don't need "shop floor" experience, though that never hurts. They certainly don't need experience in this or that product line. What they do need, in spades, is the ability to pick the right people to work immediately under them. Product strategy isn't set in a vacuum by CEO fiat. HP's recent missteps positively reek of a cadre of VP's who are little more than "yes men", toadies who are unwilling to point out the emperor's nudity, or worse, who lack the chops to run their divisions. That HP missed so badly on their table execution demonstrates a failing far deeper than the myopic CEO who green-lighted a major product without realizing the gaping hole in it (no apps).
Maybe Meg can turn that around. First sign that she can will be a major shakeup at the VP level.
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Actually, since what Leo did was try and remake HP as SAP, it does sort of happen by CEO fiat. A
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Firstly, the CEO of a company like HP deals with C-level executives of companies they are trying to sell many millions of dollars of gear and services to all the time. Meeting with client upper management is one of the bedrocks of the CEO's job with companies that sell to other large companies. In fact, I'd say that the CEO's of enterprise companies have MORE interaction with their customers than a company like eBay.
No, they don't absolutely have to have "shop floor" experience, knowledge of the industry,
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Those aren't good CEOs, there great CEOs.
Or, more apropos here, Lou Gerstner (Score:2)
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.
HP needs more than a CEO that's out of the way (Score:2)
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.
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> and she directed eBay to some amazing success.
I'm not sure about this, yes ebay is amazing success but for who? It is no longer an online garage sale where individuals can easily sell things, it is now dominated by dealers with buy-it-now. I used to do a lot shopping on ebay (unique items whether it be Gina Lollobrigida photos or 2-way radio and accessories) when many sellers were simply people with things they want to unload. Nowadays it's all fulltime sellers listing same ol' same ol' over and ove
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I miss the old ebay where unique one-of-a-kind items can be found. Maybe they still exist but swamped with too much crap.
Ditto. I used to buy a lot from ebay auctions and got some good deals and weird stuff that I'd never have found elsewhere; I've hardly bought anything from them since they became just another storefront site a few years ago.
Captain Edward Smith (Score:3)
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If the ship keeps hitting icebergs, you might want to look at the captain.
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They'd be the owners.
What they NEED is a captain who's willing to tell the owners to STFU, screw your schedule, you put me in charge for a reason and we're going to slow down because there are icebergs around.
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What's the alternative?
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If the board resigned, then they can't really do anything to try and fix things. That's just them saying that this is going down, and they're getting the fuck out of there.
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Based on most committees, the clear alternative is to go to the captain and order him to get busy rearranging the deck chairs.
(Interestingly, on the actual Titanic, Edward Smith and his officers did what was probably the right thing with their boss: did their best to keep him busy with useless stuff, and on one occasion told him off so they could get back to work)
Can we bring back Hewlett and Packard (Score:2)
Is this remotely possible? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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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?
Hey, I bet Michelle Bachmann is about to be available, after running her train-wreck of a presidential campaign into the ground. She should fit right in at HP. Maybe she can figure out a way to sell tablets for less than $100 a pop. Oh, wait...
How about promoting from within? (Score:5, Insightful)
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HP sells printer ink, right? do they need so many people just to do that?
(HP was once great. sun was once great. so was DEC and so was SGI. now, all gone. what the hell happened to this world?) ;(
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HP sells printer ink, right? do they need so many people just to do that?
(HP was once great. sun was once great. so was DEC and so was SGI. now, all gone. what the hell happened to this world?) ;(
We have Apple... And Google. After all, what would the US do if there weren't a hefty demand for marketing executives? I mean shit, it's not like they can just take any old job.
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The MBAs took over.
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This.
So. Much. This.
"You don't manage people. You manage machines. You lead people" - RADM Grace Hopper.
--
BMO
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oooooh, damn I wish I had mod points.
The entire concept that "Management" is a core discipline that someone can learn and then they can run _any_ type of company, even with no understanding of it whatsoever is one of the worst things to have come out of the 20th century, and looking at that century, thats really saying something.
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HP sells ink, inkjet printers, laser printers, large scale printers and plotters, scanners, copiers, high end costs-more-than-a-porsche-copiers, servers, network equipment, big iron servers, SANs, and medical imaging devices. They're not in the same category as SGI or DEC as their product line is still broad.
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Come to think of it, how is HP doing in those areas. Most of us are damning them for a revolving CEO and their PC madness. However, if the rest of their product line is holding their own, then maybe there's more to HP management than we've been telling ourselves.
That said, their printers have gone downhill. No doubt to keep up with the...what's Jones in Chinese...Wangs. Their mid-range line is built to last until the product warranty expires, but not beyond.
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If all the competent workers have already left, no CEO would be able to save the company because there's nobody left to actually get things done.
If the company is full of good workers, the only thing that will make them leave is bad management decisions.
The best management can do is stay out of the way.
Anybody want a 20 billion dollar company? (Score:2)
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 "m
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Steve Jobs types have emotional capital invested in their companies.
They give a shit. It's not just a job. Steve Jobs came back aboard Apple with a One Dollar salary and no golden parachute. When he stepped down as CEO, Tim Cook didn't get a golden parachute either (he's gotta work for it for 10 years if he wants to be vested in a dime of stock). That's the way it should be done.
I defy anyone to find an MBA gun-for-hire that give a shit if a company fails or not, especially if there's a golden-parachu
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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.
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Clearly, they need to hire this guy [woz.org].
He:
* has top-notch understanding of what it takes to build a PC
* has a prior relationship to HP
* co-founded a highly successful technology company
* is not a complete power-hungry jerk
* knows better than anyone else how to identify "Steve Jobs types"
Of course, there's one problem: He has way too much sense to take the job.
Meg's first action (Score:4, Funny)
Stock tip (Score:2)
HP, the Lehman Brothers of Tech (Score:2)
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.
What HP needs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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HP is already dead: they died when they turned their backs on what Bill and Dave said in "The HP Way".
To me, the _real_ HP (engineering and innovation focused, not the "brand machine" someone mentioned earlier in this thread) is Agilent.
Meg Whitman (Score:5, Funny)
Gr8 ceo,xcellent profit maker ,highly recommend AAA+
What's with HP and the hard-right republican CEOs? (Score:3, Funny)
Didn't both Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman run as tea-party candidates last year?
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Not full tea party candidates, as that would never really fly in California.
EDS to be its own company a third time? (Score:2)
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?
Everyone loves Mr. Potato Head (Score:2)
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 pul
Practical use (Score:2)
All I know (Score:2)
My condolences to the HP employees (Score:2)
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!
FOOLS RUN THE WORLD (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Just a Placeholder (Score:3)
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.
Re:Would be curious to know what board is thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Would be curious to know what board is thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
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.