1. "hired her with no CEO experience"
She was the President of and running a very successful $19B division (that's larger than many S&P 500 companies) of Lucent at the time HP begged her to turn around an aging, drifting company with legacy businesses and dozens of mostly independently run divisions whose products were being commoditized and margins shrinking, with several competitors gaining market share. Without major restructuring and change of direction, HP was going the way of Kodak, Polaroid and Xerox. Far from "destroying" HP, Fiorina's actions saved it.
2. Yes, there were thousands of layoffs - partially because of merger with Compaq, partially because of consolidations of divisions and eliminating of internal redundancies and dealing with the aftermaths of the "dotcom" bust and 9/11, just like there were in most other companies, for those who still remember.
At last count, there are more than 300,000 employees at HP today, with the revenue per employee of about $355K and profit per employee of about $15K - does that mean company is successful, unsuccessful, or these numbers, in isolation, are meaningless?
Hint: don't ask Fortune to give you the answer. But note that the price of HPQ stock is at about the same level that was 10 years ago, when Fiorina was "fired" by the dysfunctional board.
BTW, while the stock coasted up for a while as a result of her restructuring, both CEOs who followed Fiorina were also fired by the dysfunctional board — Mark Hurd "for cause" and Leo Apotheker who lasted barely 1 year on the job and really wrecked the company with mindless acquisition of Autonomy for $11B which had to be entirely written off, and cutting several promising product research projects. Oh, and two members of the dysfunctional board have resigned a year after firing Fiorina because they were implicated in a massive scandal of leaking confidential company information.
3. Fortune article omits and/or distorts financial performance of Lucent and HP by selective irrelevant comparisons. You can find more, better facts in this post: Carly Fiorina as a boss: The disappointing truth - FR, post #26, 2015 August 15 Fortune