Posted on 09/17/2015 6:21:28 PM PDT by jimbo123
Presidential hopeful and former Hewlett-Packard HPQ -3.70% CEO Carly Fiorina has built her entire campaign around the fact that she comes from the business world, not politics.
“A fish swims in water, it doesn’t know it’s water. It’s not that politicians are bad people, it’s that they’ve been in that system forever,” she said at Wednesday night’s second debate among Republican candidates for the 2016 Presidential Election.
The line was consistent with Fiorina’s pitch to voters as a no-nonsense executive who knows how to revitalize the U.S. economy, but to hear one of her chief Republican rivals tell it, the business track record she leans on isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“Hewlett-Packard was a disaster. Lucent, the company she was at before Hewlett-Packard, was a disaster. These were two disastrous reigns,” said Donald Trump in an interview with CBS’ Face The Nation.
For all Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail, he has a point here. Under Fiorina’s reign at HP shareholders took a beating. During her tenure, HP shares lost 42% while the broader market slid just 6%. The day she was fired in February 2005, the stock popped 7%.
Fiorina joined HP as CEO in 1999 and her campaign website lists a raft of accomplishments at the company, saying she ”doubled revenues; more than quadrupled its growth rate; tripled the rate of innovation, with 11 patents a day.”
Those figures are impressive at first glance, but also largely misleading. While Fiorina did double revenues to nearly $90 billion during her tenure, it was almost entirely because of the highly controversial acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2002. The merger, a bet on personal computers just as their sales were starting to slide, faced strong opposition and Fiorina had to launch a proxy battle to win approval, pitting her
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
oh and btw. if that’s wasn’t enough for you, she’s was a known mccain/chamber of commerce recruit to enter that ca sen. race against devore.
Stock dropped 42% during her, what, 6 years at HP? Leo managed a 40% drop in 13 months. They gave him millions to leave, too. I wonder: what is the common denominator in both their tenures? Oh, I know, the Board.
I thought Trump defended Fiorina saying she was fired unfairly?
At the time HP bought Compaq they were going downhill fast, I couldn’t believe they or anyone would buy Compuke. Some of the worst computers I ever saw, and I worked on dozens of them.
Both Compaq and HP were doing the same thing, building proprietary computers. That’s one area companies like Dell and Toshiba had an advantage. With those, you could go out and buy a power supply at any computer shop and it would drop right in. The power supply in your HP or Compaq went belly up and you had to order one from the company at 3X the price.
As an example I worked on one that had a bad motherboard. Compaq. I had one in the shop for $85. Customer decided to order the right one from Compaq. $212. And it refused tpo let me install Windows from the restore CD. Compaq tech support refused to help me figure it out. The guy kept telling me to call the company I bought the motherboard from. Compaq ended up getting a nastygram. Tech support superviser on phone got a piece of my mind too.
That’s what Carly bought, and why Compaq was going down when HP bought them. I knew nothing about Carly at the time. Proprietary computers, more Compaq machines came in the shop than anything else, motherboards, power supplies and sometimes even CD Rom drives could only be bought through Compaq because they made them specifically to fit only in their cases. Some also had video cards that were not full height, same thing. Standard video card would not fit. Any of those parts cost 3X what the standard ones we had on the shelf cost. Plus I had to figure out how to get into their weird cases...Sometimes I had to look it up online, while any standard case simply has 2 or 3 screws on back. Bad air circulation causing it to overheat? Too bad, no place for an extra fan. Want a better cooling fan on the CPU? Better hope you have room...then you find out it has a different power plug and your new fan still won’t work.
HP was doing the same things. Dell later did a few proprietary machines, but mostly standard parts in general.
All these were building a bad reputation, plus tech support was beyond awful. Call them and you’d get some guy in India you could barely understand. Last time I called concerning the Compaq motherboard problem above, I made 3 of them put someone else on the phone, I couldn’t understand a word. Finally demanded they put a supervisor on. I could barely understand him and got nothing done about the problem.
That was what HP bought. A failing company with a reputation for low quality proprietary computers and horrid tech support. Customers were getting sick of it and moving to other brands already.
I know nothing about the politics of the buy, or the stock situations involved, I just saw it from a repair tech’s view, I wouldn’t have touched Compaq even with someone else’s money.
Yeah, this was long known. She is a disaster.
It's very odd, all those who fail routinely fail and who perform badly, want to be the boss and control everyone and everything.
Throw Hillary into that crowd along with most of D.C. as well.
There is something very scary about the types of most of these people who drawn into government. Based on history, I can assure you it's not to benefit those who put them there.
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