Let me explain a few things these articles never do. One, the PC industry was split at that time between HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, and others who built standard configurations and pumped them into the distribution channel. If technology or even operating systems changed to favor different feature sets, the already-built PCs piled up in warehouses, unsold. On the other side was DELL with it’s amazingly powerful “build to order” model that gave customers the ability to “have it their way”.
Public companies like HP are under constant pressure to show quarterly improvement in earnings or the stock price drops as shareholders invest elsewhere. That was the scenario facing the HP board when they decided to acquire Compaq, which Fiorina as CEO was responsible for executing. The problem was, it not only created a larger version of the type of PC company that wasn’t working very well, but it added the thin margins of the PC business with the very high margins of HPs’ existing printer and ink business with the result that sales grew but profit actually went down.
Anyone who thinks Fiorina did this on her own has no clue about how corporations work. It was a calculated decision that the added revenue would buy enough time to move to a DELL-like model with a more valuable stock price, but that is not how it turned out, and Fiorina was fired. If this was a “disaster”, she may have been in the wheelhouse of the Titanic but she wasn’t alone.
Finally, what about Agilent, which was spun out of HP in 1999 and subsequently shed the component business (Avago) and the legacy Test and Measurement business that Grandpa Dave started in his garage in 1939 (Keysight Technologies). You have to add them to today’s HP computer company in order to get the same picture of the company as when Fiorina came on board.
True enough, but she was the CEO. That's why they get paid the big bucks.
And the part about bribing Russian government officials to land contracts? Would that be something to assign to her watch? After all, HP recently was socked with a 59 million dollar fine for a long history of doing that, starting with Russia in 2000.
really bob?
the board (including Walter Hewlett) changed it’s mind and the co employees agreed. they fought fiorina tooth and nail.
fiorina went right ahead got the shareholders to sign off (at least that’s the story). so no, she did it on her own. no excuses. and it is and was her responsibility.