- If Ms. Packard can suggest someone better I’m sure the conservative community would be all ears.
Posted on 03/09/2010 12:22:04 AM PST by UAConservative
The granddaughter of one of Hewlett-Packard’s founders wrote a letter Monday trashing California GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina’s leadership of the company.
Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP co-founder David Packard, wrote the letter to the three Republican senators who recently endorsed Fiorina – James Inhofe and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma as well as Jon Kyl of Arizona – over former Rep. Tom Campbell and state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore.
Packard has a long feud with Fiorina, publicly criticizing her leadership of the company and pushing for her ouster in 2005. In 2002, Packard teamed with Bill Hewlett – son of co-founder Walter Hewlett – in an attempt to kill Fiorina’s planned merger with Compaq.
“As I'm sure you've seen over the past year, voters don't like Senators who don't read bills before they vote on them,” Packard wrote in a letter first posted on the conservative blog RedState. “Voters (and donors) also don't like Senators who get involved in contested primaries, especially without having done their homework. I would respectfully suggest that in the future you conduct more detailed research on candidates before endorsing them.”
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
I’m sure no love is lost between those ladies.
Fiorina was incompetent in more than one place. She did Lucent no favor. However, even a bumbling RINO is better than Barbara Boxer. If Ms. Packard can suggest someone better I’m sure the conservative community would be all ears.
As a Compaq alum I completely agree.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/SiliconInsider/Story?id=508399&page=2
I remember the terms “unmitigated disaster” being associated with Fiorina here.
The Republican senators who endorsed Fiorina should be ashamed but the GOP elected officials are closing ranks behind business as usual, I guess........
Next they will endorse Romney in 2012.......
In all fairness to Carly, she was CEO after the dot com burst and many companies didn’t survive at all. HP and Sun were both heavily invested on server side mainframe type computers and saw data center sales just fall into the crapper.
Once the venture capital dried up for funding websites that would deliver useless stuff like condoms and a six pack to your doorstep or would provide ambient noise for your pets while you were at work hardware makers suffered. The merger though exacerbated bad market conditions.
The combination of Compaq’s consumer business and HP’s B2B core seemed to make sense. However Compaq was going to end up biting the dust eventually at the hands of Dell, Apple, Sony and Toshiba by the death of 1,000 cuts. Just like Gateway did.
The consumer PC market, unless you’re Apple, is a crappy market for manufacturers that’s fixated on price and price alone. Don’t believe me? Try going into Best Buy or Wal Mart and finding an i7 machine. The B2B business is very reliant on selling after market service contracts and consulting. Those contracts can’t be made up for in the consumer market.
The Compaq merger was HORRIBLE but then again so was the Time-Warner/AOL merger which was done around the same time. Hindsight is 20/20. Though there was far more writing on the wall that HP/Compaq would explode far earlier.
Most of the layoffs talked about were on the Compaq side. That happens when you merge companies. Most of the stock loss happened when looking at the high point of the .com bubble vs. post-merger when the merger problems surfaced and the market crashed.
Still though, she was a bad CEO on two counts; getting involved in the consumer PC business with Compaq and overpaying for it. I could point to other reasons as well but that’s enough for a synopsis.
My wife told me John Boehner was in Huntsville, Al yesterday campaigning for Parker Griffin (Dem turned Pubbie). She said Boehner was met with resistance but she didn’t say from which side. :)
Former HP employee here...I agree too. She was a mess.
The granddaughter isn’t revealing anything new.
She didnt do a good job of finishing HP off because I hate HP. Hands down the worst laptops I’ve owned. And as a Mexifornian, I couldnt stand Whitman either.
For me, HP was the leader in quality test equipment and was HP’s very identity.
Wasn’t she responsible for HP spinning that off?
That’s nice.
Ms. Packard would be more effective to show a public face boosting DeVore than getting all down and catty on Fiorina. Catfights inspire facepalms.
Jon Kyl will endorse anything with an “R” tattooed on its butt. Listen to his disgraceful McCain endorsement:
http://www.johnmccain.com/newsroom/audio-clip/senator-jon-kyl-radio-commercial
When Fiorina was being groomed for political stardom I cringed. Her reign of terror was meticulously documented and converted the HP ‘magic’ into cheap plastic.
You know what scares me? As incompetent as she is, if she gets this seat, can you imagine her working her way up to the Presidency with the full support of the left? I can. Fiorina is the feminine embodiment of a corporate scorched-Earth policy. She’s a walking disaster and would be a natural in leftist politics.
Absolutely! A company could only dream to enjoy the stellar reputation that HP had in that field when I started my engineering career in '81.
But the traded that in to hawk cheap printers and ink cartridges.
It may have been good for short term gains, but in the medium to long term it's a total folly.
Im not so sure about that. At least you can count on the liberal to act like a liberal. RINOs are all over the map and routinely switch sides at the worse possible time. Carly was an epic failure at HP and will continue that ‘rich’ tradition as a senator.
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