Business, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Carly Fiorina

19 Comments

This is brutal.

As I noted on Twitter, there’s a visceral hatred of her by many in the tech community, even among people otherwise willing to vote for a Republican. But she’ll make a good attack dog on Hillary.

19 thoughts on “Carly Fiorina”

  1. Well, having played that game with Fiorina, I’m not feeling the love. I’ve been fired before and the layoffs in question were relatively competent and generous. But she disrupted some good companies for personal gain and at the time she had this creepy messiah vibe to her. Not that we ever had anything like that before in the White House.

  2. I do not know much about her, but there isn’t enough info provided. My impression is that HP was in deep trouble regardless. So, were the firings unnecessary and counterproductive? Or, did they rescue HP, and save the jobs of those who remained?

      1. Point taken. But, was there really an alternative? I’m asking honestly. My impression is that HP was in a death spiral. I am not claiming it as fact, mind you. Just my impression.

      2. Because of her, HP was able to add (or save) thousands of jobs.

        I disagree. If we’re just looking at the jobs situation, HP and Compaq probably would have collectively larger businesses and hence, more jobs, if they hadn’t merged. I think the two companies would have been healthier as separate companies too. There was a long term decline in the collective value of the two companies following the merger announcement.

        One of the touted reasons for the merger was to combine the market share of the two companies. Glancing at Wikipedia, the combined PC market share of HP and Compaq went from just over 20% to just under 15% from 2000 to 2002 (along with a modest decline in the size of the market due to the 2000-2001 dotcom bust). Sure, I’m missing some nuance here, but Fiorina basically turned the combined PC output of the two companies into a little over the output of Compaq which was contrary to the script.

        She’s also heavily damaged the corporate culture at HP. I think that’s the root cause of most of the public ire directed at her. Sure, she made a huge poor business decision for personal gain and was a typical rockstar CEO (an executive who spends a lot of time pumping their image), but wrecking the “HP Way” was probably the deciding factor that made her stand out from the rest of the crowd who did that sort of thing.

        This is not the first company she’s played games with. She had a similar record at Lucent. There she fared better because she bailed from Lucent before it dropped substantially in value.

        1. The tech industry has its fair share of obnoxious “rock-star” CEOs but we sort of forgive them if they actually know what they are doing. Larry Ellison is one of those. He’s probably of the most self-congratulary SOBs around but at least he knows how to make money and understands tech.

        2. I’m pretty sure MfK’s statement was tongue-in-cheek, riffing on the Obama administration’s claim of all the jobs their actions had “added or saved” to cover for the fact that the “stimulus” had no apparent benefit.

  3. Agree w Bart. The website is stupid and irrelevant. Laying people off is not an automatically evil thing; it depends on what else might happen.
    I don’t know anything about the particular case, but I don’t know anything more after seeing that website.

    1. The website is stupid and irrelevant.

      Perhaps. But not registering the domain seems to show a remarkable lack of forethought; according to ‘whois’, it was registered by its current owner only a few months ago.

      Then again, so does believing she could actually get elected in California, after her record in the tech industry…

  4. She left a trail of destruction everywhere she went. It does not matter if it was at Lucent or at HP. She laid off people at HP at the same time she increased her bonuses and bought a corporate jet.

    HP used to be known for the “HP way”. It basically meant they tried their best not to lay you off. You might be repositioned inside the company as the business focus shifted elsewhere but they did try not to lay you off.

    You guys are in aerospace so you probably have heard of David Packard (the “P” in HP). He was the Deputy Secretary of Defense back when Nixon was President and had some involvement in the F-15 and F-16 projects.

    Fiorina gutted HP R&D and turned into a company which only sells shovelware from China that you can buy from anyone else, including one of the Taiwanese vendors, rather unsurprisingly their sales and market share collapsed as a result. Even after that disastrous merger they did with Compaq, which I believe was being investigated at one point, which was supposed to be a 1+1=2 in market share but turned out that both companies combined ended up with the same marketshare as HP had to begin with.

    All her management decisions were a disaster pure and simple. Look at Apple for a computer company which actually followed an outsourcing strategy successfully. i.e. they still do their own R&D.

    1. At one time the HP heirs tried to remove Fiorina from CEO but unfortunately they failed. Eventually she was kicked out but not without her golden parachute.

      Her last plan I believe was to sell all the HP printer R&D to China and outsource all the printers R&D as well as manufacturing from the Chinese. Since this is like the only division in HP which still actually made a profit that’s when they finally kicked her out. She still managed to kill their calculator division though. To Texas Instruments benefit since they still sell theirs even today.

      1. You had me worried. But, I checked and HP is still selling calculators. If I ever have to go back to a plodding old “=” sign, I think I’ll just get a slide rule.

        I guess you meant “killed” in the sense of “damaged”?

          1. Mmmm… Looks like it was already on the ropes, with production shifted to Singapore before she even came aboard.

            I don’t discount what you, or any of the other detractors, say. I just have only read enough of what you all have written now to make me wary, but not enough to condemn beyond a reasonable doubt.

            It still seems entirely possible that she inherited a rough situation with intense competition in a declining market. I don’t yet have reason to believe that what she did was necessarily worse than whatever anyone else (short of Steve Jobs himself, and even that doesn’t seem guaranteed) might have done.

            I guess I feel I have now gotten the prosecution’s case, and I would now like to hear from the defense. Doesn’t look like too many defenders are available here. Maybe when her campaign kicks in to gear, that will be forthcoming.

    3. It’s not often that I wholly agree with Godzilla, especially without the cheat of reading his post first. There are probably a lot of political mistakes on par with Fiorina getting public office, but this is one that I’m familiar with.

    4. That was the same complaint that I heard. Nowhere could be found any R&D worthy of the corporate slogan of “Invent”.

  5. Ed Koch defended Sarah Palin from outrageous attacks.

    Carly Fiorina was one of the attackers.

    I’d vote killer robot.

  6. Carly Fiorina exemplified one of the worst traits of modern corporate America: a single-minded focus on short term gains that laid the groundwork for long-term rot. Saying that because she was HP CEO, she understands business is pure, unadulterated, nonsense.

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