Nearly destroyed a huge American company, HP. Offshored, the whole works. No, she’s not anything. Meg Whitman has more clout.
I was there thru both Carly's and Meg's time, as well as many others back to Lew Platt. From my inside view:
- Carly was a good leader and very good at communicating a vision. She had little patience with Wall Street analysts, and they knew it and trashed her in retaliation. Most peoples' view of her is from these analysts.
- Hurd was the offshoring hatchet guy. He also was responsible for things like the Palm acquisition, where they paid billions then did nothing all the assets (discontinued hardware leaving webOS with no platform, killing the app dev base in the process).
- Leo was the Autonomy merger debacle, open sourcing webOS, and out.
- Meg is just struggling to keep it from dying and frankly, she changes direction almost annually from brand consolidation to divesting businesses.