Posted on 02/09/2005 12:09:21 PM PST by NormsRevenge
"The Emperor has no clothes" is a familiar refrain at such companies (spoken only behind closed doors, of course).
Sometimes these mergers/takeovers are cleverer than you think. Many companies do them to 'scramble' the books and salt away excess 'merger costs', which can be drawn down in later quarters and years to supplement profits, and keep the stock options going strong.
Caption the image: ...and I'll be strumming my guitar as Rome...I mean HP burns!
HP programs their ink cartridges to fail after a certain amount of time regardless of how much ink is left in the cartridge.
I'm not saying all mergers are bad, but at this level there should be better examination of the facts. Instead, top management commits to the idea and won't change course even when the facts don't support the move. I've seen companies plan a merger to acquire a key piece of business, then conclude the merger even after that piece of business was sold off by the target company! Of course they get yes men to tell them the deal still makes sense, with predictable results.
Both at work and at home, I've always had HP printers with one exception - an Epson - that was a piece of junk. The HP printers have been workhorses.
Ding dong, the witch is dead.
And all these are now made by Agilent, while HP's business model seems to be overcharging for ink cartridges and advertising "HP Invent"
Stockholders, watch for Fiorina's name as a nominee for your board of directors, and vote no. Maybe a useless gesture but at least you know you're doing the right thing.
Actually,
Carly Fiorina - HP's greatest mistake.
Unless she is to take over CBS. Then the vote is YES! (Or am I wishing too much pain on CBS?)
HP aggressively moved their own factories to the PRC and drove their suppliers to do the same. I wonder how much their costs of quality and logistics increased. I further wonder how much the inevitable loss of intellectual property when the crooks who work in those PRC factories sold it to Lenovo and the like, has harmed their ability to make their numbers in Asia and elsewhere?
pity that she'll never know the feeling of watching
her livelihood move to Mumbai/Bangalore/Guandong..
saying that it was a sucker move to pick up CPQ who
previously was suckered into picking up DEC.
DEC was a great company in its day but failed to change
with the times. I still remember KO's "Un*x = snakeoil"
comment...
Be nice now.......HP makes outstanding printers.
I am with you. With a few notable exceptions such as Michael Dell, T.J. Rodgers and perhaps, Scott McNealy, it seems to me that an inordinate percentage of high tech C levels are libs.
As I said in #22, sometimes there's a hidden agenda.
Carly is not unlike many CEO's brought in from outside the company. They come in needing to make a big statement on the direction of the company and in a lot of the cases don't have all the facts on the ramifications which will follow. After the deed is done then they are hard pressed to admit their failure. Buying Compact at the time HP did was regarded by most as being fool hardy at best. What she did was take a good company and sped good cash on a bad declining one. What she gained was not worth the cost HP paid in employee satisfaction and lost company value. Hind sight is 20/20 and in this case her myopia really shows. Carly should have remembered the old saying "remember who brings you to the dance" and strengthened the RD of their traditional core technologies. Carly should understand one thing. The pain she is probably experiencing now is only a very small infinite fraction of what the former HP and Compact employees felt through her mismanagement.
for some reason I have the notion that seeing HP products today will be like seeing PanAM in 2001.
I think they really missed the boat with the Ipaq PocketPC.
If they could have parlayed that into the phones more agressivly it would have been as universal as wristwatches.
There. Fixed it.
The most amazing thing is that an upstart hasn't collapsed the ink market like a house of cards. HPs competitors bought into it and are just as vulnerable.
KO ruined DEC by refusing to develop a decent management team - instead he had very bright technicians who couldn't manage - who were easy marks for manipulation by the those adept at playing inside politics - the real 'ride 'em hard and dump 'em' crowd cited earlier. The techie's designed and built quality products they couldn't sell; the politicians voted themselves and their 'team's fat bonuses and ignored the changes in the market.
KO was finally (and deservedly) dumped after two major screwups (that cost a lot of employees their wealth):
1)Letting PC's do to him what DEC did to IBM
2)Unsuccessfully and embarrassingly fighting the UNIX/Open Systems market evolution.
KO and his management team of inside players left with still very fat wallets and stuck it to Compaq. HP's purchase of Compaq was KO's revenge for HP management handling the Unix wars so well.
Carly was an opportunist who did a great job for what she was hired to do - fire people and shake up a culture. She ruined a great company when she tried to build a new company - something she had neither the talent nor the skill to accomplish. Unfortunately, she got wealth, riches and fame - and the price of failure was (and will be) paid by the stockholders and the ten's of thousands of employees that lost (and will lose) their jobs.
Prior to the purchase, the Hughes corporate management announced a decision that would make the company more “saleable.” They said that there should be some assurance that key technical personnel, “the heart of the company,” would remain with Hughes after a sale. The Hughes board of directors adopted the Hughes Long-Term Incentive Plan (“LTIP”). The 1985 GM Hughes Electronics corporation annual report describes the LTIP. It states the LTIP was designed to provide approximately one thousand key scientists, engineers, and managers of Hughes with an incentive to keep them from leaving the company in the event of a sale. That report also says that the amount of the incentive would total two hundred fifty million dollars. This did not include what the report called a preacquisition charge of one hundred twenty-five million dollars (note; this preacquisition charge is fifty percent of the total amount disbursed). The preacquisition charge included a loan fee for the two hundred fifty million dollars, plus enough more to satisfy tax liabilities of the recipients. The true cost of the LTIP was three hundred seventy-five million dollars. The same report stated that the future economic benefits from the LTIP were to be one hundred twenty-five million dollars. They spent three hundred seventy-five million dollars to increase the value of the company by one hundred twenty-five million dollars! In other words, it cost them three dollars to make one dollar.
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