Carly’s tenure at HP.
....wellll, Carly’s tenure at HP SUCKED, as evidenced by the free fall of HP stock. She tried to empire build with a poor decision, against the wishes of the founders, to take over and overpay for Compaq and then dropped the Digital gem of R&D when she dashed overseas and cut thousands of US jobs.
She is a great Establishment Internationalist, but not a good exec, leader or strategist. They had to pay her $50MM to go away. A true affirmative action hire...first female disaster!
ymmv
You know this is really an overreaction.
No one came through the dot com bubble burst unscathed or different from how they were before the bubble burst.
The multiples being paid on tech companies at the time were completely outrageous. This is what happens during bubbles. The deal with Compaq could not have been done without board approval from two companies and stockholder approval as well. To pin this on one CEO and only one CEO is ridiculous.
The tech sector is completely bonkers when it comes to other “mature” industries. There is no such thing in tech. In 1999-2000 people expected the desktop/laptop to be dominant forever. Dial up was going to be how most Americans got their internet or the TimeWarner/AOL merger wouldn’t have been worth the price it was pegged at.
Cell phones as computers would have been laughed out of any company R&D labs. Film was still dominant for picture taking. Scanners were how photos ended up being shared in email. Tablets were considered vaporware. Palm Pilot “shorthand” was how people were going to interact with mobile devices.
I’m sorry, HP is still alive and countless others from 15 years ago are footnotes.
Given the scale of the dot com bubble meltdown and how much technology has evolved and shifted in hindsight she actually was right to do what she did.