The poor quality and incompetence at Hewlett Packard drove away significant shares of the market to the competitors, Dell and Lenovo. The Hewlett Packard LaserJet printers were for awhile an exception to the disaster while a Packard still managed that division of the company. The quality, such as the Vietnamese plastic/nylon gears in the printer, has since devastated the quality of those products as well. The destruction of a previously competent and trusted domestic customer service later outsourced to an incompetent foreign customer service is notorious. Fiorina committed the sin of eating the seed corn of trust and reliability for short term gains that vanished along with her job as the long term consequences of destroying customer trust and loyalty finally made itself painfully evident.
For such a terrible company, they sure do seem to be making a lot of money...
Sure HP suffered during the Tech Crash. But there are a lot of companies that employed hundreds of thousands of workers that just don't exist anymore. Sun Microsystems, Gateway, Atari, America Online, Wang, Alta Vista, Nokia... the list goes on and on. More companies failed than survived.
HP weathered that storm, and has emerged stronger. Now, you can say it did so in spite of Carly Fiorina, but you can't fault her because her company survived.