How about Kodak?
Posted on 09/10/2015 9:56:51 AM PDT by McGruff
Carly Fiorina: By the time the board pushed her out in 2005, Fiorina’s $25 billion acquisition of Compaq was considered a flop — and H-P recently essentially undid the deal. (More on that later.) The company’s earnings withered during her rocky tenure, falling to $1.16 a share in her final full year in 2004 from $1.54 a share in 1999, when she was named CEO. True, 1999 was the height of the Internet technology boom and 2004 was a time when businesses were recovering from the dotcom meltdown and a recession.
During Fiorina’s unsuccessful U.S. Senate run last year, Fiorina’s opponent had a section of his website devoted to criticisms about her H-P tenure. One line read: “Let’s not forget that the H-P board fired Fiorina early in 2005, and no company has hired her since.” That’’s mean.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
I don’t trust Fiorina. She did more harm than good at HP and seems like she’s out mainly for her own career advancement.
and got caught on an open mike making demeaning comments about her political opponent’s looks..
Carly will get a significant number of women listening to the conservative message who might never have considered it before. Once adopted, it is more easily transferable to the eventual nominee, especially with her endorsement. That makes her presence here a plus, just as it does with Carson. I'm glad both are in and doing well enough to be heard.
She had previously ruined Lucent. Apparently she was promoted not on the basis of competence but on the basis of her chromosomes.
As are most these days. Politically correct promotions and agendas.
I’m not a Carly fan by any imagination but LOTS of companies bought junk companies after the .com crash which turned out worthless.
Intel and Cisco were probably the worst at it.
That being said, Compaq was a worthless company back in the mid 90’s.
Compaq spent a bundle trying to design an alternative to Intel processors but they didn’t have fab capacity to make it work.
HP and Carly should have known that.
Kodak has to take top prize for failing to see digital imaging marketplace coming, and remaining focused on prints and film
I worked at one Kodak location in Rochester - the building complex was so huge it had to be at least 2 miles long- there were bicycles and scooters inside for travel and street names
Nearly the entire place is shut down
But Compaq had tremendous market presence and brand strength as well as a phenomenal stock track record. Technology is a much smaller factor in public company valuations that underlie deals like this. The acquiring company always thinks it is smart enough to fix whatever might be suboptimal,the main thing is how the deal affects the stock price and eexecutives bonuses/options. And not in that order.
This is from 2011, couldn’t something more recent be found?
you kidding? i used to work for hp and agilent.
HP did make the wise move to junk their Netservers and rebrand the Compaq ones as HPs. The rest of Compaq’s portfolio may have been worthless but HP’s server line benefited.
Well put.
Carly was a disaster, she single handedly destroyed one of the greatest tech and research companies the planet has ever known.... The board decided to affirmative action hire, and even after it was obvious she was over her head stuck with her, because it was all about politics.
She was a competent sales exec but had ZERO line experience and as such had no business as the CEO, but the board decided it wanted a woman, and she became it.
She has no shot of getting the vote of ANYONE in technology who was around at that time, the watched first hand how badly she destroyed HP... No one in tech at that time would ever vote for her, myself included.
Kodak’s failing wasn’t simple the board... lots of companies fail... in fact most do... Kodak’s critical failure was when it invented digital photography, instead of listening to the public, they listened to their current corporate “customers” who were making money processing film, and wanted nothing to do with digital and pushed Kodak to not do it... and shot themselves in the foot.
They weren’t the first company to misread something, and die from it.
The didn’t hide it, they viewed their existing customer base of film processors as more important than the potentially new customer base and opportunities Digital would open up... and in the end... went down the tubes for it.
Its pretty typical, many a company has worried more about protecting what it had, at the expense of building new opportunities.. in fact that story is quite common.
The compaq acquisition made no sense then, and it makes no sense in retrospective. Hardware by that time was a commodity, a few percentage points margin no matter whos name was on it.... there were no economies of scale to gain from that merger/buyout... it was a bad move.
It was gut wrenching to watch her destroy HP.
In fairness to Carly ... HP is STILL reorganizing. Their issues were large and numerous.
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