Carly Fiorina turned a prestigious technology company into another vendor of commodity hardware and printer cartridges.
She let go a lot of engineering talent, and the soul of the company with it. Now that HP is trying to re-establish itself in the enterprise space, they are missing those engineers and developers.
The increased cash flow came from commodity products like printer cartridges and consumer PCs. HP traded its position as Lexus of technology, bumping off either Dell or e-Machines for #1 vendor of the $399 special. She replaced Vectra sales with Pavilion sales.
At the time Fiorina took over HP, Apple was actually in worse shape financially. Steve Jobs was back and the iMac was just released, but no iPod, no iPhone, gimpy laptops based on hot PowerPC chips. At the time, HP was in better shape than Apple. She didn’t have to be Steve Jobs, but she decided that she wanted to be Hammermill or Georgia Pacific. Hardly a growth strategy.
The business PCs were crap. HPs laptops were always kind of weird, but the desktops, workstations and servers were solid. No more. Itanium was a bust as well, but that was in motion before she took over.
This article was obviously written by a hack who is parsing words to obscure the truth. Those of us in IT have no problem with great women in IT. Some of us even have a portrait of Ada Lovelace on our wall. Grace Hopper is venerated, even if we don’t LIKE the language she invented (COBOL).
For female CEOs, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo! is doing a good job with a much tougher company to steer than HP.
Don’t let Fiorina take her record off the table by people claiming that men don’t want girls in the IT sandbox.
Oh, and her attitude to the heroic Kim Davis is shameful.
HP went in as a Cadillac of technology and came out something between a Chevy and a Yugo.
I had an HP laptop back in the day. You’re right, it sucked. The server division was solid fora while, but towards the end of her tenor they fell.
And all of the test equipment my fellow employees used to use to do their jobs, went bye bye. Equipment lines they’d used for decades.
What did we get? Cheap ass printers and expensive ink.
HP has A LOT of work ahead of them if they ever want my business again. I think it unlikely.