“The information is readily available for anyone that wants to look it up.”
Here is what wiki says, including the part about a general downturn in the entire IT business, during her HP tenure.
Do you have any specifics about what she did wrong, at HP?
from wikipedia:
In July 1999, HP appointed Carly Fiorina as CEO, the first female CEO of a company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Fiorina served as CEO during the tech downtown of the turn of the second millennium. During her tenure, the market halved HP’s value commensurate with other tech companies at the time and the company incurred heavy job losses.[20] The HP Board of Directors asked Fiorina to step down in 2005, and she resigned on February 9, 2005....
....On September 3, 2001, HP announced that an agreement had been reached with Compaq to merge the two companies.[21] In May, 2002, after passing a shareholder vote, HP officially merged with Compaq. Prior to this, plans had been in place to consolidate the companies’ product teams and product lines.[22]
The merger occurred after a proxy fight with Bill Hewlett’s son Walter, who objected to the merger. Compaq itself had bought Tandem Computers in 1997 (which had been started by ex-HP employees), and Digital Equipment Corporation in 1998. Following this strategy, HP became a major player in desktops, laptops, and servers for many different markets. After the merger with Compaq, the new ticker symbol became “HPQ”, a combination of the two previous symbols, “HWP” and “CPQ”, to show the significance of the alliance and also key letters from the two companies Hewlett-Packard and Compaq (the latter company being famous for its “Q” logo on all of its products.)
Here is an historic shareprice chart for HPQ, IBM, DJIA, and NASDAQ.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=my&s=HPQ&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=ibm&c=%5EIXIC&c=%5EDJI
If you are intellectually honest, you will readily observe that during her tenure, all four measures went down. The NASDAK of that era is probably the best reflection of tech stocks. Including IBM is relevant, for they were and remain both large, old computer tech stocks. DJIA is for general reference.
I believe this dispenses with the “Carly ruined HP” claim.
The biggie was the merger with Compaq. A week after the purchase, HP stock plunged 22%. Compaq stock dropped 14%. The combined drop wiped out $3 billion off the value of the takeover.
On your comment about the downturn, as already posted, HP's number fell. Lucent and Dell numbers increased.
Some of the insider criticism of her is that she shifted priority from nurturing employees to financial performance. That ran contrary to the conservative businesses founders that saw value in people.
With Fiorina, it became a Financial results all-or-noting game.
Also contrary to conservative business management, she worked over quarterly financials to put them in the best positive light and forecasting unrealistic sales growth. The conservative approach is to under report and then over achieve.
On this last point, it sounds much like the management philosophy of the Sacramento politicians that have the state in such a mess. Maybe she will fit right in but her management style and the risks she took the ending up hurting HP are not to my liking.
The indexes you note, IBM, DJIA, and NASDAQ are hardly useful for comparison sake. IBM was a struggling dinosaur. DJIA and NASDAQ are not competing companies - they are of course not companies at all. DJIA and NASDAQ may be an indicator of general market conditions, but drops in the indexes are merely excuses for companies that can not compete in a toughening industry.
Dell is a more appropriate comparison - I am sure you have their numbers as well for the same period.
The numbers that are most supportive of the "Fiorina ruined HP" claim are the stock prices during her tenure. Someone as fixed on numbers performance as she was could not even keep them up in a short 5 year run. I don't subscribe to the "everything in the short term" management philosophy so maybe I am not the one to be critical of her on this point. But, if short term numbers were her focus, she never achieved any of them.
While I was not there in person, what I have read about her management attitude surely turned a successful company on its head by replacing employee drive and encouragement with a club and threats. I am familiar with that business management philosophy. Never have I seen a company using it live up to its potential.