Wednesday, February 9, 2005
Carly Fiorina Resigns As Chief Of HP
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "NEWS" @ 08:00 AM
"Hewlett Packard Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina, one of the most powerful women in corporate America, is leaving the company effective immediately, after being forced out by its board. Fiorina was the only female CEO of a component of the Dow Jones industrial average. But her controversial May 2002 purchase of Compaq after a bruising proxy fight led by one of the Hewlett heirs has not produced the shareholder returns or profits she had promised."
This is slightly off topic; however, HP is one of the major players in the Digital Media world so the news is important. From a personal standpoint, when the merger was announced several years ago, I have to admit that I was happy to hear of it. It made a fair bit of sense as HP wanted to become a much large player in the desktop/server market. Ahh, but how wrong I was.
The vicious battle between her and the Hewlett heirs led to Carly's victory and the merger proceeded; however, we have all seen how badly it has failed. It appears that HP has become more of a behemoth company with tons of bureaucracy and so many small and uncoordinated departments that don't really talk to one another. Case in point: I bought a 1GB module for a tablet PC from HPshopping and when it didn't fit in the system, I called HP. After being bounced through several departments and explaining the problem everytime to every engineer, I was told to send in the tablet for a hardware upgrade (for free since my tablet is still under warranty). A couple of days later, I get a call saying that there is no such thing as a hardware upgrade, certainly not for free, and that I was was change the memory. HPshopping in the mean time will not accept HP's advice, nor will they take back the memory since it is beyond the take-back-date. This case still remains unresolved after three months as they don't quite know what to do.
HP had a solid market share in the printer scanner business, but has since really lost its focus. It has alienated its customers (remember how none of their "older" pocketPCs qualified for ROM upgrades) and is generally languishing in all the problems that plague a poorly managed large company - tons of bureaucracy where where exist tons of redundant small departments, none of whom talk to each other. Janak (from pocketpcthoughts.com) and I often joke that HP, the behemoth of a company, will be gone by the end of the decade, despite the occasional good new products that it creates. I can see why the Board was unhappy with the results of the merger and the results from the CEO and the decision to force her out, I think, is a good one. I wonder what's next for HP.
This is slightly off topic; however, HP is one of the major players in the Digital Media world so the news is important. From a personal standpoint, when the merger was announced several years ago, I have to admit that I was happy to hear of it. It made a fair bit of sense as HP wanted to become a much large player in the desktop/server market. Ahh, but how wrong I was.
The vicious battle between her and the Hewlett heirs led to Carly's victory and the merger proceeded; however, we have all seen how badly it has failed. It appears that HP has become more of a behemoth company with tons of bureaucracy and so many small and uncoordinated departments that don't really talk to one another. Case in point: I bought a 1GB module for a tablet PC from HPshopping and when it didn't fit in the system, I called HP. After being bounced through several departments and explaining the problem everytime to every engineer, I was told to send in the tablet for a hardware upgrade (for free since my tablet is still under warranty). A couple of days later, I get a call saying that there is no such thing as a hardware upgrade, certainly not for free, and that I was was change the memory. HPshopping in the mean time will not accept HP's advice, nor will they take back the memory since it is beyond the take-back-date. This case still remains unresolved after three months as they don't quite know what to do.
HP had a solid market share in the printer scanner business, but has since really lost its focus. It has alienated its customers (remember how none of their "older" pocketPCs qualified for ROM upgrades) and is generally languishing in all the problems that plague a poorly managed large company - tons of bureaucracy where where exist tons of redundant small departments, none of whom talk to each other. Janak (from pocketpcthoughts.com) and I often joke that HP, the behemoth of a company, will be gone by the end of the decade, despite the occasional good new products that it creates. I can see why the Board was unhappy with the results of the merger and the results from the CEO and the decision to force her out, I think, is a good one. I wonder what's next for HP.
