Ding dong the witch is dead!
 

Ok, not dead, but gone! Nice parachute she put together for herself though - $21M not counting stock options.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/02/09/technology/hp_fiorina/index.htm?cnn=yes

Maybe now she'll have enough money to get a different hair stylist

I'd do her (if I was single!)

I was all for Carly until the Compaq merger. Didn't she know about the DEC curse? At the time, I was hoping that Walter would kill the deal. I was sad when he gave in.

The severance packages that bad executives get make me sick. Michael Ovitz comes to mind... I mean, I could have done 14 months of a horrible job at Disney. Where's my 120 million?

I'm so glad I work for a privately held firm...

Had a roomate in Boston, guy was working on his doc at Sloan (he is now a prof at Chapel Hill NC), his paper dis was on the new product development model at DEC - typucal tech flaw, they design according to the engineers whims and pay little or no attention to what the customer really wants/needs or can apply. They aren't cursed, just arrogant and narrow minded.

I was kind of tongue-in-cheek about a curse. When Compaq took over DEC, it tanked. Same thing appears to have happened now with HP. I agree with you 100% LubeMaster77. The Alpha processor seemed to be designed to brag about how advanced it was, not to actually run any software.

I am of the opinion that most big mergers are a bad idea. They limit consumer choices; they make big and innefficient companies even bigger and more innefficient. The justification that a company needs to be bigger to compete is total BS...it's having a good product that matters. True, some smaller companies get shut out by predatory practices of bigger competitors, but I think that mergers of smaller and mid-size companies is generally okay. I think the types of mergers we've seen in aircraft production, airlines, telecoms, banking, cable, and oil (to name a few) have helped no one. They've provided some short-term hype and long-term problems.

This condition is know as "Marketing Myopia". There is a classic article about this written by Theodore Levitt in early 60's I believe. Standard litterature for most bussines students ;)

Anyone who thinks that buying Compaq is a "good idea" has to be mentally challenged! HP used to make great printers, under Carly's leadership, they moved away from printers and that's their biggest mistake.

HP isn't so much a printer company as it is an ink company. While I don't have the exact numbers, the margins on that stuff is obscene. For a while, it was cheaper to buy a new printer on sale than to buy in for your old one; HP wised up to that and started selling printers with 1/2 empty (or 1/2 full, or with 50% excess capacity) 'starter' cartridges. All the effort they've put into making the cartridges non-refillable and non-copyable makes the Dept of Homeland Security look like a bunch of Cub Scouts out trying to get their knot-tying badges.

Friend of CB...
I've been assimilated twice.
DEC's curse wasn't so much hubris of the engineers. All engineers suffer from that! It was hubris o fthe managementent who believed, if you build it they will come.

Management that dismissed the PC. Management that had not killer instinct. DEC couldn't sell cool stuff because it didn't have commisioned sales folks. DEC couldn't sell AC in Saudi Arabia!

Software engineering struggled to move into the "windows" paradigm and was not sucessful. The joke was that any windows app prefaced by DEC like DECwrite or DECcalc sucked!

On the other hand, DEC made some the best engineered products hands down. The hardware was bullet proof. The enterpise software like the databases, operating system, networking, management and other infrastructure elements were, and in some cases like VMS still are the best in the world. A fe years ago, VMS showed up at DEFcon and was declared unhackable!

Don't believe the marketing crap you read everywhere. The people who use these products to move billions of dollars a minute like banks and the stock markets, or run air traffic control systems or manufacture Intel chips know that if the computer goes down, the business goes down don't use Unix, AIX, HPUX, LINUX, Windows Server... they use VMS.

I actually predicted that the Alpha chip would be the Omega of DEC... and it was. Too expensive to manufacture. Too hard to sell for a braindead directionless marketing organization.

But do not say that "The Alpha processor seemed to be designed to brag about how advanced it was, not to actually run any software." World record database benchmarks were set on the alphachip. Last year Tru64 UNIX on a 16 cpu marvel smoked a SUPERDOME running HPUX. That was not a politically correct outcome because HP didn't want to sell Tru64 over HPUX.

Carly was clueless in Cupertino!

We have a saying in HP. Pick the worst possible way of doing something. Dismantle the infrastructure and replace it. Now everyone suffers. "Thats the HP way." I kid you not.

The idiot believed that she could defy the odds. Only 1 out of something like 22 such mergers succeeded and that was some banking institution. Now its 1 out of 23. Freakin idiot didn't listen to anyone with an ounce of common sence. She screwed up big time and gets punished with a 21 million dollar paycheck. Now that's OBSCENITY!

- mark

Thanks for the intel - I shall assimiliate into my understand. I am a beleiver that companies hit a critical mass at which point their survival is curious but some actaully seem to make money in spite of themselves. GE is another great example of this. I think the only good example of how a big company can do the right things is WL Gore, Nike maybe, any others?

Was hoping with this title that Hilary had collapsed and not gotten up this time... oh well, we can all pray.

JoeA

Thank you for the education! Up until this point, my information was mostly 6th or 7th hand. I'm always glad to get the "real story".

At least she backed off from buying the PWC consulting group at a hugely inflated price (those PWC partners were real disappointed). It was scary,though, that is was even under serious consideration!

What has Eisner done for Share Holders in the past 5 years....Nada, Zero.......and he still gets paid...he should pay Disney instead.....for his incompetence.

Ran into a corporate flight crew in Bermuda recently. Turned out it was Disney's private Boeing 737. Chatted with them about Eisner and how Roy and friends felt about the idiot. Eisner will get his in the end... Karma will bite him in the buns when he least expects it.

JoeA

Maybe, maybe not, karma is a funny thing. I would wager a bet that I (and a few of you guys) could run one of these companies and make serious profits - I would do it gratas for the first year and every year after that only expect the compensation that was 10% of the gross profit increase that happened. 25 Mil for being a jackass! What a country...

That's wierd, my heart skipped a beat when I saw that, also thinking(hoping) the same thing:D