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Meg Whitman to Step Down as HPE CEO

(www.wsj.com)
184 points praneshp | 10 comments | 21 Nov 17 21:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.714s | source | bottom
1. rdlecler1 ◴[22 Nov 17 04:12 UTC] No.15754169[source]▶
eBay is a shadow of what it could have been, and so I really can’t compliment her on her tenure there. She was on a rocket ship and took it to the moon instead of to mars. HP on the other hand was as tough as a gig as Yahoo. I don’t know how you turn around a company like that. HP is a zombie company living off of its legacy.
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2. abawany ◴[22 Nov 17 05:25 UTC] No.15754467[source]▶
I was at HP during the Carly years and I would say that between her and Hurd, anything that made HP anywhere close to special was destroyed by indiscriminate financial engineering. During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers.

Our lab, which was one of the best places that I can look back on in my career, had been acquired by HP. Their messing about, sending us various failures as 'senior management' resulted in it draining all of its good people to companies such as Microsoft, Google, and etc. It was a terrible shame. Edit: I guess I was trying to say that HP legacy has been destroyed pretty good by all the mergers, cuts, 'retirements', etc.

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3. cjsuk ◴[22 Nov 17 11:36 UTC] No.15756026[source]▶
HP was going down the pan when they spun off Agilent with their original business. That was the rat leaving the sinking ship.
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4. CamperBob2 ◴[22 Nov 17 12:04 UTC] No.15756139[source]▶
More like the captain breaking out of the brig after a mutiny and stealing a lifeboat.
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5. pjmlp ◴[22 Nov 17 13:05 UTC] No.15756428[source]▶
Which is a good example of how good technology gets destroyed by management.

Watching Modula-3 from the outside, I saw DEC Olivetti being acquired by Compaq, followed by HP buying Compaq.

Nowadays their research results at HP Labs still lives on an HPE server that might eventually be turned off one day, leaving those of us that downloaded the papers as the sole owners of such copies. :(

EDIT: For those that might want to get those papers, search for HP labs, DEC and SRC.

6. mathattack ◴[22 Nov 17 13:30 UTC] No.15756593[source]▶
During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers

This is a hallmark of the Telecom industry where Carly came from. Haven't spent many years there, I knew it was doom for an old tech executive to come to new tech.

7. mathattack ◴[22 Nov 17 13:31 UTC] No.15756599[source]▶
If eBay is doing poorly after her departure, is it really on her?
8. cjsuk ◴[22 Nov 17 14:07 UTC] No.15756839{3}[source]▶
I prefer that story! It leaves me with a picture of Dave and Bill paddling away quickly with a boat full of oscilloscopes (even though this was after their time)
9. zrm ◴[22 Nov 17 16:40 UTC] No.15758165[source]▶
> During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers.

And it's not just the employees they're annoying.

I went to download a BIOS update for an old HP server last week. They wanted a support contract. The thing is ten years old, it's not in production, I'm just using it to test some hard drives.

When did companies forget how easy it is for a customer to scratch them off the vendor list?

10. lacker ◴[22 Nov 17 18:55 UTC] No.15759405[source]▶
Meg Whitman joined eBay when it had 30 employees. Even if it ended up worth tens of billions of dollars instead of hundreds of billions of dollars, I think she really deserves a lot of credit for its success.