On Wednesday, April 15, 2015 at 10:11:26 PM UTC-4, rbowman wrote:
On 04/15/2015 12:40 PM, Oren wrote:
Something reminds me of Compaq computers, about the time she showed
up? I do agree with Carly. If she debated Clinton, she "would put a
kink in her swing".

It was controversial when she bought Compaq. Eventually HP regrouped
with the ProLiant server line that was originally Compaq's and made
Compaq their consumer line. There's not a lot of margin in commodity
computers. For instance IBM sold their line to Lenovo.

Meanwhile as they were shooting it out, Dell ate their lunch. HP
survived but it certainly wasn't because of Fiorina.

She's on many lists of the worst tech CEOs in history.
HP stock value was cut in half during her 6 year reign.
And even today, I think most of their profit is from their
other lines of business, ie printers. Her buying up Compaq
made no sense to me. In essence she doubled down on the
part of their business that was least successful by buying
Compaq that was itself struggling with problems, running out
of money, at the time. And prior to that Compaq had bought
DEC, which was failing, in a similar strategy that also
didn't work.