14 ms·

Meg Whitman to Step Down as HPE CEO

184 points by praneshp 9y ago

pcl 9y ago
Non-paywalled: http://archive.is/jyavW http://archive.is/jyavW
- m-p-3 9y ago
  I use this as a bookmarklet to bypass some paywalls javascript:window.location="https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);
  - digital_trench 9y ago
    This is genius. Can you explain how it works?
    - quantumwannabe 9y ago
      Websites don't want to block their articles from being shared on Facebook, so they allow traffic referred by FB through. That link is Facebook's warning to users that a link they clicked on will take them offsite.
      - heisenbit 9y ago
        It is one of the precursors to loosing net-neutrality i.e. a tax on non FB users who pay with their privacy.
rmason 9y ago
If I remember correctly she said at her last HPE earnings call, "I am not going anywhere". She also stated she had much more work to do at HPE. Now that was in response to Uber's courtship but this was so sudden you have to wonder what prompted it?
- briankelly 9y ago
  It's really not all that sudden. HPE appointed Neri as president back in June. From https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/hpe-appoints-first-president-antonio-neri-22-year-hp-veteran/2017/06/ https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/hpe-appoints-first-... : The move positions Neri to become HPE’s next CEO, CRN reports. “This clearly lines up Neri to be the next in line to take the reins of HPE, there is no question about it,” Bob Venero, CEO Future Tech told CRN. “This looks like it is Whitman staying true to her statement that the next CEO of HPE would be born and bred in the HPE family.”
  - shostack 9y ago
    I've always been curious how those sorts of internal conversations go at that level at companies that size. Anyone have any insights to share?
    - randoramax 9y ago
      Read Jack Welch's autobiography, very informative on the subject of internal car and successions
      - alexpotato 9y ago
        I've always been curious about this as well so thanks for the suggestion.
- fullshark 9y ago
  Perhaps CEOs lie to both investors and their employees.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    Kind of. The manager in my team (hpe) hasn't been replaced for a few months after quitting, then the project was killed / people let go. Meanwhile, all the communication from the top was pretty much "this is an important project for us". And that's one of the reasons I'm unlikely to work in a big corp in the future.
adamnemecek 9y ago
I never understood why she ever was.
- ProAm 9y ago
  She was hired as a hatchet man. A role she served well.
  - tormeh 9y ago
    Huh. That's an interesting term. Thanks!
- rsynnott 9y ago
  Well, she’s almost certainly been better than the previous few. There’d probably be nothing left if Apotheker had stayed.
1024core 9y ago
Is she planning to run for Governor again?
- jedberg 9y ago
  More likely Senate. Feinstein is up in 2018 and the tides are turning against her. It would be a tough slog but doable. Oh and she'd have to run as a Democrat. I don't think a Republican could get elected in California in 2018.
  - briholt 9y ago
    The smart move would be to say she's switching parties because of Trump, run as a conservative Democrat left of Trump but right of the progressive wing.
    - komali2 9y ago
      I feel like 2018 is going to boil down to only whether you have an (R) or (D) next to your name, if the election in Alabama is any indication. When people will vote for a pedophile to avoid putting a checkmark next to a (D), that's when you can give up faith in the average citizen's regard for the details of an election.
      - cat199 9y ago
        Alternately: When people will vote to decriminalize child prostitution and felonious sexual activity to avoid putting a checkmark next to a (R), that's when you can give up faith in the average citizen's regard for the details of an election. http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-gov-brown-downgrades-from-felony-to-1507331544-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essentia... https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160SB1322 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... both parties are atrocious, along with anyone who votes along party lines thank you very much... but perhaps that was your point..
himom 9y ago
She was an MBB consultant turned manager turned startup CEO one-hit wonder. Although I do remember seeing the “supercar showroom” parking lot on the west side of Grelands Drive around the corner from where I lived everyday as one bookend of the dot-com era. To her credit she incubated the PayPal mafia and inflicted Teletubbies on America.
- goialoq 9y ago
  You say that like you are insulting her, but to most people in the world, "MBB(?) consultant turned manager turned startup CEO one-hit wonder." would be the best thing that happened to their life. Your description is someone who is very good at running businesses.
  - wutangson1 9y ago
    So, her foray into China with eBay was a case study of 'how-to" or 'how not to' expand into a new market? #CrocodileInTheYangtze
  - ves 9y ago
    MBB meaning McKinsey, Bain, and BCG, the Big Three of consulting.
  - rdlecler1 9y ago
    She may be smart and a great communicator, but eBay was a rocket ship and is a shadow of what it could have been and there was no turn around story at HP. MBB folks are often perceived as the smartest people in the room, but their ability to see around corners and to be an entrepreneur —- that I’m not sure she demonstrated.
jackvalentine 9y ago
It certainly has been interesting being a customer of HPE's software business (now MicroFocus) over the last few years.
CrackingYz 9y ago
Meg Whitman is the person companies hire to help them die.
- dang 9y ago
  This sort of personal attack isn't allowed here because, irrespective of the person at issue, it degrades discussion. We've banned this account.
Cyberdog 9y ago
Is it sad that my first thought at seeing the headline was to assume she was one more person falling on their sword after sexual assault accusations? What a world.
- Tade0 9y ago
  Same here unfortunately.
- tabeth 9y ago
  It really has been amazing to see the momentum building with people speaking out against aggressors. I wonder when critical mass will be reached in terms of when people feel that there's little negative consequence to sharing stories of harassment.
  - topspin 9y ago
    Sorry to be a cynic but the likely next phase will be a spate of false accusations and then a backlash. The so far largely credible victims have been receiving a great deal of well deserved attention, but attention is a profound motivator for some people; certainly enough that they'll make things up. We're in the midst of the storm just now... In the last 48 hours we've seen Charlie Rose implode and Pelosi call for investigations of Conyers. In the last few hours John Lasseter ended up in the spotlight and got LOA-ed out of Disney. It's too early yet, but at some point an accuser will emerge with provably false claims against a popular and sympathetic figure and the worm will turn. It's just the way of things.
    - linkregister 9y ago
      You're leaving out the part of the story where all of the accusers were slammed as liars for years until they were suddenly believed by the general public in the face of overwhelming mass testimony. Only two of the scandals involve recently disclosed assaults. So, maybe it will happen as you say. I predict it won't be widespread. There will likely be another Duke, but it'll be isolated.
    - 9y ago
nickpeterson 9y ago
I would expect HPE to get bought by Oracle or IBM at some point in the next few years.
- codefined 9y ago
  It's already dumped a lot of it's stuff to Micro Focus.
- X86BSD 9y ago
  I don’t know why oracle would want it. Since buying sun the share and recognition of sun hardware is even less than the lowest point since sun owned sun. I haven’t seen a sun box in over a decade. Except eBay. I guess oracle has the cash to just buy it to lessen competition? IBM I thought was focused on power like they always are but never do anything with it. It’s still damn near impossible to find a power 8 vendor. So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them.
  - monocasa 9y ago
    For their sales and support contracts to a very large percentage of medium size businesses.
  - awalton 9y ago
    > I guess oracle has the cash to just buy it to lessen competition? > So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them. These two statements are at complete odds with one another. The only reason Oracle buys anyone is to kill competition against themselves - they are the penultimate 600 pound gorilla in the Enterprise Software space, with eyes on Microsoft's fast approaching taillights. They bought Sun because it was the easiest way to get to MySQL. They wanted to buy MySQL because they thought that they could kill their single largest market competition in the FOSS database world simply by strangleholding it the same way they do with their other database products - fortunately it was protected by the GPL long before they got their hands on it. But the list goes on for as many companies as you can name that Oracle has acquired - Oracle is where tech goes to die, and where tech laborers go to retire. And in some ways, that's okay. It's healthy for the market to have trusted, long term minded players - enterprises love companies like Oracle because they know what to expect. Big price tags, but phone support and a deep ecosystem of people skilled to fix and deploy their junk. It's healthy for employees not to be looking over their shoulders and hoping Wall Street's next sneeze doesn't put them on the bread line. It only becomes unhealthy when Oracle uses its multibillion dollar cash reserves to stomp the life out of a market because it can no longer compete against it. But, all of that said, the argument as to why Oracle might want to pick up HPE is a bit dull, I must admit. Unless they want to go for a complete vertical integration play and make it so you have to also buy their hardware to run their database engines, I can't imagine anything sticking. I also can't imagine that play working without regulators crying Unfair Competition, even with the current state of the DOJ and the constant hum of megamergers being rubberstamped. But HPE is not currently a competitive threat to... anyone? Oracle buying HPE would be a very long winded mercy killing, just like Sun. (obligatory "my words, not my employers, yadda yadda")
justboxing 9y ago
That 51 MILLION $ golden parachute must be really nice. Now she gets to go to a new place and do this all over again. > Whitman would get nearly $91 million if HP gets acquired – more than double her peers – and $51 million if she's forced out (not fired for cause) – again, nearly double. Source: [2015] http://www.businessinsider.com/whitman-gets-51-million-if-hp-axes-her-2015-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/whitman-gets-51-million-if-hp...
- coupdejarnac 9y ago
  It's kind of amazing to me that there would be a bonus tied to being acquired. That would motivate the ceo to not act for the long term benefit of the company.
  - jeffwilcox 9y ago
    Yet common. Stephen Elop (Nokia back to Microsoft) $25m https://news.slashdot.org/story/13/09/19/1834224/nokias-elop-set-to-receive-25-million-bonus-after-acquisition https://news.slashdot.org/story/13/09/19/1834224/nokias-elop...
  - cvsh 9y ago
    Shareholders are more than happy to carve up their company and feast off its remains if they come out ahead financially, and once you go public, they're all that really matters.
- vfulco 9y ago
  The new American Dream. Get to C-suite as quickly as possible, offshore as much as possible. Even if none of your "strategic" read consultancy driven plans work out, ka-ching! F-U money for life.
frik 9y ago
Hewlett-Packard (known for (school/desk) calculators, PC printers, chips and computer) bought Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) (known for server, mini computer) and Compaq (known for desktop and notebook computer). All three companies were in good shape, especially Hewlett-Packard and Compaq (one of two biggest PC&notebook manufacturers). Hewlett-Packard went all downhill in the 2000s onwards with changing CEOs doing greedy decisions and lackluster products and quality. It got worse in 2010s, and the company split to HP and HPE - now it's confusing for customers which company is responsible for what, e.g. HP "ePrint" iOS app (companion app for HP printer) is now owned by HPE and requires an enterprise login, whereas the consumer version got forked by HP and has to be discovered under a different name in AppStore. The network switches, notebook, printer, companion-software, keyboards, server storage, (most got renamed) and worse in every aspect. Yes Meg Whitman and the other CEOs (of both HPE and HP in 2010s) were bad.
- edkennedy 9y ago
  The network switches and storage actually improved through acquisition which replaced their flagging HPE lines. Aruba & Nimble
rdlecler1 9y ago
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.
- abawany 9y ago
  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.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    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.
  - mathattack 9y ago
    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.
  - 9y ago
hkmurakami 9y ago
And so she leaves the company gutted. Painful to see HP in tatters.
cptskippy 9y ago
HP over the last 10 or 15 years has been a complete mess. When Meg came on board she was determined to turn HP into a consumer electronics company, the way Carly had envisioned, so it's ironic that when they split into HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services, she went with the later. It's really a shame what has happened to that company and how all of the parts of HP that made up it's soul were sold off for not being profitable enough. What we have now is just another bunch of Me-Too companies that do shame to the Hewlett-Packard name(s).
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  I've been saying for years that HP is where good products go to die. They've been a mess, as you said, and it's not going to get any better.
iteriteratedone 9y ago
How do you turn around a hardware company, you dont. But it wont die either ... software rises and falls like a deritive stock, but hardwate is like the gold tgat is always good to have a stake in My suggestion would be to become the mysql of hardware, be compatible with everyone, what if an hp could go from pc to mac? We have never had that direction. Impossible you say? That why theres profit , the market doesnt have it yet. (Mac to pc is there) Cheaper hardware , but same env. Make it worth apples wild. Hp seems to have good salesmen and bizz connects. Big contracts are not just about tech.
grondilu 9y ago
I don't know much about her and why she's leaving, but I do remember her from two years ago or something when she announced, with quite a fanfare, "The Machine". I was excited about that, and even bought HP shares as a result. Not long after that, HP stepped down from most of their ambitions with this thing[1] I don't know if that explains Whitman's departure, but I would not be surprised if that was taken into account. 1. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine-repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-mach...
- cbsmith 9y ago
  I dunnoh... even when The Machine was announced, it seemed like vaporware. If she was betting on that thing shipping, she's a bit crazy... and Ms. Whitman isn't crazy.
- hubatrix 9y ago
  https://www.labs.hpe.com/the-machine https://www.labs.hpe.com/the-machine perhaps you should've just waited.
jondubois 9y ago
The quality of HP products appears to have gone downhill. They had a perfect reputation but the last HP Envy laptop I bought about 1 year ago had lots of problems and it kept overheating to the point that I couldn't even touch the underside of it. The fan was quite loud too. After only 7 months, the hard drive failed completely. It had so many obvious problems, it felt like nobody had actually tried using the machine in real life. I don't think I'll buy HP again. I've lost faith in the brand. My current laptop is a Dell and it's a huge improvement.
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  HP is pretty much three brands. Business HP, “Prosumer” HP and Consumer HP. The first too are quite good, the last has never been great. (The Spectre x360 is great, the Envy x360... not so much)
- dreamcompiler 9y ago
  Their printers have been terrible for a long time. Just the driver issues alone are a horror story.
mathattack 9y ago
In the end why was she pushed out? Was it a loss of credibility? Investors were probably happy about splitting the company. Did she lose internal credibility because she said she wasn't interesting in Uber (when she was)?
ahmetyas01 9y ago
Why did it take too long?

184 points by praneshp 9y ago

pcl 9y ago

Non-paywalled: http://archive.is/jyavW http://archive.is/jyavW

m-p-3 9y ago
I use this as a bookmarklet to bypass some paywalls javascript:window.location="https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);
- digital_trench 9y ago
  This is genius. Can you explain how it works?
  - quantumwannabe 9y ago
    Websites don't want to block their articles from being shared on Facebook, so they allow traffic referred by FB through. That link is Facebook's warning to users that a link they clicked on will take them offsite.
    - heisenbit 9y ago
      It is one of the precursors to loosing net-neutrality i.e. a tax on non FB users who pay with their privacy.

rmason 9y ago

If I remember correctly she said at her last HPE earnings call, "I am not going anywhere". She also stated she had much more work to do at HPE. Now that was in response to Uber's courtship but this was so sudden you have to wonder what prompted it?

briankelly 9y ago
It's really not all that sudden. HPE appointed Neri as president back in June. From https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/hpe-appoints-first-president-antonio-neri-22-year-hp-veteran/2017/06/ https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/hpe-appoints-first-... : The move positions Neri to become HPE’s next CEO, CRN reports. “This clearly lines up Neri to be the next in line to take the reins of HPE, there is no question about it,” Bob Venero, CEO Future Tech told CRN. “This looks like it is Whitman staying true to her statement that the next CEO of HPE would be born and bred in the HPE family.”
- shostack 9y ago
  I've always been curious how those sorts of internal conversations go at that level at companies that size. Anyone have any insights to share?
  - randoramax 9y ago
    Read Jack Welch's autobiography, very informative on the subject of internal car and successions
    - alexpotato 9y ago
      I've always been curious about this as well so thanks for the suggestion.
fullshark 9y ago
Perhaps CEOs lie to both investors and their employees.
- viraptor 9y ago
  Kind of. The manager in my team (hpe) hasn't been replaced for a few months after quitting, then the project was killed / people let go. Meanwhile, all the communication from the top was pretty much "this is an important project for us". And that's one of the reasons I'm unlikely to work in a big corp in the future.

adamnemecek 9y ago

I never understood why she ever was.

ProAm 9y ago
She was hired as a hatchet man. A role she served well.
- tormeh 9y ago
  Huh. That's an interesting term. Thanks!
rsynnott 9y ago
Well, she’s almost certainly been better than the previous few. There’d probably be nothing left if Apotheker had stayed.

1024core 9y ago

Is she planning to run for Governor again?

jedberg 9y ago
More likely Senate. Feinstein is up in 2018 and the tides are turning against her. It would be a tough slog but doable. Oh and she'd have to run as a Democrat. I don't think a Republican could get elected in California in 2018.
- briholt 9y ago
  The smart move would be to say she's switching parties because of Trump, run as a conservative Democrat left of Trump but right of the progressive wing.
  - komali2 9y ago
    I feel like 2018 is going to boil down to only whether you have an (R) or (D) next to your name, if the election in Alabama is any indication. When people will vote for a pedophile to avoid putting a checkmark next to a (D), that's when you can give up faith in the average citizen's regard for the details of an election.
    - cat199 9y ago
      Alternately: When people will vote to decriminalize child prostitution and felonious sexual activity to avoid putting a checkmark next to a (R), that's when you can give up faith in the average citizen's regard for the details of an election. http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-gov-brown-downgrades-from-felony-to-1507331544-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essentia... https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160SB1322 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... both parties are atrocious, along with anyone who votes along party lines thank you very much... but perhaps that was your point..

himom 9y ago

She was an MBB consultant turned manager turned startup CEO one-hit wonder. Although I do remember seeing the “supercar showroom” parking lot on the west side of Grelands Drive around the corner from where I lived everyday as one bookend of the dot-com era. To her credit she incubated the PayPal mafia and inflicted Teletubbies on America.

goialoq 9y ago
You say that like you are insulting her, but to most people in the world, "MBB(?) consultant turned manager turned startup CEO one-hit wonder." would be the best thing that happened to their life. Your description is someone who is very good at running businesses.
- wutangson1 9y ago
  So, her foray into China with eBay was a case study of 'how-to" or 'how not to' expand into a new market? #CrocodileInTheYangtze
- ves 9y ago
  MBB meaning McKinsey, Bain, and BCG, the Big Three of consulting.
- rdlecler1 9y ago
  She may be smart and a great communicator, but eBay was a rocket ship and is a shadow of what it could have been and there was no turn around story at HP. MBB folks are often perceived as the smartest people in the room, but their ability to see around corners and to be an entrepreneur —- that I’m not sure she demonstrated.

jackvalentine 9y ago

It certainly has been interesting being a customer of HPE's software business (now MicroFocus) over the last few years.

CrackingYz 9y ago

Meg Whitman is the person companies hire to help them die.

dang 9y ago
This sort of personal attack isn't allowed here because, irrespective of the person at issue, it degrades discussion. We've banned this account.

Cyberdog 9y ago

Is it sad that my first thought at seeing the headline was to assume she was one more person falling on their sword after sexual assault accusations? What a world.

Tade0 9y ago
Same here unfortunately.
tabeth 9y ago
It really has been amazing to see the momentum building with people speaking out against aggressors. I wonder when critical mass will be reached in terms of when people feel that there's little negative consequence to sharing stories of harassment.
- topspin 9y ago
  Sorry to be a cynic but the likely next phase will be a spate of false accusations and then a backlash. The so far largely credible victims have been receiving a great deal of well deserved attention, but attention is a profound motivator for some people; certainly enough that they'll make things up. We're in the midst of the storm just now... In the last 48 hours we've seen Charlie Rose implode and Pelosi call for investigations of Conyers. In the last few hours John Lasseter ended up in the spotlight and got LOA-ed out of Disney. It's too early yet, but at some point an accuser will emerge with provably false claims against a popular and sympathetic figure and the worm will turn. It's just the way of things.
  - linkregister 9y ago
    You're leaving out the part of the story where all of the accusers were slammed as liars for years until they were suddenly believed by the general public in the face of overwhelming mass testimony. Only two of the scandals involve recently disclosed assaults. So, maybe it will happen as you say. I predict it won't be widespread. There will likely be another Duke, but it'll be isolated.
  - 9y ago

nickpeterson 9y ago

I would expect HPE to get bought by Oracle or IBM at some point in the next few years.

codefined 9y ago
It's already dumped a lot of it's stuff to Micro Focus.
X86BSD 9y ago
I don’t know why oracle would want it. Since buying sun the share and recognition of sun hardware is even less than the lowest point since sun owned sun. I haven’t seen a sun box in over a decade. Except eBay. I guess oracle has the cash to just buy it to lessen competition? IBM I thought was focused on power like they always are but never do anything with it. It’s still damn near impossible to find a power 8 vendor. So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them.
- monocasa 9y ago
  For their sales and support contracts to a very large percentage of medium size businesses.
- awalton 9y ago
  > I guess oracle has the cash to just buy it to lessen competition? > So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them. These two statements are at complete odds with one another. The only reason Oracle buys anyone is to kill competition against themselves - they are the penultimate 600 pound gorilla in the Enterprise Software space, with eyes on Microsoft's fast approaching taillights. They bought Sun because it was the easiest way to get to MySQL. They wanted to buy MySQL because they thought that they could kill their single largest market competition in the FOSS database world simply by strangleholding it the same way they do with their other database products - fortunately it was protected by the GPL long before they got their hands on it. But the list goes on for as many companies as you can name that Oracle has acquired - Oracle is where tech goes to die, and where tech laborers go to retire. And in some ways, that's okay. It's healthy for the market to have trusted, long term minded players - enterprises love companies like Oracle because they know what to expect. Big price tags, but phone support and a deep ecosystem of people skilled to fix and deploy their junk. It's healthy for employees not to be looking over their shoulders and hoping Wall Street's next sneeze doesn't put them on the bread line. It only becomes unhealthy when Oracle uses its multibillion dollar cash reserves to stomp the life out of a market because it can no longer compete against it. But, all of that said, the argument as to why Oracle might want to pick up HPE is a bit dull, I must admit. Unless they want to go for a complete vertical integration play and make it so you have to also buy their hardware to run their database engines, I can't imagine anything sticking. I also can't imagine that play working without regulators crying Unfair Competition, even with the current state of the DOJ and the constant hum of megamergers being rubberstamped. But HPE is not currently a competitive threat to... anyone? Oracle buying HPE would be a very long winded mercy killing, just like Sun. (obligatory "my words, not my employers, yadda yadda")

justboxing 9y ago

That 51 MILLION $ golden parachute must be really nice. Now she gets to go to a new place and do this all over again. > Whitman would get nearly $91 million if HP gets acquired – more than double her peers – and $51 million if she's forced out (not fired for cause) – again, nearly double. Source: [2015] http://www.businessinsider.com/whitman-gets-51-million-if-hp-axes-her-2015-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/whitman-gets-51-million-if-hp...

coupdejarnac 9y ago
It's kind of amazing to me that there would be a bonus tied to being acquired. That would motivate the ceo to not act for the long term benefit of the company.
- jeffwilcox 9y ago
  Yet common. Stephen Elop (Nokia back to Microsoft) $25m https://news.slashdot.org/story/13/09/19/1834224/nokias-elop-set-to-receive-25-million-bonus-after-acquisition https://news.slashdot.org/story/13/09/19/1834224/nokias-elop...
- cvsh 9y ago
  Shareholders are more than happy to carve up their company and feast off its remains if they come out ahead financially, and once you go public, they're all that really matters.
vfulco 9y ago
The new American Dream. Get to C-suite as quickly as possible, offshore as much as possible. Even if none of your "strategic" read consultancy driven plans work out, ka-ching! F-U money for life.

frik 9y ago

Hewlett-Packard (known for (school/desk) calculators, PC printers, chips and computer) bought Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) (known for server, mini computer) and Compaq (known for desktop and notebook computer). All three companies were in good shape, especially Hewlett-Packard and Compaq (one of two biggest PC&notebook manufacturers). Hewlett-Packard went all downhill in the 2000s onwards with changing CEOs doing greedy decisions and lackluster products and quality. It got worse in 2010s, and the company split to HP and HPE - now it's confusing for customers which company is responsible for what, e.g. HP "ePrint" iOS app (companion app for HP printer) is now owned by HPE and requires an enterprise login, whereas the consumer version got forked by HP and has to be discovered under a different name in AppStore. The network switches, notebook, printer, companion-software, keyboards, server storage, (most got renamed) and worse in every aspect. Yes Meg Whitman and the other CEOs (of both HPE and HP in 2010s) were bad.

edkennedy 9y ago
The network switches and storage actually improved through acquisition which replaced their flagging HPE lines. Aruba & Nimble

rdlecler1 9y ago

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.

abawany 9y ago
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.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  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.
- mathattack 9y ago
  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.
- 9y ago

hkmurakami 9y ago

And so she leaves the company gutted. Painful to see HP in tatters.

cptskippy 9y ago

HP over the last 10 or 15 years has been a complete mess. When Meg came on board she was determined to turn HP into a consumer electronics company, the way Carly had envisioned, so it's ironic that when they split into HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services, she went with the later. It's really a shame what has happened to that company and how all of the parts of HP that made up it's soul were sold off for not being profitable enough. What we have now is just another bunch of Me-Too companies that do shame to the Hewlett-Packard name(s).

jlgaddis 9y ago
I've been saying for years that HP is where good products go to die. They've been a mess, as you said, and it's not going to get any better.

iteriteratedone 9y ago

How do you turn around a hardware company, you dont. But it wont die either ... software rises and falls like a deritive stock, but hardwate is like the gold tgat is always good to have a stake in My suggestion would be to become the mysql of hardware, be compatible with everyone, what if an hp could go from pc to mac? We have never had that direction. Impossible you say? That why theres profit , the market doesnt have it yet. (Mac to pc is there) Cheaper hardware , but same env. Make it worth apples wild. Hp seems to have good salesmen and bizz connects. Big contracts are not just about tech.

grondilu 9y ago

I don't know much about her and why she's leaving, but I do remember her from two years ago or something when she announced, with quite a fanfare, "The Machine". I was excited about that, and even bought HP shares as a result. Not long after that, HP stepped down from most of their ambitions with this thing[1] I don't know if that explains Whitman's departure, but I would not be surprised if that was taken into account. 1. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine-repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-mach...

cbsmith 9y ago
I dunnoh... even when The Machine was announced, it seemed like vaporware. If she was betting on that thing shipping, she's a bit crazy... and Ms. Whitman isn't crazy.
hubatrix 9y ago
https://www.labs.hpe.com/the-machine https://www.labs.hpe.com/the-machine perhaps you should've just waited.

jondubois 9y ago

The quality of HP products appears to have gone downhill. They had a perfect reputation but the last HP Envy laptop I bought about 1 year ago had lots of problems and it kept overheating to the point that I couldn't even touch the underside of it. The fan was quite loud too. After only 7 months, the hard drive failed completely. It had so many obvious problems, it felt like nobody had actually tried using the machine in real life. I don't think I'll buy HP again. I've lost faith in the brand. My current laptop is a Dell and it's a huge improvement.

BoorishBears 9y ago
HP is pretty much three brands. Business HP, “Prosumer” HP and Consumer HP. The first too are quite good, the last has never been great. (The Spectre x360 is great, the Envy x360... not so much)
dreamcompiler 9y ago
Their printers have been terrible for a long time. Just the driver issues alone are a horror story.

mathattack 9y ago

In the end why was she pushed out? Was it a loss of credibility? Investors were probably happy about splitting the company. Did she lose internal credibility because she said she wasn't interesting in Uber (when she was)?

ahmetyas01 9y ago

Why did it take too long?