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Even when she was CEO, it was widely believed within HP that Fiorina was only there to fluff up her Republican credentials in preparation for a run at higher of

• hugh3 16y ago
  Y'see, this is why I don't like these sorts of discussions. Suppose Fiorina were a Democrat instead of a Republican. Would you be writing the same thing (s/Republican/Democrat/), or would you be defending her? Maybe you would be writing exactly the same thing. Maybe you're a paragon of political detachment. But in the fraught political climate of the day, I the reader am left to suspect that most people's opinions on the matter are severely coloured by whether they personally wish to see a Republican replace a Democrat in next week's California Senate election. This is why I don't think this article is conducive to good discussion and have flagged it.
  • moxiemk1 16y ago
    I'm not sure that the exact same discussion would be had if she were a Democrat, but not because people would be giving her a free pass. The Republican party makes it a major plank to support large business and to support issues that benefit the wealthy/large, while making less-than-indisputable arguments as to why the decisions benefit the rest of the company. Thus, her tenure at a large business is quite relavent to her viability as a Republican candidate, while it's less relavent (though certainly still important) to her viability as a democrat.
    • ahoyhere 16y ago
      I agree. I'm far from considering myself a democrat (I hate both parties pretty much equally), but aren't most of the "experience is totally out of left field" politicians Republican? The Gipper Arnold Schwarzenegger Clint Eastwood Carly Fiorina George W Bush (his main claim before governorship, other than genetic, was running a baseball team) Who else? Sarah Palin - sportscaster Sonny Bono Shirley Temple (yes really - she ran for office, didn't win, but was chosen as a diplomat) On the Democrat side there is… who? Hillary Clinton? But she actually majored in polisci and law, which is a traditional path. Al Franken is odd but he was a political humorist. And he graduated from Harvard with a degree in polisci. In fact, though I looked, the only Democrat I could find who fit the bill was Jerry Springer. Yes, that's Gipper-level weird.
      • protomyth 16y ago
        Ronald Reagan had a long lead-up to running for Governor of CA and eventually President. Sarah Palin did the mayor => governor path that happens a lot. GWB did a lot of behind the scenes work in Bush I's White House which followed a pretty normal political path. Clint Eastwood ran for mayor in a pretty normal fashion. Some of it is Democrat's looking for inexperience or Republican's trying to be seen as "outside the system", but it is a pretty normal path taken by pretty much everyone listed. It matches the Democrats on about an even basis. Look at the actual paths of people and not what the media tells you. For example, The last election had both top spots as Senators with no executive office experience in a lower rung of government. This is generally not good when you know that neither had done a budget cycle from the executive prospective (e.g. mayor, governor). This lack of experience, probably lead to some of the problems seen with the federal budget cycles. // I do believe the same probably would have been true of a McCain admin even with a VP that had been through it as a mayor and governor.
  • gamble 16y ago
    Sorry, but I disliked Fiorina way before it was cool. I would dislike her regardless of party, for the way she destroyed HP culture and turned my friends at Compaq into bitter, insecure husks of human beings. (Those that haven't been fired by now, anyways) The fact that she's actually running for office on that record is just the icing on the cake.
    • metageek 16y ago
      The arsenic on the cake.
  • _delirium 16y ago
    I think in Fiorina's case, the dislike in the tech industry for her trumps political parties, at least on places like HN. It's possible there are people who would suddenly like her if she had run in the Democratic primary instead of the Republican one, but I don't think such people would be very numerous in silicon valley.
  • Tangurena 16y ago
    I worked for HP when she was the CEO. I hated her then, and will hate her to my dieing breath. It doesn't matter if she calls herself the "free beer and pot for everyone" party candidate, I would stil hate her. I could post a Great Wall of Text(tm)(r) explaining why she was a rotten CEO, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as polite as the linked article. Finally, I have never met a person who worked at HP who actually liked what she did to the company. I'm sure there are some, but at the facility I worked at (in Colorado Springs), there were none that I met.
    • gaius 16y ago
      I said back in the day HP should have hired Catherine Keener just to play the CEO, and I was right.
  • yummyfajitas 16y ago
    I dunno about anyone else, but I was anti-Fiorina way back when she was advising McCain. At the time, I supported McCain due to his position on torture [1], but having Fiorina as an adviser certainly made me think he would be less than effective. [1] The other candidates on my radar at that time (Hillary, Rudy) were pro torture, McCain was against. Sad to say torture has become an electoral issue.
    • MichaelSalib 16y ago
      McCain did not oppose torture; he opposed the uniformed military engaging in torture. He was fine with CIA officers torturing people in military facilities assisted by military officers. See http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/02/senator-mccain-is-against-torture-but.html http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/02/senator-mccain-is-against... for more information.
      • yummyfajitas 16y ago
        The article you quote does not agree with the content of your post. McCain's quoted statement claims that the Military Commissions Act (supported by McCain) already requires the CIA to treat prisoners humanely and forbids torture. Regardless, this is way off topic.
  • Dove 16y ago
    Well, I don't like these sorts of "what if the shoe were on the other foot?" comments. A person's motives for writing both unknowable and immaterial, and I find speculation on the matter annoying. If someone makes a good case, they make a good case. I don't care if the devil himself told them to make it.
  • anigbrowl 16y ago
    Well, Fiorina-bashing was a sport in the Bay Area long before she stepped into the political ring. Maybe a better question would be what if the Republicans had run a different candidate with a track record of success in business? As it happens, they have, but there hasn't been much in the way of discussion on HN about Meg Whitman (and I'm not inviting anyone to start one, btw).
  • phlux 16y ago
    "EPIC FAILURE" -- Does it matter what side of the fail table she sat on?
  • davidw 16y ago
    I agree completely. This site should be about hacking and startups, not about politics.
• kablamo 16y ago
  HP was a tech industry icon? This is a genuine question. Everyone here seems to have fond memories of HP. I thought HP was a big boring company that made good printers and some decent polish notation graphing calculators and a few crappy PCs. I've never wanted to buy anything from them in the last ... 15 years. Its never struck me as interesting -- especially from the point of view of a software developer interested in startups.
  • gamble 16y ago
    HP may be a shell of its former self these days, but they were the prototype for Silicon Valley. Hewlett and Packard were a couple of bright engineers who parlayed a clever oscillator circuit built in a garage in Palo Alto into a billion-dollar company. They made the tools almost every engineer used. Thanks to their reputation for technical excellence and respect for their employees, HP was a dream job for many engineers. (Most famously, Steve Wozniak) The best analogy I can think of is that they were the Google of their day. Unfortunately, being a mature company with unsexy product lines like scientific instruments wasn't popular with investors in the late '90s and the bean counters and MBA types were given free reign to strip and gut HP so that now it's little more than a marketing division for cheap, Chinese-made crap with funky bezels.
    • CamperBob 16y ago
      It's not much of an exaggeration to say that Hewlett and Packard were the Romulus and Remus of their day. They didn't build a company, they built an idea.
  • CamperBob 16y ago
    You need to read a book called Bill & Dave ( http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/1591841526 http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/... ). Seriously. Everything good about Silicon Valley is owed to that company, and to its founders. It's impossible to place Fiorina's actions in any sort of context until one understands that.
  • Dbug 16y ago
    I'd suggest you do some reading, there's a serious hole in your knowledge of HP. The HP history and culture that people admire has nothing to do with PCs or printers, and predates those going back many decades. (Does anyone know of a museum or collector that might be interested in my HP 300A Harmonic Wave Analyzer? I think that was their second product, a very impressive one for the early 40's... It's still useful) HP has a long history of very sophisticated electronic test equipment. A great deal of innovation and hard work went into development of that equipment, including many things that hadn't been done before. Many other tech companies used HP (and Tektronix) gear when developing their products. Aside from the many tech contributions, their corporate culture was certainly one to admire. HP was better known to engineers than consumers, but they did do some things that crossed over. The HP-35 hand-held scientific calculator was the first product of it's type I ever saw (and owned too...), certainly seeming worth the $400 one cost back in the day (around 1972). HP was constantly pushing the state of the art. HP wasn't merely successful, they were special. I was sorry that the HP/Compaq computing combination got the HP name. I wish that had stayed with the real tech products, but in Agilent tech lives on. HP certainly stands out from an era when the U.S. really shined as an engineering and manufacturing leader. HP wasn't another Dell or Gateway. There are (and were) tech companies with a past that goes way back. For instance most think of Motorola as a cell phone company. They were huge in semiconductors (some of that lives on in Freescale), but how many remember them as being the ones behind the first car radio or first under $200 television set, or making communications gear that went to the moon? In comparison, I find it a little sad to see highly valued companies like Facebook that don't really seem to produce anything. If it had never come into being, would we have really missed much that mattered?