Anyone familiar with the ins and outs of technology undoubtedly has caught a glimpse of the tragedy of HP and continued debacles of the board of directors.
The most recent was Leo Apothecker, whose poor communication regarding the personal computer division had cause the company to loose over $12 billion on stock value. He also killed the Palm division and the WebOS tablet, which was a great product. His decisions make sense from purely a financial perspective, but not from a leader that should be more well rounded that can understand technology and the market.
HP’s board of executives brought in the infamous Meg Whitman, said to be an apostle of “darkness and ignorance” and “intellectually embarrassing” and “so banal” by Jerry Brown during her campaign for governor. Her ethics seem rather spotty and she comes off brash and abrasive in the public’s view according to InfoWorld. Her experience with acquisitions was purchasing Skype and then selling it off at a loss of $2.75 billion. At FTD (Florists Transworld Delivery) famous for 1-800-FLOWERS, she was brought on board to fix it, but walked away saying hat the “company was not fixable“. There’s an intriguing story about Meg’s tenure at FTD: Meg Whitman’s FTD Tenure Tells A Different Story by Juliet Willams.
There are some, like Professor David Hsu at Wharton, according to a Knowledge Today article, that think Whitman is a good fit to “out-IBM IBM or out-Oracle Oracle in the business services or enterprise software spaces” even though HP does not have a homegrown database solution they are positioning.
With these events and combined prior destruction of HP, I don’t expect them to be around for too long, for the writing is on the wall. Thus, I have to say Goodbye HP. And goodbye to prior companies it has absorbed: Palm, Compaq, Tandem, and Digital Equipment Corporations. Those companies brought significant solutions and products to the market that forever changed the industry, but never adapted their offerings with the times under HP’s umbrella.
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