Whitman Expected to Get HP CEO Nod After Markets Close

http://allthingsd.com/20110922/exclusive-whitman-expected-to-get-ceo-nod-after-markets-close-and-not-for-the-interim-either/

by charlief • 15 years ago

37 48 15 years ago

allthingsd.com

privacyguru• 15 years ago

I have much respect for Meg Whitman, but she is not an ideal pick for HP. Her experience is with consumer companies -- eBay, P&G, Disney...Especially if HP spins off its PC business, that leaves the company as essentially a pure enterprise hardware/software play. Don't do it HP.

notatoad• 15 years ago

is the Autonomy acquisition finalized yet? it seems like maybe this is a signal that HP will attempt to refocus on its consumer products?

bane2• 15 years ago

So wait, is Apotheker out yet or not?

Either way, what a waste of time his entire tenure has been.

raganwald• 15 years ago

  what a waste of time his entire tenure has been

The stock has gone down 47%, and he will walk away with approximately thirty million dollars. “Waste of time” doesn’t quite capture my thoughts about his tenure.

http://allthingsd.com/20110921/what-will-leo-apotheker-walk-...

Raphael• 15 years ago

Colossal failure?

ahi• 15 years ago

The HP board is less organized than my local kickball league.

SurfScore2• 15 years ago

There was an article I read about this yesterday on one of the big tech websites, I'm not sure which one. HP basically hired a guy that was good at something, and operated in a certain way, and now that he's doing it, they're firing him. Granted, not everything has been well-executed, but come on, its like buying a motorcycle and then returning it because it isn't air-conditioned.

icefox• 15 years ago

Really have to ponder why Whitman would take this job given the probability of being fired next year no matter what happens...

suking2• 15 years ago

Leo is making $35mm+...

jm42• 15 years ago

Are you a football fan? The CEO job at HP right now is pretty much like the head coach job with the Oakland Raiders. It's a completely dysfunctional organization. If you succeed you're the genius that was able to turn it around. If you don't then Al Davis takes the blame and you get a free pass. You get paid either way. And you have to remember there are only 32 head coaching jobs available so it's great work if you can't get the same job with another team.

Being CEO of one of the world's largest companies is a similarly exclusive club. Who wouldn't take that job?

jm42• 15 years ago

Exactly. But we should wait and see how this plays out. Maybe they realized that strategy was a mistake to begin with and are trying to correct it. He hasn't necessarily been turned into a scapegoat yet.

bane2• 15 years ago

It's almost too late at this point isn't it? Their mobile/tablet divisions are dead, PC business is on the way out, billions down the toilet for Autonomy. Whoever takes over is basically either going to have to continue to play this crappy hand or blow billions more to turn it into something else/reverse this course.

eweise• 15 years ago

Yea, exactly, they should have just bought this http://entrosys.com/

axusgrad• 15 years ago

I'm sure she will do for HP's reputation what she did for PayPal, and build value like she did with Skype.

untog• 15 years ago

Good grief. This reflects far worse on the board than anyone else- they hired the wrong guy, and then fired him when he did the things he said he would do.

Uhhrrr• 15 years ago

Well - once they've gone down the wrong path, realizing it and making a correction should reflect better on them (although it still shows poor predictive skills IMHO).

ScottBurson• 15 years ago

During Whitman's gubernatorial campaign there was a great quote on SFGate, something like: "Meg Whitman is the only force in the universe that could compel me to vote for Jerry Brown." I felt the same way, pretty much.

I don't know much about her work at eBay, but the distant, autocratic way she ran her campaign -- she didn't get out and talk to people, she just stayed in her castle and put out ads -- strikes me as the antithesis of the management style needed by a company in crisis.

elq2• 15 years ago

I once got a chance to talk to Meg when I worked at eBay. After the, very brief, interaction I dubbed her "Queen Margaret" as the look on her face suggested that rabble like me shouldn't be seen, at least by the aristocracy.

Also, across the street from the eBay HQ in Campbell there was a restaurant that had failed and Hooters wanted to open a location in it's place. Meg fought Hooters for nearly two years.

Good luck HP, you're going to need it.

cynest• 15 years ago

I had a similar experience when she visited my AP econ class shortly after declaring her candidacy. She displayed a mixture of being obviously uninformed and having contempt for her audience.

parfe• 15 years ago

Whitman spent $144 million of her own money campaigning.

She is the type of person that feels $144 million in TV Ads is enough to buy public support rather than $100 million in charity and non profit work to build an image. I don't imagine her leadership of HP to be any different.

I expect her attitude to be "We can buy customers" rather than "We can earn respect and attract customers."

earl• 15 years ago

Meg Whitman is, as far as I can tell, an incompetent moron.

Examine the skype acquisition: the way I understand, Meg/ebay acquired skype without buying the backing technology / p2p tech which remained owned by Joltid / Niklas / Janus. Ebay then went on to not pay some of the earnouts of the skype acquisition which I'm sure made Niklas / Janus think highly of ebay [1]. It literally boggles the mind that she could be stupid enough to acquire a company without owning the backing tech; it would be like a company buying an OS that came without ownership of the kernel. Niklas / Janus then used this to earn a bunch more money when ebay went on to sell skype.

For some background: http://gigaom.com/2009/09/01/ebay-skype-sale/

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2007/10/01/skype-ceo-zennstrom-steps-d...

mikeryan• 15 years ago

This strikes me as a hire very much in the same vein as Bartz at Yahoo. Successful with on particular type of tech company doesn't mean success with another. (Apotheker being a similar example).

Whitman could be very competent and turn things around, she sends likely a good message to wall street. But if I were the king of HP I'd be looking for someone who's got way more domain experience.

sp332• 15 years ago

My favorite quote in this conversation so far: "[Ms. Whitman] is bit of a lightning rod in Silicon Valley, where founders are allowed to have outsize personalities but mere managers are not." https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/technology/idea-of-whitma...

pessimist2• 15 years ago

The really disgusting part is that these CEO's have absolutely nothing to lose. If Meg Whitman gets this job she is basically guaranteed 10's of millions of dollars - whether or not she ruins the company. Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, Leo Apotheker and the ex-Compaq CEO (Capellas?) all walked away with 20+ million dollars. And for what?

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard - not to mention Steve Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg etc. - earned their billions with brilliant and gutsy decision making, while these parasites earned their money by being better schmoozers than their business school classmates.

thematt• 15 years ago

I agree completely, which is why I don't own HP stock. From my perspective it shouldn't really bother me unless I'm an HP shareholder and it's my money they're playing with. If the company wants to waste tens of millions cycling through a new CEO every year or two -- so be it. It'll be that much easier for a competitor to eat their lunch. If the shareholders cared enough they would throw out the board of directors.

cynicalkane2• 15 years ago

Imagine if you worked for BigCo, and one day your boss says to you, "You're fired... and we're also taking back your stock options and severance pay."

Because that's what you're proposing doing to a CEO. Yeah, they're rich and proportionally more of their pay is comprised of non-salary items. Oh well. Yeah, you don't like what HP executive management did to the company. I agree, it sucks. But in the real world, people negotiate trading work for pay, and you can't just yank it back because you didn't like the work.

(Unless you negotiate some provision to do so, which some companies do. But not HP.)

pessimist2• 15 years ago

Well, if I get fired, my unvested stock options certainly dont suddenly vest. And I dont get any severance pay. So yes, I propose that CEO's get exactly that treatment.

chollida1• 15 years ago

The theory is, and I"m not necessarily a believer in it, that if you take a CEO job, it's often the last job you ever take.

CEO's like sports coaches are hired to be fired. It's really rare for a CEO to leave on their own terms.

We like to think of CEO's going from one company to another, but in truth once you've been a CEO and fired you don't often get that chance again.

The large severance pay is supposed to reflect the "fact" that you probably won't get a job like this again.

sudonim• 15 years ago

When I read the headline, I was hoping for another Whitman. Alas, it was the one I feared. Meg Whitman has never struck me as a visionary CEO who can fix a broken company. It seems like if this goes through, HP will be relegated to a slow death. Whitman will get out with a golden parachute and HP will be on to the next person who will suck some blubber out of a dying whale. Am I too cynical?

mdanger• 15 years ago

Cringley's article from February: http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/why-leo-apotheker-will-be-fi...

protomyth• 15 years ago

Normally I like hires within, but hiring a board member is just trouble. Particularly one who has been around for the total collapse of the stock. Apple had a natural and trained successor in-house and was running smoothly, HP needs a product guy who can articulate a new HP way.

Ms. Whitman is just the wrong person. Heck, I am not fond about his time at Apple or Be, but Jean-Louis Gassée (if he has learned price does matter) would be a better choice from the product side. He would need a strong CFO and COO to make it work. Not ideal but better.

rbanffy• 15 years ago

The most depressing part? "He will be fired, of course, with a nice, big (and appalling, considering the 47 drop in HP stock in his tensure) severance package as a goodbye-on-your-way out."

A-K• 15 years ago

So effectively Apotheker was brought in, trashed Palm, spun off the PC division, and now is getting the boot? The suggestion that HP replace the entirety of its upper management, Apple-circa-1996-style, is becoming more and more credible.

abrowne• 15 years ago

He wasn't even that successful. He only got to the point of "maybe we should spin off the PC division, or do something else with it" without actually announcing (or maybe even having!) a plan to do so.

DevX101• 15 years ago

Am I the only one noticing some latent sexism in some of these comments?

I view Whitman's role with Ebay as comparable to Eric Schmidt and Google. Both joined about 2 years about their respective companies were founded and made them #1 in each of their target sectors.

I don't think anyone here would seriously question that Eric Schmidt could run HP (not that he'd want to).

But reading through these comments, I'm getting the impression people think she's unqualified to run HP, even with her impressive track record and having been on the board of HP to understand what's actually happening there.

So is it me, or am I reading to much into this?

benmccann• 15 years ago

Simply because someone thinks that one particular woman might not be great at one particular job does not make them a sexist. Also, I don't think success at Ebay and Google are exactly comparable. Ebay is a dual-sided market. Once they became dominant it'd be very hard to unseat them. In this environment it's very possible Ebay was able to succeed in spite of Meg Whitman not because of her. She made some very good moves like acquiring PayPal and some very bad moves like acquiring Skype. I don't have much of an opinion on how Meg Whitman would do in the role, but I think HP's board royally screwed up and will not make the job easier. They hired Apotheker, approved of his acquisitions, and never gave his strategy a chance to work before deciding to fire the guy. HP's board needs to be replaced.

99992• 15 years ago

People think she's unqualified to run HP precisely because of her track record. During her tenure at eBay she made many terrible decisions that did long lasting damage and ultimately weakened the company. Furthermore, she suffocated any innovation within the company. HP was once a true engineer's company, it had the reputation of being one of the best places to work as an engineer, hands down. The board of HP needs to hire someone that can rekindle that spirit, and Meg Whitman inspires nothing but loathing in a huge swath of the population. Her gender has nothing to do with it.

itships• 15 years ago

Back when I was doing e-commerce, a large percentage of my revenue was on eBay from '05-'09. I didn't realize how stagnant the platform was until John Donahoe replaced Whitman and finally changes were made to increase safety for buyers and differentiate sellers in the marketplace. I don't think ebay would have lost so much 3rd-party seller market share to Amazon if Whitman had been proactive.

I don't know what the HP board is hoping for by hiring Whitman as CEO, but if it's anything other than "steady as she goes," then I think they are making a bad choice.

r00fus2• 15 years ago

God help those poor souls still stuck at HP. The gubernatorial campaign exposed all sorts of character flaws and showed that Whitman has a complete lack of empathy for people who work for her.

99992• 15 years ago

I really hoped her disastrous run for governor of CA would be the last thing the public ever heard from her. Her hilariously stupid decisions during the acquisition of Skype made me think she would have very little future after eBay. It boggles my mind that the HP board would even briefly consider her... What HP really needs is a new board and a new CEO...

r00fus2• 15 years ago

Worst tech BoD ever: HP or Yahoo? I'm thinking this pushes HP over the line.

maxharris• 15 years ago

Does this mean they'll bring back the TouchPad? Is it even possible, given the people they just laid off from that team?

thought_alarm• 15 years ago

Killing WebOS and undoing the Palm acquisition was the best thing Apotheker did for HP.

WebOS features some impressive application design on top of a turkey of an OS. HP shouldn't have tried to ship any of that junk.

lobster45• 15 years ago

HP should buy Yahoo and then both companies can spiral down until their stock is low enough to be picked up by AOL

Whitman Expected to Get HP CEO Nod After Markets Close

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