Someone Has Domain for Carly Fiorina’s Name and Is Pretty Upset with Her Layoffs

http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/04/someone-has-a-domain-for-carly-fiorinas-name-and-is-pretty-upset-with-her-layoffs-while-at-hp/

by Errorcod3 • 11 years ago

65 41 11 years ago

techcrunch.com

maxmcd• 11 years ago

"bonus page" -> http://carlyfiorina.org/bonus-page.html

Some pretty clean and concise static markup for your typical internet smear site.

swalsh• 11 years ago

I noticed that too, I wanted to see if he had marked-uped 30k unsmiles or if it was a script that printed them.

caiusdurling• 11 years ago

Credit link to the original sheep in CSS too.

marvel_boy• 11 years ago

Well done ! A simple and efective landing page: http://carlyfiorina.org

Still scrolling...

teamhappy2• 11 years ago

I can't wrap my head around the fact that I actually believe this is a reasonable way to visualize the data.

rev_bird• 11 years ago

I've been pondering this for a little while -- I agree with you, and I think it's because the point being conveyed isn't the data, but the scale.

belorn• 11 years ago

So someone bought a sign with the name "carlyfiorina" on it and is trying to gather opinion against that person. This is apparently a failure.

The root domain contains 810 top-level domains, which in theory means 810 possible places where one could register a carlyfiorina.sometld. no mater how aggressive a person is trying to own that specific 12 letter word, its a futile attempt, especially if we also include the 1-2 letter sub domains of tld's. As such, not registering this name is as big failure as not buying up all the signs that exist in stores.

diminoten• 11 years ago

.org is a pretty big sign, though.

quotha• 11 years ago

Buy a similar domain: carlyfiorina.info carlyfiorina.biz carlyfiorinagroup.com carlyfiorinaonline.com carlyfiorinashop.com mycarlyfiorina.com carly-fiorina.net carly-fiorina.org

DominikR2• 11 years ago

It is probably the unpopular position but I'd like to point out that it is sometimes needed to lay off employees because otherwise a company wont survive.

Sometimes this must be done rather quick.

I don't know the exact reasons why she had to lay off 30.000 employees but it would look less like a public smearing if the creator of this page gave us some insight into the details and nature of her decision.

I just doubt that she is plain evil and laughing at the pain she has caused with this decision.

Kurtz79• 11 years ago

It is unpopular because the average employee being laid off will have had much less influence than a CEO on the reasons that ultimately led to the (necessary) measure, but he/she will be the one facing the consequences.

The worst that can happen to unsuccessful CEOs is being replaced (IF the situation does not improve after the layoffs) while netting a generous severance pay.

I agree that rationally such backlash it's unreasonable, but humans are not rational beings, especially when perceiving something as unfair.

disposition2• 11 years ago

The worst that can happen to unsuccessful CEOs is being replaced (IF the situation does not improve after the layoffs) while netting a generous severance pay.

And then run for office touting your hugely successful time as CEO, just make sure you have enough money to run enough ads to support this claim rather than the realities that are your failures.

smitherfield• 11 years ago

I agree that sometimes it is necessary to lay off employees for the good of the company. But Fiorina is widely considered to have been a complete incompetent as CEO, of which the layoffs were a symptom, and she was fired by the board of directors. That's enough for me to consider her with extreme skepticism. I must also say that I'm not impressed with business school-grad tech executives who don't know anything about coding or hardware, especially if they're also proven incompetents.

trcollinson2• 11 years ago

It's a bit hard to answer this on mobile and get all of the links in, but there was quite a bit of controversy around these lay offs. The first was that she ordered the layoffs but reopened the same number of jobs in foreign countries, and in many cases more jobs. The work force of HP actually grew significantly over her tenure, just with cheaper foreign labor.

This is in contrast to Meg Whitman who, during my personal tenure at HP, laid off far more employees than Carly. Meg though did not try to add back head count in a cheaper way. She was just reducing the work force, which was needed. When I started HP had 360,000 employees, post Carly. (Disclosure: I was laid off from HP during a Whitman lay off).

The other thing which made Carly's lay off controversial was that they changed HPs technical ecosystem pretty significantly. For most of HPs history they had been giving employees significant amounts of equity in the company. When Carly came in there were high ranking technologist with quite a bit of voting ability due to their stock holdings. This put a real cramp on the executives ability to make decisions without those pesky engineers using logic to ruin it. When she first came in, for example, she couldn't get board approval to lay people off.

To solve the problem Carly did two things. First she diluted the value of the existing stock by merging with compaq. After that the existing power that the engineers held was diluted enough that she could make the decisions she wanted without as much problem.

This is where the quote having to do with laying people off quicker comes from. She really had to work for those lay offs by restructuring a company first. Another often heard comment from her was that a business as big as HP should never be run or managed by engineers... We have MBAs for that.

She was not well liked.

mhomde2• 11 years ago

Should companies be run or managed by engineers? I'm not sure that's actually a good idea as much as I'm not overly fond of MBA types either.

I think it's a faulty generalization either way, companies should be run by competent passionate people.

DominikR2• 11 years ago

Thanks for this insight, I absolutely agree that diluting the value of stock was a bad move by her.

Regarding the first point you made I'm somehow split. The mere act of laying off employees to hire more cheap labor in other countries can in some cases make sense from a business perspective.

How you feel about that comes down to the personal value system you have. I think most people would agree that one important task of any business is to benefit the community. (by paying wages, taxes or creating cheaper services and products)

The question here is how much benefit to the community is enough. From a purely legal perspective paying taxes and obeying all laws is sufficient.

One might also argue that she created jobs oversees where now other communities benefit.

For me personally it was wrong to do what she did, as long as it wasn't necessary for the survival of the company, but I also recognise that I can't demand from any business to follow my personal value system in addition to the laws we have.

jroseattle• 11 years ago

Fiorina is known for leading the acquisition of Compaq Corp. in 2001 in the largest tech merger in history. In doing so, she would show cost savings by layoffs of a certain chunk of employees. "Cost synergies" was the label. I think the expected number at the time was around 10k. http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=23061...

In the next 4 years, Fiorina would sell off the printing business (which had higher margins) and double-down on the PC business (with lower margins.) Timing as it was, the dot-com bubble burst which affected every hardware maker (since tech companies needed to buy hardware to operate.)

She basically made the absolute wrong bets, and as a result many jobs were destroyed. Between HP and Compaq, the collective companies lost more than $13 Billion in shareholder value. Other companies did at that time as well, but HP was by far the worst.

When tracing the history of HP performance during Fiorina's tenure as CEO, she is arguably one of the worst who has ever guided a publicly-traded US company. A simple before-and-after of the company's position from the day she took leadership until the day she left is not a pretty picture.

btoptical• 11 years ago

She also spun out the original HP business of test and measurement equipment, chips, transceivers, etc as Agilent (now Keysight). I never ever thought of HP as a computer company. To me HP was oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, network analyzers, and lightwave measurement gear. Spinning Agilent out was shocking to many people at the time.

Eric_WVGG• 11 years ago

Yup.

Those who say that the firings were justified are probably correct, but if Fiorina is running for a position where she is expected to “create jobs,” her record at this task should be front and center.

ianbicking• 11 years ago

When she sold off printing and spun out Agilent, what were the results? If they did better on their own then with HP, then that was a smart move, even if "HP" as a company was diminished. If she sold them for cash and invested that poorly, then that was not a smart move.

drumdance• 11 years ago

I don't think you can put someone in the "worst ever" category without bankruptcy. There has been a lot of very shitty CEOs over the years, some of them criminal.

Bahamut• 11 years ago

One possibility that hasn't been mentioned is that this could be a political smear attempt as well.

meragrin2• 11 years ago

That is all it is. His twitter feed consists nearly entirely of retweets promoting Democrats and smearing republicans.

caryhartline• 11 years ago

How scandalous it is to like one political party and hate another.

spacemanmatt• 11 years ago

Layoffs are political, too. Any time someone's income or power is affected, it's political. It's a rather large scope.

jszymborski• 11 years ago

(lacklustre) Easter Egg: http://carlyfiorina.org/bonus-page.html

shill• 11 years ago

One could create a similar page to represent people who have purchased HP multifunction inkjet printers.

bruceb• 11 years ago

Funny. Though whether you like her or not Carly Fiornia has no chance at becoming president or being nominated as the Republican nominee.

Someone Has Domain for Carly Fiorina’s Name and Is Pretty Upset with Her Layoffs

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