The decline and fall of HP

[Voyager]

@IdahoMauleMan

I certainly agree with you, but of course Leo negotiated that exit package as part of his hiring in the first place. As most large company CEOs do. The song was already sung by the time they fired him.

Sure, the problem was not them honoring the contract but agreeing to the contract in the first place. Leo was not all that much in demand. I can see giving a CEO money if it turns out that he and the board don’t get along, but maybe there should be a clause putting holes in the golden parachute if he destroyed a certain amount of stockholder value. As if.

Which sort of proves your first point, above. After following HP governance closely since the hiring of Carly Fiorina (who still hasn’t ever been called to account for stuffing the channel at Lucent to the tune of billions) I also believe they are one of the worst Boards of Directors to ever walk the earth.

I would have been in Lucent if I had stuck around during the Trivestiture - not doing so was one of my better decisions. They still own my pension, but I can do without that cup of Starbucks coffee every week, so I don’t care what happens to it.
There is a book from a bunch of years back which details how the Lucent execs screwed up. Made me very happy that I dumped all my AT&T stock when I left.
How does the HP board pick CEOs everyone hates? It seems that everyone hated Hurd, who was at least competent (except in terms of women, of course.)

[R.P.McMurphy]

@Greg_Charles

No, your understanding doesn’t gibe well with mine. I’m a computer geek and use a Mac at home, as do many of my colleagues. Mac OSX is based on Linux, so it’s easy to drop into a terminal and actually get some work done. The people that denigrate Macs tend to be people who have gotten so used to Windows, they are annoyed by something that works differently. (The same thing could be said of many people who denigrate Windows.) The picture you paint of a snobby Windows geek isn’t something I’ve seen much in nature.

You may be entirely correct. I’m not a computer geek. I gave up on Windows when, when, when, . . . when I just realized that I couldn’t spend my life trying to figure out why the shit didn’t work.

The message that I seem to have gotten from the Windows defenders is that, with the Mac OS they can’t get their dirty little hands inside it and fuck it up to their delight. Now maybe I’m misinterpreting all of this but I’ll just say that I want as little to do with Windows and Microsoft as possible. The Mac OS isn’t perfect but my life has been a lot more peaceful since I made the switch. My experience with HP support turned out to be the last straw. The last HP/Windows computer I had was my wife’s. She didn’t want to make the switch. It got to the point that I and the kids told her to either make the switch or she was going to be on her own. We had had enough.

So maybe we are stupid and aren’t wringing every last thing out of what a PC can do. I don’t care. My computer is suppose to be a tool that makes my life easier and more efficient, not a source of aggravation that is crashing, giving error messages and dumping my email. I don’t think that Microsoft and HP ever really understood that that was what 99% of the users out there really wanted.

[E-Sabbath]

Most of us gave up fighting the Mac/PC wars in the 90s. We understand where you’re coming from, and we feel it’s perfectly all right you have that opinion. Some of us agree with you and some don’t.

We accept you. Deal.