back to article HP expected to hand Whitman full fat CEO role

Meg Whitman will be handed the reins at HP for the long term, multiple reports said today. However, the expected ousting of accident prone current boss Leo Apotheker in favour of the former eBay boss turned gubernatorial candidate, has done little to steady investors' faith in the firm, with its shares down almost 5 per cent …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Eduard Coli
    Facepalm

    New boss same as old boss

    Fiorina, big fat bonuses and platinum parachute for her and layoffs for everyone else,

    Hurd, big fat bonuses and platinum parachute for him and layoffs for everyone else,

    Apotheker, big fat bonuses and platinum parachute for him and layoffs for everyone else,

    and the list goes on...

  2. Dazed and Confused

    tablets for sale

    So it's HP themselves putting all those tablet onto eBay, and there was me thinking it was the lucky sods that snapped one up cheap

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Angel

    Even a blind squirrel will find buried nuts occasionally

    Hey look - Bob Cringely called it seven months ago (and he got the replacement right as well!)

    http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/why-leo-apotheker-will-be-fired-from-hewlett-packard/

    NB: Not a criticism of El Reg, more my amazement that anyone could get it right so far in advance.

  4. kain preacher

    I'm waiting for bill and dave to crawl out their graves and night of the living dead on the board .

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Bill and Dave

      The tragedy is that in 40+ years Bill and Dave built a monumental empire from absolutely nothing which was highly respected the world over. And within 20 years of their handing over the reins a succession of incapable CEO's has put the company into the also-ran brigade. Unbelievable.

      Interesting that since Gates departed Microsoft have been suffering. One wonders what is going to happen to Apple now that Jobs is away from the helm.

      I rather suspect that with these big technology companies the company is 100% dependent on the originators of the company, and when that bond is broken then the whole thing goes up in smoke.

  5. Erik4872
    Pint

    Wow.

    Is it just me or is this a really strange period for corporate craziness?

    - Nokia flushes their entire R&D group to become a WinPhone 7 shop

    - Sony has a month-long shutdown of PlayStation Network because it failed to secure its servers

    - HP fires Carly, then fires Hurd after, er, "irregularities," then fires Apotheker after failing to pull a Lenovo and flushing a billion on WebOS/Palm

    I would like to see Zombie Bill Hewlett and Zombie Dave Packard show up to a board meeting to see what HP turned into in the last 20 years. Maybe feast on the gathered brains...oh, wait...

    If I were on the board, I would definitely not have chosen the CEO that oversaw the purchase of Skype and changes to the eBay rules that drove tons of sellers off the site. I know there's pressure to drive quarterly results and get the stock price, but here's a thought guys -- If you can get beyond 3 quarters, and the company actually MAKES a PHYSICAL product people want to buy, that isn't garbage, and your strategy is improving those products rather than all the branding garbage, the company will make money.

    No one realizes that you have to put something in to get profit out every now and then. Only IBM, with gobs of money and a huge services division that doesn't stink as badly as EDS, can pull a Lenovo. And a product is not guaranteed to be an overnight success, especially when you fail to price it right. That's no reason to turn around after a month and say "oh well, that was a waste."

    My recommendation? Pick a long-time internal executive who has actually been running a profitable product division for a very long time. They're going to be much more invested in HP's success than these celebrity hired-gun CEOs. People like that will realize that enterprises still buy lots of hardware, even if they're building these cloudy things, and work to make the hardware they buy better than anything else out there. That beats flashy marketing, "brand" and printer ink any day in my mind.

    I'm a long-time purchaser of HP gear, business and personal, and all I have to say to Whitman is "Please, please please don't sell HP to Oracle - ignore the Hurd." That would be a very ignominious end to a great company.

  6. Doug 3

    HPbay

    so Meg will be auctioning off parts of HP until the only thing left is not really what people care to use anymore.

    I remember when HP was a tech company from floor to ceiling. too long ago.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like