This would be great news if it happens, seems HP is considering replacing their CEO. I don’t know if Meg Whitman would be a good candidate or not that’s not really my area of expertise, but Leo’s reign has been a disaster to-date, not only for the company, but the customers, and their stock price.
Not that the previous CEO was good, he was terrible too, being known for slashing budgets, cutting corners for short term profits, and killing morale across the company. HP execs seem to be doing everything they can to kill the company.
I’m seeing on CNBC “Significant number of HP board members want to replace Apotheker”. Which is somewhat ironic considering people believed that Leo recently rebuilt the board around people that would support him. I guess they may not be so loyal after all.
If the CEO goes hopefully goes the bid for that UK software company Autonomy – HP should re-invest in their own stuff, several folks have pointed out the lack of HP’s R&D in recent years has almost forced HP to acquire a lot of companies and in the end they pay a much higher premium for that vs doing things themselves, just look at how much HP has spent on acquisitions vs IBM (the data for both is incomplete but the trend shows HP running at about double the rate of IBM for what data is available.
HP has Vertica, they have 3PAR, they could use some more advanced networking stuff 3COM just isn’t there, nor is Procurve (I still believe HP bought 3COM for nothing more than market presence in China).
nutMeg, not a chance in hell, she makes Carly Fiorina look like Jack Welch.
HP will continue to be a also ran until they make significant imaging changes, as well as a redirection to focus on their core competencies instead of simply trying to be seen as one of the big boys. 3Par was a good pickup for them, but they seem to be buying for the sake of buying. A vertica/3par integration kind of inline with Exadata, Greenplum would put them in the competitive space with EMC/Oracle on that front, but integration of that kind takes time, and their foray into the tablet market has cost them significant capital as well as face.
Comment by tgs — September 21, 2011 @ 10:01 am
Yeah the more I thought about it the less sense it made, but I’m seeing headlines crossing now that indicate she’s going to be the one. I suppose the bright side is could she be worse than Leo? I hope not.
I’ve had a saying for a while now “all I want for christmas is a deadlocked congress”, point being that I’d rather have the ship head slowly towards the iceberg rather than a new captain come on board and do stuff that makes us get there faster. Our Titanic is going down in any case, just a matter of long it takes to get there.
Someone like myself could hope that HP reverses(again) it’s direction on WebOS (and associated hardware) with Meg at the helm having such a consumer oriented background. Their hardware team was laid off pretty recently it wouldn’t be hard to get most of them back.
Their enterprise business seems to be doing well at least as far as products go, I continually hear complaints about their field staff which are idiots for the most part, which is unfortunate. But if you know exactly what you want you don’t need to rely on those folks.
Comment by Nate — September 22, 2011 @ 9:15 am