Fiorina Gone From HP
from the so-much-for-that-plan dept
Carly Fiorina was definitely one of the most watched, and judged, CEOs around — whether fairly or unfairly. Before she’d really had a chance to settle into the job at HP, she was already being compared to Lou Gerstner and what he did at IBM. Those are tough shoes to fill, and HP had a lot of moving parts to handle, and it appears that no one’s going to be comparing the status of HP post-Fiorina favorably to IBM post-Gerstner any time soon, as Fiorina is now gone from HP in a bit of a surprise move. Depending on which source you read, she was either dismissed by the board or she quit, which likely means there was a standoff where she threatened to quit and the board said “go for it.” Maybe this means HP will realize that being anti-consumer isn’t such a good idea, but right now, they probably have bigger problems to focus on. Fiorina’s real legacy, of course, is that she’ll be forever tied to the deal to buy Compaq (and the huge fight the ensued). Of course, a big part of the reason why the deal was made was to get Compaq’s PC computing customers, in an attempt to compete with IBM across all aspects of computing and services, so the fact that IBM is trying to sell of its PC computing division now speaks volumes about the differences in strategies the two companies are actually taking.
