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New I wouldn't trust anything in the press at this point.
Every story in the press about HP and this acquisition is going to be driven by someone with a very strong agenda.

Marketplace radio had in interview of her with Kai Ryssdal a few weeks ago. I was appalled by the way he treated her (he never would have been so dismissive of a male CEO of a company as large). She was articulate and presented a strong case.

http://www.marketpla...e-hewlett-packard

Note that the transcript there leaves out a lot of the conversation. The audio is 12:43.

I have no doubt that many of the knives against her (and Fiorina before that) was driven by sexism.

She (and Carly before her) may very well be over their heads and poor fits for HP. But they don't run the show on their own. HP's board and management has been flailing around for decades. Maybe the Agilent spin-off in 1999 was the most visible illustration of the problems at HP, but Agilent has been in transition as well - http://en.wikipedia....i/Agilent#History

The knives coming out for Meg in the press shouldn't be taken at face value.

My $0.02.

Cheers,
Scott.
New I'm down on her for her entire persona,
so evident in the [local] Governor campaign; sexism Will be there, but that's not My schtick.
That she spawned some randy nincompoops whose hubris may exceed even hers.. cannot be by random accident, nor can she be blamed for the fact that, Offspring do so often disappoint.

HP is now little more than a repackager for Chinese ink cartridges.. a company once.. at least of the same general calibre as Tektronix
[once the Gold Standard ... but never again to recapture that, after Vollmer left: a truly unique CIEIO in that he really Meant-it re. "State of the Art"
insistence from lab --> boxed (in Tested-boxes!) for shipment.] (before that phrase too, became as meaningful as, Have-a-good-day .)]

Without a science background, assiduously applied, you CAN'T have [what HP once stood for.]
She ain't got that so--whatever the merits/demerits of the board: she could not/cannot competently oversee such a manufacturer: think ex-Pepsico-droid running Apple-into-ground?

Yes the long-knives may indeed be out for her, and sexism / like Confederate Flags.. remains right up there in the Murican zeitgeist. But IMO she fails all on her own inadequate knowledgw of that which she heklped dismantle.

Then there's the Unanswered Question asked by that [iconic?] Japanese businessman a while back..
Just HOW corrupt is America, anyway?
So maybe all bets are off when it comes down to attempting to discriminate the level of personal background competence of an 'officer', inexperience with abstruse scientific principles etc. VS the common thread of All Business People needing to lie repeatedly: merely To Sell Stuff.

We are all flying-blind amidst the unprecedented admixture of patently-false semantic dissembling and outright inadequacy--exemplified in Number One position by, anyone in the *cough* Financial 'Community'.
So my opinion here is likely quite as bogus as ... the entire System g u a r a n t e e s bogosity of astronomic level.

How's THAT for a disclaimer of 'bias', eh? ;^>

Methinks that That Is Kai Ryssdal's general MO, not especially snarky here--and surely not about gender.
(BTW, as surely you know, 'Agilent' was the super-silly name-change for--the remaining science-based division under the HP panoply,) and I admit near total ignorance of how much? of early-HP techno-competence remains there (unaware also of that Div's profitability, too.)

But a major loss seems to be, that unlike before:
almost every Agilent offering is priced in the stratosphere, completely beyond a 'professional's budget / only Corporation-affordable.
(In past I had bought new such things as audio metering/measuring equipment--they make nothing Like That now.)
Just another sign that, from Ivy League wissenschaffts on down--Murica now trains/spawns merely more and more MBAs, not 1:100 of whom even knows what Ohm's Law might be 'for'.

D e t e r i o r a t i o n creeps in on little pussy-cat feet :-/
New All good points.
I had (somehow) forgotten her California campaign.

The old HP was a great company. Great internal research, great innovative products, for a premium (but non-usury) price. I've told my story about using an HP Integral PC in grad school. It was an amazing lunchbox PC for the time. http://books.google....onepage&q&f=false The one we had was donated by HP. The list price was ~ $5000 with a 10 MB HP-IB hard drive.

But they were in a cut-throat business and had to change dramatically in the many markets they were in beginning in the late 1980s. They were at MS's mercy in the PC business. They had the talent to innovate there (witness NewWave - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_NewWave ), but MS killed that in Win95. They were undercut by outfits in the Far East in the instrumentation markets. They were at the US stock market's mercy, along with many other great US companies. Etc.

South Korea was willing to (directly and indirectly) invest billions over decades building up Samsung and other behemoths. Now they have the infrastructure, knowledge, and market share to control their destiny for years to come. Intel is likely to have trouble competing with them (and TSMC) in the not-too-distant future. HP, being in so many markets but without the size and support necessary to compete with state-of-the-art semiconductors, would have had a very tough time no matter who was in charge.

Yes, based on her governor campaign, one wouldn't expect her to be a good fit for the old HP. Yes, Sculley wasn't a good fit for Apple's culture and for getting the best out of it - especially in retrospect. But Jobs was unique. It may well be that she's spinning madly, under the mistaken belief that she can blame the auditors and Autonomy's former management. I dunno. But I do know that the press too often gets things wrong. When non-public information is thrown around in the press with strong language, with billions at stake for those involved, and which can easily be slanted to feed preconceptions, well, one can't take the stories at face value.

For example: http://www.wired.com...m/2012/12/launch/

Last week, North Korea finally managed to put an object into orbit around the Earth after 14 years of trying. The event was greeted with hysterical headlines, about how the whole thing was a likely a missile test and most certainly a failure of Western intelligence. Most of those headlines were dead wrong.

There are many questions yet to be answered about this launch and what it means. Some of them will take weeks or months to determine, others may never be answered satisfactorily. But there’s enough information already in the public domain to answer basic questions about the launch. News flash: Most of the initial reports about it were total misfires.

[...]


Maybe my sexism detector's sensitivity was turned up too much, too.

FWIW.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.
     Meg Whitman [!] and HP's *Death by 1000 Idiocies* .. ongoing - (Ashton) - (5)
         I wouldn't trust anything in the press at this point. - (Another Scott) - (2)
             I'm down on her for her entire persona, - (Ashton) - (1)
                 All good points. - (Another Scott)
         dupe ignore - (boxley)
         Meg is no better and no worse - (boxley)

I don't know about you, but that's the lifestyle I'm striving for.
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