Meg Whitman to Step Down as HPE CEO
wsj.com
wsj.com
> Whitman would get nearly $91 million if HP gets acquired – more than double her peers – and $51 million if she's forced out (not fired for cause) – again, nearly double.
Source: [2015] http://www.businessinsider.com/whitman-gets-51-million-if-hp...
Our lab, which was one of the best places that I can look back on in my career, had been acquired by HP. Their messing about, sending us various failures as 'senior management' resulted in it draining all of its good people to companies such as Microsoft, Google, and etc. It was a terrible shame. Edit: I guess I was trying to say that HP legacy has been destroyed pretty good by all the mergers, cuts, 'retirements', etc.
This is a hallmark of the Telecom industry where Carly came from. Haven't spent many years there, I knew it was doom for an old tech executive to come to new tech.
And it's not just the employees they're annoying.
I went to download a BIOS update for an old HP server last week. They wanted a support contract. The thing is ten years old, it's not in production, I'm just using it to test some hard drives.
When did companies forget how easy it is for a customer to scratch them off the vendor list?
Watching Modula-3 from the outside, I saw DEC Olivetti being acquired by Compaq, followed by HP buying Compaq.
Nowadays their research results at HP Labs still lives on an HPE server that might eventually be turned off one day, leaving those of us that downloaded the papers as the sole owners of such copies. :(
EDIT: For those that might want to get those papers, search for HP labs, DEC and SRC.
All three companies were in good shape, especially Hewlett-Packard and Compaq (one of two biggest PC¬ebook manufacturers).
Hewlett-Packard went all downhill in the 2000s onwards with changing CEOs doing greedy decisions and lackluster products and quality. It got worse in 2010s, and the company split to HP and HPE - now it's confusing for customers which company is responsible for what, e.g. HP "ePrint" iOS app (companion app for HP printer) is now owned by HPE and requires an enterprise login, whereas the consumer version got forked by HP and has to be discovered under a different name in AppStore. The network switches, notebook, printer, companion-software, keyboards, server storage, (most got renamed) and worse in every aspect. Yes Meg Whitman and the other CEOs (of both HPE and HP in 2010s) were bad.
Now that was in response to Uber's courtship but this was so sudden you have to wonder what prompted it?
Since the HPE stock split, the HPE stock has lagged the Nasdaq composite index by almost 60%!
The move positions Neri to become HPE’s next CEO, CRN reports.
“This clearly lines up Neri to be the next in line to take the reins of HPE, there is no question about it,” Bob Venero, CEO Future Tech told CRN. “This looks like it is Whitman staying true to her statement that the next CEO of HPE would be born and bred in the HPE family.”
I've known quite a few monday morning quarterbacks/sophomore kremlinologists/cynics who would regale anyone who'd listen with their analysis of what management is really doing and (especially) what they obviously should have done. What is less clear is how this deep insight ever led to any actionable intelligence at all.
Their first major sale of the new system to a client fell through 6 months later because the system wasn't ready (would probably never have been ready) and 3 months after that they were bought out and the project cancelled by the new owners. For those I left behind it was utter hell.
So this is a counter-example in a way. Rather than their commitment being unconvincing, it really was convincing. Still they were on a direct course to screwing up and I got out at just the right time.
Somewhat? Manipulating your employees using lies and misdirection and then firing them should not be considered ethically acceptable.
You absolutely need to pay attention to what is being said at all of your levels of management and figure out how to not only do your job well, but also to do so in a way that supports management.
That said if it had caused some panic at the office the upper management might want to take steps against the said manager. So it's better not to say anything.
javascript:window.location="https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-whit...
When people will vote for a pedophile to avoid putting a checkmark next to a (D), that's when you can give up faith in the average citizen's regard for the details of an election.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/roy-moore-is-not-a-p...
http://time.com/5029172/roy-moore-accusers/
Your (and the author of that op-ed) opinion and my opinion of the definition of "child" differ greatly.
With regards to Alabama, the general vibe I've gotten is that the very large evangelical bloc in the state is conflicted - trapped between very strongly held policy preferences (especially on abortion and LGBT rights) and their views on personal morality. Moore has seen a large slide in the polls, including among evangelicals, but there are a lot that are willing to hold their noses and disbelieve for their preferred policies.
See this very interesting write-up: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-values-that-values-...
Sanders did better in primaries that allowed people outside the Democratic Party to vote and was throughout the election seasons (and remains, as of the last pollI saw earlier this year) the single most popular national political figure in the country. Every objective indication is that he would have done better than Clinton in “the states that mattered”.
In any case, much as one might prefer policy ideas to be decisive, elections are less about policy ideas and more about soft personal factors than people like to think.
>Sanders’ 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where he reportedly joined a Sandinista rally with a crowd chanting, “Here, there, everywhere/ The Yankee will die.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
I don't know how it's gonna happen, but I think the Dems really need to get to a point where they could accept someone with a history like GWB and his "youthful indiscretions" as a candidate. Purity is a hard thing to find in the world.
And about purity and electability, I thought someone like Mitt Romney was pretty pure but see where that got him.
Or, maybe, I was using colloquial language to describe 'a significant portion', in which case:
1) Didn't happen in our lifetimes? That makes willfully supporting and idolizing such blatant revisionism and racism _markedly worse_ than the example against Bernie, supporting my point quite resoundingly...
2) You are incorrectly presupposing that Republicans need to be from the south to wax poetic about the fictional "South"... The recent comments by General Kelly, born in Mass, about General Lee show otherwise. That identity came part and parcel with the Republican Southern Strategy, and has been a part of the right wing cultural identity ever since. This should be news to no one.
3) I listen to myself just fine. What are you even trying to say? ... Secessionists who killed Yankees and tried to destroy America are openly revered in public by major players in one party with little consequence, while incidentally being involved in _a_ chant _one_ time with a _hint_ of the same beliefs is seen as a death blow in the other party [aaaand this only if you completely ignore Americas contemporaneous relationship with the Contras, and who was behind that fiasco].
Mitt Romney is not a Democrat, which was the entire thrust of my (now down voted, because... facts...), post: Republicans gladly swallow things about candidates for the sake of their party that Democrats refuse to.
Roy Moore, for example, or Trump, or GWB (etc etc), continue with sustained polling numbers that 'The Left' would never provide after their scandals and behaviour. It creates asymmetric competition, and a massive disadvantage in terms of policy creation.
This is verifiable behaviour, and comes out quite clearly in the polling numbers between political demographics.
Yeah, I don't think most people (esp those who actually vote thinking that huge changes will happen to make their lives better by electing someone else and are on the fence) will look at some random smear piece on Their Candidate™ through this lens. If only we covered more of US historical/present foreign policy (and the perspective of the different powers/peoples at the time on issues) in public schools, though one would suspect that if lecture notes were posted online, some may get labeled as fake news, nor that the dog and pony show would have become what it is…
>Republicans gladly swallow things about candidates for the sake of their party that Democrats refuse to.
I think that in the most recent presidential election, it was the case that the DNC was already swallowing clinton, and had no space for sanders except to use him to attract those who couldn't swallow clinton, to swallow clinton.
Robert E Lee is a part of a confederate heritage fondly opined about by significant numbers of Republicans. That heritage has more than a little "Kill the Yankee" sentiment to it, right? That's a pretty objective fact, hence the double standard in the opposition research against Bernie, hence its use as an example.
To your secondary point: the verifiable fact that said heritage has been overtly reshaped into a modern fantasy by racists and racist organizations, its correlation to Jim Crow, its disingenuous hand-waiving about slavery, and its tight ties to the [Republican Southern Strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) kinda sorta do mean that supporting, aggrandizing, or selectively portraying it beyond the limits of its historical boundaries is pretty darned supportive of racism. I think describing the common fellating of this anti-history from otherwise anti-minority, anti-immigration, anti-democracy, fundamentalists as 'waxing poetic with a glint in their eye' is putting is kindly and mildy.
Right wingers showing fondness for the Confederacy is hardly a secret... I mean, who signed all those bills and built all those statues?
Plus, Bernie wasn't attacked because of his policies because HRC's were similar. He would have been in the general election.
Yes he was, from the right, by Clinton—that was a key part of Clinton's primary campaign—and, no, they weren't that similar. But I agree that there would have been more focus on policy in a general election campaign with Sanders as the nominee, which would have been bad for Trump.
Funny and the DNC did everything in their power to make her their candidate over Sanders. I would have voted for him instead of an independent.
Nope. HRC was unlikeable. It’s all her own fault.
I'll ask the same thing I ask when people claim homeless citizens voting steals elections: why do you think opioid addicts do not have the right to vote? If they registered legally, why shouldn't they have the right to vote like everybody else?
I mention the opioid addicts specifically because their poster child Rush Limbaugh is a hard core fruit cake. I believe, but cannot yet prove, that pickling the brain turns people “conservative”, by which I mean absolutist and authoritarian.
Similarly, yes, all those things you mention were part of the context in which the 2016 election occurred but they were decisive only because that Democrats picked the weakest possible candidate, with higher unfavorable ratings than any previous major party nominee, firm unfavorability because of decades of national political exposure, and relatively little experience as a candidate in electoral politics (having only served a couple terms as a Senator in a heavily-selling state coming in onethe coattails her husband's Presidential popularity; she'd never been in a campaign where she needed more than the approval of the Democratic establishment to win.) Clinton had the worst negatives that can come with long political exposure, without the strengths that come from long and relevant electoral politics experience.
And, no, it's not her fault, it's the Democratic establishment's fault. Clinton didn't have the choice to be herself or be someone else, the Democratic establishment did have the choice not to decide to go all in for Clinton even before other candidates were declared.
re HRC and the DNC... That’s just not how it works. There is no monolithic “Democratic Party”. Just loose coalitions of power centers, big and small, that brand themselves as “Democrats.” And 1/2 of “party politics” is always the candidates parasitic relationship with the various interest groups, making promises to earn endorsements and contributions, to be forgotten once elected. Use them and then disgard them. There is nothing (comparable to the right) on the left where elected are held accountable to their constituents.
If voters want more choices, then they have to lower the barriers to entry, by (greatly) reducing the cost of campaigns. Public financing, restore fairness doctrine, time box campaigns season, universal voter registration, compulsory voting (most campaign money on the left is spent on GOTV), etc.
How inconvenient that the minority vote of states without mass populations centers is valued.
> Johnson & Stein
I voted for Johnson, it was not a "Nader." If we don't like the system, then we must force pressure upon it.
And any viable new third party must be grown from the bottom up. That’s just how it works. If you want more choices, I encourage you to advocate for Approval Voting (as I do). First a little, than a lot.
Look up "wikileaks piedpiper candidate" and decide whose fault is it
The press is doing a good job of highlighting the shortcomings and flaws of the Silicon Valley elite, but enough voters in the right places have shown they don't trust the press.
Of course, anyone coming from the Silicon Valley elite is going to have answer the question of how they are going to create new jobs... which would be interesting to see.
Of course but I don't think they can convince the average voter - they have been concentrating huge amounts of wealth in a couple of cities.
Why would I trust them to be able to spread the wealth?
What's next? A movie star running for President?!
I disagree partly, faking empathy and goodwill is a cornerstone of manipulation in politics. However, I agree it's not a long-term strategy and over the medium-term (months not years) people will learn to see through it. Some people are more transparent than others in this regard.
She made a lot of subtle jabs at the Trump presidency by referring to their dishonesty towards the public, then turned around and gave a generic "stop acting like snowflakes" bit that I felt was a little too broad.
Perhaps a week later, the latter part of her speech popped up on a right wing FB page with a clickbaity caption kinda like "HP CEO TELLS SNOWFLAKES TO GROW UP" or whatever. Curiously, the seemingly anti-Trump part wasn't mentioned at all.
Not long after that, HP stepped down from most of their ambitions with this thing[1]
I don't know if that explains Whitman's departure, but I would not be surprised if that was taken into account.
1. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-mach...
It had so many obvious problems, it felt like nobody had actually tried using the machine in real life.
I don't think I'll buy HP again. I've lost faith in the brand.
My current laptop is a Dell and it's a huge improvement.
The first too are quite good, the last has never been great. (The Spectre x360 is great, the Envy x360... not so much)
It's really a shame what has happened to that company and how all of the parts of HP that made up it's soul were sold off for not being profitable enough. What we have now is just another bunch of Me-Too companies that do shame to the Hewlett-Packard name(s).
So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them.
> So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them.
These two statements are at complete odds with one another. The only reason Oracle buys anyone is to kill competition against themselves - they are the penultimate 600 pound gorilla in the Enterprise Software space, with eyes on Microsoft's fast approaching taillights.
They bought Sun because it was the easiest way to get to MySQL. They wanted to buy MySQL because they thought that they could kill their single largest market competition in the FOSS database world simply by strangleholding it the same way they do with their other database products - fortunately it was protected by the GPL long before they got their hands on it. But the list goes on for as many companies as you can name that Oracle has acquired - Oracle is where tech goes to die, and where tech laborers go to retire.
And in some ways, that's okay. It's healthy for the market to have trusted, long term minded players - enterprises love companies like Oracle because they know what to expect. Big price tags, but phone support and a deep ecosystem of people skilled to fix and deploy their junk. It's healthy for employees not to be looking over their shoulders and hoping Wall Street's next sneeze doesn't put them on the bread line. It only becomes unhealthy when Oracle uses its multibillion dollar cash reserves to stomp the life out of a market because it can no longer compete against it.
But, all of that said, the argument as to why Oracle might want to pick up HPE is a bit dull, I must admit. Unless they want to go for a complete vertical integration play and make it so you have to also buy their hardware to run their database engines, I can't imagine anything sticking. I also can't imagine that play working without regulators crying Unfair Competition, even with the current state of the DOJ and the constant hum of megamergers being rubberstamped. But HPE is not currently a competitive threat to... anyone? Oracle buying HPE would be a very long winded mercy killing, just like Sun.
(obligatory "my words, not my employers, yadda yadda")
Re:MySQL was an inconvenience to Oracle in the Sun deal, not an acquisition target. PostgreSQL was/is a stronger OSS competitor to their DBMS tbh, due to its closer feature parity, especially PL/pgSQL - and no sign of them sponsoring (controlling) that project.
What a world.
We're in the midst of the storm just now... In the last 48 hours we've seen Charlie Rose implode and Pelosi call for investigations of Conyers. In the last few hours John Lasseter ended up in the spotlight and got LOA-ed out of Disney. It's too early yet, but at some point an accuser will emerge with provably false claims against a popular and sympathetic figure and the worm will turn.
It's just the way of things.
AFAIK there's a well-known phenomenon of victims later being friendly with their attackers. In general, it doesn't disprove the allegation (I don't know the details about Franken).
Based on my poor knowledge of it (and in the absence so far of anyone who knows more), it comes from the desperate need for safety by traumatized people (i.e., those in the fight / flight / freeze state), any way they can get it. That includes by later trying to placate their attackers and checking if the attacker is friendly (or safe). Remember, often attackers are someone the victims previously knew and trusted and then that trust was horribly violated, leaving the victim feeling utterly defenseless (i.e., dependent on the attacker's good will).
Only two of the scandals involve recently disclosed assaults.
So, maybe it will happen as you say. I predict it won't be widespread. There will likely be another Duke, but it'll be isolated.
My suggestion would be to become the mysql of hardware, be compatible with everyone, what if an hp could go from pc to mac? We have never had that direction. Impossible you say? That why theres profit , the market doesnt have it yet. (Mac to pc is there)
Cheaper hardware , but same env. Make it worth apples wild. Hp seems to have good salesmen and bizz connects. Big contracts are not just about tech.