Cringely’s second column on the firing of Leo Apotheker | Hacker News Reader

Cringely’s second column on the firing of Leo Apotheker

cringely.com

68 pointsableal14 comments

Amazing how he was able to make such a specific prediction, not only about the firing of Leo, but also the hiring of Meg Whitman, if it was actually just a prediction. But he most likely had some strong inside information.

It seems that the HP board is set on destroying HP with all these political games and hiring friends as CEO's.

Not to mention buying SAP (or as it actually turned out, a SAP-like company).

Maybe Autonomy could hire Leo?

> But he most likely had some strong inside information.

He's been watching the show for a couple dozen seasons now. The scripts aren't quite Coyote and Road Runner class, but it is possible to make good guesses about what the characters will do.

Besides, inside information would probably be wrong anyway, possibly deliberately.

Maybe the board took his column as advice?

Impressive prediction. This was in February, way before the bungled Touchpad and WebOS strategy, followed by announcements that totally diminish the Hardware division, which remains a large portion of HP's value proposition. Cringely has made wild predictions that don't pan out, but this is one that was right on target.

Well, if you guess enough times...

These are VERY specific series of guesses. Names being mentioned, scenerios being played out.

Reading the comments to hist first post totally made my afternoon. People ridiculing his choice of Whitman as the new CEO? And totally clueless ones stating that Apotheker was the right person to take HP out of trouble.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. He also predicted before the apple press conference where they gave away free bumpers for antenna problems that apple had halted production of iphones.

http://www.cringely.com/2010/07/missing-in-action/

What's Cringely's reputation? Why would be considered a broken clock?

Cringely prides himself on his predictions. He makes many of them. Sometimes they are extremely accurate—sometimes they are extremely off (like predicting that Apple would buy Time Warner Cable, or predicting that Apple would halt production of iPhone 4s to 'fix the antenna issue [http://www.cringely.com/2010/07/missing-in-action/])

He at least used to make an annual list and score himself later: 2011: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://... 2009: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081216_0055... 2006: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070105_0014...

For 2009 he scores himself 4 right and 11 wrong, which is certainly broken clock territory, but he's usually decent for a pundit.

In all fairness to Leo Apotheker you can't judge whether he would be ultimately successful based on a single year at the helm.

Imagine that the Apple board fired Steve Jobs after one year in 1998? After all he killed the clones as well as disrupting the most single profitable piece of a financial struggling company - http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/what_steve_jobs_taught_me_ab...

Not to mention wanting to open retail stores after CompuAdd and Gateway both proved that was an unworkable idea.

I personally think the board shouldn't have hired Apotheker in the first place but you can't give him more than an incomplete on his two turns as a CEO.

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