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Comment by jfruh | Hacker News Reader

"While Mr. Apotheker is going, his strategy, including consideration of spinning off H.P.’s personal computer business from other parts of the company, will remain in place."

ha ha ha WHAT

"OK, let's hire this enterprise software guy, then get mad when he restructures the company around enterprise software, then fire him but make his successor implement the plan the enterprise software guy put together! Can't fail!"

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The board wouldn't have hired Apotheker in the first place if they didn't approve of the direction he was going to take HP.

I would guess that his firing, is due more to the way he went about it [1] and his overpaying for Autonomy.

[1] That is: going public with the general plan too far in advance of having the details ironed out. Which arguably did real damage to the hardware division's sales and the process of trying to find a buyer for it.

Do you seriously think that the Autonomy purchase was made autonomously from board approval? (no pun intended)

No. But I think that price would have strained Leo's support such that the later misstep regarding the spin-off could push them over the fence.

It sounded like it was more of a presentation issue. He doesn't present well. They didn't say anything about not liking his ideas. "He's just not CEO material" is what I got out of the article.

Aren't "presentation issues" about the easiest thing they could have assessed in advance before they hired him? It's not like he was some anonymous behind-the-scenes VP somewhere -- he was the CEO of a major company in their space.

Of course, if you're right, this fits in nicely with the NY Times' article from this morning, which basically said that the HP board hired Apotheker without meeting him, because the board members all couldn't stand each other and didn't want hang out together long enough to vet him.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/business/voting-to-hire-a-...

These people, it's amazing.

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