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Comment by slacka | Hacker News Reader

Do you know anything about HP's failure under her rule? I don't care about her gender, but I do know for a fact that they lost market share and had a massive brain drain under her tenure. Her massive layoffs included axing their R&D. Why don't you read this before jumping to conclusions?[1] It identifies many of the issues I saw first hand during that period, while still trying its best to find reasons to praise her.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2010/04/20/analysts-carly-fiorin...

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The comment to which I was replying claimed that “Carly’s stupidity wiped out the high-end processor market.”

Whatever her other faults as a CEO, that’s just not what happened with the Itanium. The writing was already on the wall for high-end Unix in the mid-1990s.

HP teamed up with Intel and had them take over the bulk of R&D expense with HP continuing to extract profits from the shrinking market for over a decade. Meanwhile the competitors DEC and SGI and Sun basically went out of business. (IBM of course retained its niche as the only choice for those who only buy IBM.)

This would have been a more appropriate comment, than calling someone misogynistic.

A misogynistic tone is recurrent in online comments about Carly Fiorina’s time at HP, and in my opinion the comment blaming her stupidity for Itanium was in that vein.

Nobody talks about Sun’s contemporary leadership using phrases like “that dumb hockey jock Scott ruined Sparc.” Somehow it’s ok when the CEO was a woman.

These two things are not the same.

You don’t hang around with enough ex-Sun people if you haven’t heard derogatory comments about McNealy. But his ultimate failure at Sun wasn’t the same scale, and Sun was never as well managed or universally revered as HP.

I guess I hang around with different ex-Sun people because, however Sun ended up eventually, they're all pretty praising of McNealy and Sun's culture.

One thing McNealy did get right is that Sun was pretty much the only one of the large Unix vendors that wasn't at least preparing for the possibility of an all-Microsoft future with NT. (IBM was arguably placing more of a small side bet that execs like Mills didn't really believe in but almost no one besides Sun dismissed NT out of hand.

Yet Solaris is gone for all practical purposes, while Aix is still seeing new sales beyond plain maintenance, with increase in 2022.

I know that she was blamed for that considerably more than her male predecessors who set them on that trajectory. She definitely isn’t blameless but I would pause to question why so many men are so quick to shift the blame to the only woman available as a scapegoat.

I have an acquaintance who has been at HP for ages and his characterization is more that she was left holding the bag.

I remember an internal email thread about HP and Fiorina at the analyst firm I used to work at and, at one point, one of my colleagues wrote with exasperation "What would you have them do? Bring back Lou Platt?"

Hurd did seem to right the ship when he took over. But, to the degree many of us didn't really recognize at the time, a lot of that was financial engineering and eating of seed corn.

Talk to the HP engineering staff who were there. It was irreparable, and it was Fiorina who did it. Or so they generally claim.

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