edit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902749 I just stumbled upon this comment by AlexMuir, it was the most upvoted comment on the HN discussion about HP's acquisition of Autonomy
AlexMuir pretty much called it.
Why? for making a bad business decision?
The board approved it. That's why there is a board. The finance department at HP signed off on it. The tech department at HP looked at the tech and signed off on it.
Everyone signed off on it, it didn't' work out.
http://www.businessinsider.com/meg-whitman-hp-autonomy-blame...
"Why didn't the HP board question the purchase price in the first place? That's what Benjamin Reitzes, an analyst for Barclays Capital, asked on the call. Whitman's answer: The board wasn't responsible. The two people who were responsible, in her view, are now gone: her predecessor, Léo Apotheker and HP's longtime strategy chief, Shane Robison, who retired in November 2011, shortly after the Autonomy deal went through. "
It's true that the buck stops with the CEO. It was after all, his decision to make the deal.
My point was what are you going to sue him for? He did the right thing. He made up his mind, ran it past the board for approval, ran it past finance for approval, got an outside auditor to do due diligence.
All approved. The deal went through.
It turned out to be a stupendously bad business decision.
Should twitter be able to sue the developer who made the incredibly bad design decision to use ruby on rails and architect their system as a blog rather than than a message queue?
Bad decisions happen, people loose their jobs over them. it's much harder to sue someone when they've done the due diligence and had the decision signed off by many other people.
And in the end, it was not something that was done hidden from other people, if it was a bad decision they should have stood their ground.
They are clearly part of the problem. HP's vaunted culture isn't what they think it is and that's part of the problem too. They are too big for their britches, literally, need to cut some pieces off and get smaller again before they become smaller.