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Comment by sami36 | Hacker News Reader

The Autonomy debacle aside, what has Meg Whitman accomplished since she took over HP ? After a long tortured process that needn't take so long, she enshrined WebOS's abandonment. And with her at the helm, HP continues to fail to innovate in the consumer electronics space. No decent phones, No compelling tablet, not even a laptop worth glossing over. Zilch.

When is she going move on from blaming her failed predecessors for their missteps & actually put an imprint of her own.

I don't know who's worse at H.P. The CEOs who effectively run the company to the ground or the board that picks them.

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I don't know what you're expecting. When Steve Jobs became CEO of Apple in 1997, it also took more than a year for any products he influenced to launch. And presumably his predecessor hadn't gutted research and development of hardware...

Not only did Jobs bring with him the trunk of what effectively would become OSX. Within months of his return , Jobs had slimmed down Apple's product portfolio to a handful of products then immediately started executing on that vision. As flawed as he was as a human being, Jobs was decisive.

She took forever to make a decision about the fate of the PSG (personal systems groups,) Agonized months over what to do with (granted, a fatally wounded) WebOs. I'm not saying she wasn't dealt a tough hand. I couldn't agree more. Her predecessors strategic blunders were atrocious, but she could have acted with more urgency.

I disagree (HP employee here). I was actually pleased to see these decisions being made with due deliberation. Quite an encouraging change from Apotheker's loose-cannon style. Seriously -- killing the TouchPad after six weeks?

It's actually kind of funny to hear you talk about this.

Meg Whitman "enshrined WebOS's abandonment", "After a long tortured process", "Agonized for months".

Steve Jobs on the other hand "Within months [...] slimmed down Apple's product portfolio to a handful of products".

Is it just me, or are you describing fundamentally the exact same actions? I sense a spin doctor in the house.

No, I just remember listening to the investor calls over a couple quarters & she was unable to give a straight answer on either issue ( WebOS, PSG)

The issues are totally different. Meg is an ex board-member doing triage after a series of clusterfucks. She has to sort-out the politics and vision thing that has been left over from the previously aborted pet projects of more than one "administration". In that sense, its similar to the Yahoo situation with Marissa Mayer. What you want to see is think-fast+move slow...not more haphazard whiplash. That being said, she still may not be all that great. Time will tell. The automony thing is a complete embarassment, and she was on the board that approved it.

Jobs also demanded and got the full resignation of all but 2 of the prior BODs after he came back. Dump the past troublemakers. That won't work here since Meg is one of those previous bad HP BODs members.

For what it's worth, she joined the BoD a few months before she became CEO.

I really don't have an opinion on her, but it seems like the OP of this thread was using a not very sound argument to attempt to pillory the woman.

They did try to open source WebOS. And yea cleaning up that mess takes time. I think Meg said that before.

And they succeeded. Enyo is a nice, stable cross platform JS framework, and Open webOS has a decent sized hacker community around it (webOS Ports).

With how much % marketshare ? I don't mean to be snarky but that question is essential to drive home the point on WebOS's current irrelevancy however good or superior it is as a software platform in vacuum. Software is meant to be used & despite all its shortcomings, marketshare is as good a metric as we'll ever get to measure an ecosystem's health. WebOs fails that test.

And as soon as they get the Galaxy Nexus port into a state that's stable enough to be a daily driver I'm going to pick one up. Until then I'll be sticking with my Pre2.

Sure if you look at the demos, and quickly read the docs all is fine and dandy. But did you try at least to code something with that junk? I did, and wasn't pretty. JS as currently stands is not mature enough to support something complex as an UI kit. Let's see if the next iteration takes us there, and then maybe Enyo can live up to our expectations.

Reminds me of the "3 envelopes" story.

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