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February 09, 2005
Carly Leaving Hewlett-Packard
I wrote about Carly here a long while back. I'll go dig up the link.
Today we read that she's leaving HP and I'm sorry about that. I liked her. I like her. I think she probably had a helluva time as a woman CEO there.
I think the stuff she did integrating digital photos and printers and all that cool shit was revolutionary and the WSJ reported "One of the few bright spots has been the company's printing-and-imaging division, which generates more than three-quarters of H-P's profits."
Needless to say, we're having a gender discussion about it over here, at Tom Peters site where I blogged about it this morning.
One of the commenters, a woman named M. R. Maguire wrote the greatest thing, and I want to blog it here.
Women + too much technology = frustration
Women + simple technology + efficiency + reasonable price = a home run for whichever company dreams it up first.
Posted by Halley Suitt at 11:42 AM in Organizations | Permalink
Comments
I liked her to, but she killed the personal/employee focus at HP and she has almost killed the server and network business. This has nothing to do with gender she was not liked because of the way she treated employees. Lets remember that printers where not always the main profit center of HP and that they will not be in the future, my kids never print pictures the carry a USP drive on a key chain and an MP3 player that shows off pictures. I work closely with a lot of HP employees and former employees and I can tell you she was not very well liked... The printer division was a hot product line before she joined the company and her latest move to merge it with the PC line was a mistake. And because some much was riding on printers enterprise companies back off from using their services feeling that they were moving to being a consumer hardware and services company.
Posted by: Al Hill at Feb 9, 2005 12:42:28 PM
One other thing a lot of emplyees belived that she though of herself as leading the company and not as a part of the company
Posted by: Al Hill at Feb 9, 2005 12:59:38 PM
Bigger Isn't Always Better
If you look at the Wallstreet Journal today--Chrysler is doing
well. It's streamlined it's product line and is producing
a profit. It's Mercedes division is not. This points out
a specific trend. Bigger isn't always better.
I think Carla was eager to seize what was thought to
be a good opportunity at the time--to grow bigger--sell
more computers--add an extension to the company. It
seemed logical at the time--but the question was---
what was the projected forecast for the future--not the present.
I think that's where Carla missed the boat. She also missed
the boat by not seizing on the opportunity to make the printing
division feel comfortable and thus they felt slighted.
Posted by: Margie Anne at Feb 9, 2005 11:17:14 PM
Looks like HP will be in the news for a while - check out Terry Shannon's article "Opinion: What Went Wrong at HP?" from OSNews [http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9894] posted on 05-03-07 07:48:07 UTC.
Posted by: bd at Mar 7, 2005 4:51:48 AM
Carley schmarley...
Self glorifying woman.
Merging a true technologically advanced company - HP, with a barely functioning moribound PC marketing company getting beat by Dell, and IBM.. was stupid.. everybody told her so..
She should have read Milton Glaser's 10 rules...
hubris hubris hubris.. Everyone at HP knew it and Compaq folks had nothing to lose.. Dell had already eaten their lunch..
And believe me when I say - I don't know nothin' - just what I read and see from the my little cloud..
But I sure feel bad for the folks of both companies who got the squeeze due to a small "leadership" group's oversized "Wall Street" Ego...
So Carley.. " keep your eyes on the road and your hands on the wheel... " Gee, who did write that anyway??
Posted by: TW at Mar 12, 2005 5:37:48 PM
wow
Posted by: tim sellers at Jul 8, 2005 1:26:01 AM
