Meg Whitman takes over as HP CEO, Apotheker out

HP today named Meg Whitman President and Chief Executive Officer. Let the company's deathwatch commence. Quipped @laloalcaraz: "[Her] first task at HP will be to shove all the Asian employees."

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  If corporations are people now, can HP receive extreme unction?

  • [Xeni Jardin]

    I thought that sentence ended with EXTREME UNICORN. I would like to give some corporations some extreme unicorn, right up the kazoo.

    • [Mike List]

      and i thought you said kalamazoo, i was vaguely insulted, that being my home town. then my reading comprehension kicked in. i’m thinking extreme rhinoceros.

• [cstatman]

  nearly sucked eBay dry,  failed at CA Gov Race,  yet someone said  “lets give her HP”    So I asked my pal,  “what do -I- have to do to be CEO”   and his response was perfect.

  “we need to go back in time, be born rich, go to harvard with all our rich pals, and be part of the network of rich people keeping each other rich.”

  ah-ha.   so I am screwed

• [Adam Fields]

  https://twitter.com/#!/fields/status/116986484627746817

• [EH]

  Better HP than CA.

• [Aram Jahn]

  In related news, Carly Fiorina has been named CEO of eBay, and will proceed to drive it into the ground even further. Experts say expect Whitman and Fiorina to give Jerry Brown a run for his money – with the emphasis on MONEY – in the next governor’s race.

  Sheesh…Oh…but corporations need to attract the best CEO “talent;” that’s why they get those bonuses – 15 times more money than you’ll ever make in your lifetime – for bad performances.

• [Guest]

  Thinking ahead, both Hewlett and Packard had themselves mummified in copper wire, and buried in magnetic coffins. The combined forces of their turning over so often in the last few years is an untapped renewable resource. I’d bet the future of the company on it.  

• [jimh]

  HP
  Implode.

• [Warren_Terra]

  The last guy decided that what HP really should be was a corporate IT services provider (or some such), like the company he’d headed before being hired to take over HP, and consequently killed WebOS and signaled HP could be getting out of the PC business for which it was best known. With the hiring of Meg Whitman, we can assume HP will now be getting out of the corporate IT services business and starting an auction website. Or maybe HP will be running for governor of California, I’m not sure which.

  • [Jonathan Badger]

    I always thought they were best known for calculators using the weird but wonderful RPN, and that computers and tablets were just a needless distraction from this.

    • [Warren_Terra]

      They probably hired a computer guy as CEO and consequently had to de-emphasize the RPN calculator business.

  • [Warren_Terra]

    Further to my “HP for Governor Of California” theory, it turns out that Gov. Jerry Brown is actually a year older than HP, and was born about 30 miles away.

• [Pishabh Badmaash]

  I’ve always thought that Meg Whitman was perfectly proportioned for a great bobble head doll

• [Teller]

  She’ll spin herself off in a year.

• [Bottle Imp]

  Briefly read Mae Whitman instead of Meg Whitman. Thought they’d made a really “outside the box” choice.

  First press release could have been: “Prepare to die, obviously.”

• [xtophr]

  First order of business: Buy Skype!!!

• [Adam Rice]

  Meg Whitman was a member of the board that hired Apotheker in the first place. Clearly the board has not been representing the shareholders’ interests. Asleep at the switch, at best. The shareholders should rebel.

• [EH]

  I bet Meg hasn’t even been in a garage in the past 15 years.

• [Roderick St John]

  As Frank Zappa, more or less, said, “Witch arriving too late to save a drowning ship”.

  • [Steve Miller]

    Would that not have been Roger Price, who invented the “droodle”?

• [skyhawk1]

  I wonder if her contract specifical­ly stipulates that she cannot lay her manhands on any employee?

• [Aima Littetipot]

  Fail!

  Short *now*.

  Also, so it’s somewhere, someplace, in writing. Meg Whitman walked into eBay when it was on the ascent, during the dotcom bubble, and into a business that had *already* established critical mass in a sector where critical mass is *everything*. It was an easy gig; just sit back and watch the business grow. But she didn’t do that; she presided over turning eBay into a bloated place with cacophonic features and completely lacking in innovation; then she made strategic purchases that had *nothing* to do with eBay’s business. Whitman is a very smart, self-aggrandizing, plotting person, with powerful connections. That’s the only reason she is where she is. She’s essentially an incompetent, well-connect rich person. She will be remembered for ‘Fail!”, and deservedly so.

• [bklynchris]

  Hey anybody else here remember when HP printers, like worked?  I think Jerry Brown was Mayor of Oakland then.

  But really, at this point how much more damage can she do?  Instead of implode, as someone mentioned earlier, its more like-implode more.

• [Terry Loseke]

  I wonder how many $Millions she will get in severance when they fire her next year.  The real objective (like the last three incompetents) is to get the money before the company is driven to zero.

• [xtalman]

  Does HP’s board really have some secret pack to kill the company?  They would have been gone long ago if they weren’t so big.  It takes awhile to really screw things up and die and they are well on there way to doing it.

  Still treasure my RPN calculator.  Have had it about 25 years and it is still going strong.

  • [Warren_Terra]

    “”Have had it about 25 years and it is still going strong.”"
    It’s non-repeat customers like you that are the problem. If you’d just have the good grace to break it every thirty months or so, they’d be laughing.
    Or maybe you should be paying a license fee for the continuing use of your RPN calculator.

    • [xtalman]

      Oh for some stupid reason I keep buying HP products.  Just bought a new PC about 6 months ago and then spent a half a day with tech support trying to get the HP printer to be recognized. The morons wanted me to pay to have them “fix” the driver problem.  I guess total incompetence starts from the top down even in a company as big as HP.

    • [Antinous / Moderator]

      I stitch up my tee shirts when they get holes in them. It’s one good reason to wear black; the repairs don’t show.

• [teapot]

  Hewlett Packard owns Electronic Data Systems, which is in charge of the technology monitoring checkpoints inside of Palestine. In addition, HP monitors the Israeli Navy’s entire IT operating system, which enabled last year’s attacks on the Freedom Flotilla.
  ^Thats enough for me. HP is already a no-go zone.

• [Michael Sanderson]

  Because the last failed 2010 California statewide Republican candidate they had as CEO worked out so well….  

• [jonjonz]

  What is the HP board smoking?

  A real pity.  The HP Laserjet back in the 80′s practically made Apple and Adobe.  I visited their HQ back in the day and was so impressed.  A few years later, they lost the bid for our new system because the sales person screwed up and failed to get the bid in on time.  Why do these idiots keep rewarding FAIL by CEOs?  All I want to know is “Where is my Bail Out?”

• [Hank]

  Coming in late to the discussion, but I’ve been wondering how much it cost her to actually win this election.

• [Deidzoeb]

  Sweet. Meg’s drumming skillz are solid, and they can probably get songs for their commercials by White Stripes really cheap.

• [makuribu]

  HP is the SAAB of the technology world. It’s been gutted by corporate idiots and devalued to the point where it is just a logo on hardware assembled from low bid parts suppliers.
  Agilent contains the souls of Hewlett and Packard. HP might as well be a steak sauce.