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The move positions Neri to become HPE’s next CEO, CRN reports.
“This clearly lines up Neri to be the next in line to take the reins of HPE, there is no question about it,” Bob Venero, CEO Future Tech told CRN. “This looks like it is Whitman staying true to her statement that the next CEO of HPE would be born and bred in the HPE family.”
Kind of. The manager in my team (hpe) hasn't been replaced for a few months after quitting, then the project was killed / people let go. Meanwhile, all the communication from the top was pretty much "this is an important project for us". And that's one of the reasons I'm unlikely to work in a big corp in the future.
Never trust the official communications, in fact you should treat them counter factually. More important, you need to be in some circle of know for highly political companies.
Why counter factually? I agree that they can be largely ignored and it's the actions that should be observed. But if things go well, some good chart will be presented, if not, some other good chart will be presented. What's the reason to go the opposite way?
If the higher ups feel the need to communicate how important X is to the company, it is usually because X is on shaky ground. If you knew nothing about X before, you know that about it now. If you think about the reasons behind why the message was communicated, rather than the message itself, you can get a lot more real knowledge out of it.
This should be a key point to surviving in the corporate world. Whenever the CEO or VP of engineering spoke, I always paid attention to what was glossed over or conveniently omitted from the official line. While I found it all somewhat distasteful and duplicitous, it's the game. As such, I occasionally found it entertaining to discern what was really being communicated to me. Most other people take these kinds of official communication at face value. Never turn off your brain at work.
And what specific benefits did you get from this? What actionable insights did you get that your colleagues missed out on?
I've known quite a few monday morning quarterbacks/sophomore kremlinologists/cynics who would regale anyone who'd listen with their analysis of what management is really doing and (especially) what they obviously should have done. What is less clear is how this deep insight ever led to any actionable intelligence at all.
He probably left because he learned that the project was going to be killed. Sad he didn't share that news with the rest of the team so you could all be hunting for a job while on the corporate payroll just like he did.
I know someone who was in a similar situation recently. The whole thing becomes catch-22. The manager shared his insights but was brushed off as sour grapes and biased against the company.
That said if it had caused some panic at the office the upper management might want to take steps against the said manager. So it's better not to say anything.
It could just as easily be that he was the lead cheerleader for the project and when he left there was nobody there to advocate for it, so it was first to go.
It wasn't needed. When the manager is gone and a replacement is not hired, it's pretty obvious you should start sending out CVs. Or prepare but stick around for the redundancy pay ;-)
Majority of the time when CEOs of major companies leave, it is because they have been asked by the board of directors to leave. This is especially true after unfavorable business/stock performance.
Since the HPE stock split, the HPE stock has lagged the Nasdaq composite index by almost 60%!
More likely Senate. Feinstein is up in 2018 and the tides are turning against her. It would be a tough slog but doable. Oh and she'd have to run as a Democrat. I don't think a Republican could get elected in California in 2018.
The smart move would be to say she's switching parties because of Trump, run as a conservative Democrat left of Trump but right of the progressive wing.
I feel like 2018 is going to boil down to only whether you have an (R) or (D) next to your name, if the election in Alabama is any indication.
When people will vote for a pedophile to avoid putting a checkmark next to a (D), that's when you can give up faith in the average citizen's regard for the details of an election.
This is part of what I really like about California's top-two primary system - in a dominant-party system like we have, we end up in a situation where two candidates of the dominant party have to compete on ideology and policy, and the members of the minority party still get an equal say.
With regards to Alabama, the general vibe I've gotten is that the very large evangelical bloc in the state is conflicted - trapped between very strongly held policy preferences (especially on abortion and LGBT rights) and their views on personal morality. Moore has seen a large slide in the polls, including among evangelicals, but there are a lot that are willing to hold their noses and disbelieve for their preferred policies.
He seems to be a horrible person who’s done heinous things, but he’s not accused of being a pedophile (except on Twitter). Words have actual meanings, and using ones like pedophile outside their proper meaning reduces their value and impact.
Leigh Corfman told the Washington Post that she met Moore in 1979 when she was just 14 years old. The then-district attorney offered to watch Corfman while her mother attended a custody hearing, she said, and he asked for her phone number when he was alone with her. Corfman said that days later, Moore drove her to his house and kissed her.
I don't understand the delusion that Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina are under to think they can win election to political office without ever having done so before with the charisma of a wet noodle and a mostly standard GOP platform. I hate Donald Trump who also never won political office prior to 2016 but I can comprehend his appeal to racism and promising the moon on healthcare/jobs being a drawing card. The GOP would have a better chance of picking a conservative actress who at least has charisma and can read a speech like the actor Ronald Reagan (who at least was able to win leadership of his state first). Maybe Sarah Shahi, GOP members would be able ignore her Persian heritage because of the R next to her name.
Silicon Valley is trending for like-ability about where Wall Street was in 2008. But of course she should run, as should Zuckerberg, Thiel, Altman etc because it would be a hoot watching them go down in flames.
but just imagine all the jingly-jangly campaign videos featuring $candidate doing yoga in the california sun and doing meet and greats while eating farm-to-table food in faux-rustic casual eateries!
If Clinton's 9-figure campaign couldn't get a handle on what the average American voter wants from their government, it would be downright hilarious to watch someone from Silicon Valley try. The region is so far out of touch, they aren't even on the same planet.
The problem wasn't Clinton's campaign, it was the candidate; it's amazing that a candidate that widely hated and whose negatives were rock solid from decades of political exposure still managed to get more votes than Trump, who came in with slightly higher negatives, but about whom voters had far less firm opinions.
Uh huh. Overt racism & sexism, foreign meddling, systemic disenfranchisement, Johnson & Stein pulling a Nader (+2m votes over 2012), $3b of free earned pro-Trump media, Comey’s sabotage, the electoral college, and 300k opioid addicts voting for the Big Chief were all totally irrelevant.
I'll ask the same thing I ask when people claim homeless citizens voting steals elections: why do you think opioid addicts do not have the right to vote? If they registered legally, why shouldn't they have the right to vote like everybody else?
I’m for 100% enfranchisement. No taxation without representation.
I mention the opioid addicts specifically because their poster child Rush Limbaugh is a hard core fruit cake. I believe, but cannot yet prove, that pickling the brain turns people “conservative”, by which I mean absolutist and authoritarian.
I respect your vote. But. Elections have consequences. Voting is a chess move, not a valentines.
And any viable new third party must be grown from the bottom up. That’s just how it works. If you want more choices, I encourage you to advocate for Approval Voting (as I do). First a little, than a lot.
Look, let's consider the 2000 election for a moment: Florida was both brought within distance for theft to matter by Nader votes and actually stolen, resulting in the Bush victory. But the only reason the results, in Florida or nationally, were close enough for any of that to matter was because the Gore made the incredibly moronic choice not only fail to leverage the fact that he was Vice President to the most popular outgoing President in the history of polling, but to top that off my spitting in the face of that with the Vice Presidential pick.
Similarly, yes, all those things you mention were part of the context in which the 2016 election occurred but they were decisive only because that Democrats picked the weakest possible candidate, with higher unfavorable ratings than any previous major party nominee, firm unfavorability because of decades of national political exposure, and relatively little experience as a candidate in electoral politics (having only served a couple terms as a Senator in a heavily-selling state coming in onethe coattails her husband's Presidential popularity; she'd never been in a campaign where she needed more than the approval of the Democratic establishment to win.) Clinton had the worst negatives that can come with long political exposure, without the strengths that come from long and relevant electoral politics experience.
And, no, it's not her fault, it's the Democratic establishment's fault. Clinton didn't have the choice to be herself or be someone else, the Democratic establishment did have the choice not to decide to go all in for Clinton even before other candidates were declared.
Mostly agree about 2000. I mostly blame Liebermann. And the Supremes.
re HRC and the DNC... That’s just not how it works. There is no monolithic “Democratic Party”. Just loose coalitions of power centers, big and small, that brand themselves as “Democrats.” And 1/2 of “party politics” is always the candidates parasitic relationship with the various interest groups, making promises to earn endorsements and contributions, to be forgotten once elected. Use them and then disgard them. There is nothing (comparable to the right) on the left where elected are held accountable to their constituents.
If voters want more choices, then they have to lower the barriers to entry, by (greatly) reducing the cost of campaigns. Public financing, restore fairness doctrine, time box campaigns season, universal voter registration, compulsory voting (most campaign money on the left is spent on GOTV), etc.
The conventional wisdom is that Bernie would have won the general election. I disagree with that - it's wishful thinking. His ideas might be palatable inside the democratic party, but I think he would have hard time pushing his ideas in the states that mattered.
His ideas might be palatable inside the democratic party, but I think he would have hard time pushing his ideas in the states that mattered
Sanders did better in primaries that allowed people outside the Democratic Party to vote and was throughout the election seasons (and remains, as of the last pollI saw earlier this year) the single most popular national political figure in the country. Every objective indication is that he would have done better than Clinton in “the states that mattered”.
In any case, much as one might prefer policy ideas to be decisive, elections are less about policy ideas and more about soft personal factors than people like to think.
Will never know. Keep in mind that only 28.5% of voters participated in primaries, so I am not sure the open primaries reasoning holds water. Plus, Trump also won more primaries when they were open. Precisely twice as often. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/22/trumps-big-advantage-open-pr...
Plus, Bernie wasn't attacked because of his policies because HRC's were similar. He would have been in the general election.
Yeah, but did you see Meg's campaign for governor? She spent a crapload of money and really didn't connect with the voters at all. I don't think she's a natural politician.
You think that the person who created the system that controls most middle-aged Americans news and emotions doesn't have a handle the electorate's feelings?
The systems they build and own might have a handle on the feelings of the electorate, but the people don't. Zuck builds walled hundred million dollar mansions on "stolen" land in Hawaii, while the people he "stole" it from complain about it on Facebook. Its one thing to know what people are mad about; its another to empathize and try to fix it, and you can't fake empathy. People see right through it.
I disagree partly, faking empathy and goodwill is a cornerstone of manipulation in politics. However, I agree it's not a long-term strategy and over the medium-term (months not years) people will learn to see through it. Some people are more transparent than others in this regard.
I think people could be persuaded to overlook the negative Silicon Valley sentiment if they believed the candidate knew how to make money and do good deals and improve their lot in life. Pretty much the "Yeah but..." argument I have heard from people who voted for Trump.
The press is doing a good job of highlighting the shortcomings and flaws of the Silicon Valley elite, but enough voters in the right places have shown they don't trust the press.
Of course, anyone coming from the Silicon Valley elite is going to have answer the question of how they are going to create new jobs... which would be interesting to see.
10 figure campaign. Total spending on Hillary Clinton 2016, at all levels and by all sources, was at least $1.7 billion. They spent $1.2 billion just trying to defeat Trump and half a billion dollars versus Sanders in the primary.
It's interesting that you bring this up, because she gave a quite politically charged speech at my graduation ceremony (CMU '17).
She made a lot of subtle jabs at the Trump presidency by referring to their dishonesty towards the public, then turned around and gave a generic "stop acting like snowflakes" bit that I felt was a little too broad.
Perhaps a week later, the latter part of her speech popped up on a right wing FB page with a clickbaity caption kinda like "HP CEO TELLS SNOWFLAKES TO GROW UP" or whatever. Curiously, the seemingly anti-Trump part wasn't mentioned at all.
She was an MBB consultant turned manager turned startup CEO one-hit wonder. Although I do remember seeing the “supercar showroom” parking lot on the west side of Grelands Drive around the corner from where I lived everyday as one bookend of the dot-com era. To her credit she incubated the PayPal mafia and inflicted Teletubbies on America.
You say that like you are insulting her, but to most people in the world, "MBB(?) consultant turned manager turned startup CEO one-hit wonder." would be the best thing that happened to their life. Your description is someone who is very good at running businesses.
She may be smart and a great communicator, but eBay was a rocket ship and is a shadow of what it could have been and there was no turn around story at HP. MBB folks are often perceived as the smartest people in the room, but their ability to see around corners and to be an entrepreneur —- that I’m not sure she demonstrated.
It really has been amazing to see the momentum building with people speaking out against aggressors. I wonder when critical mass will be reached in terms of when people feel that there's little negative consequence to sharing stories of harassment.
Sorry to be a cynic but the likely next phase will be a spate of false accusations and then a backlash. The so far largely credible victims have been receiving a great deal of well deserved attention, but attention is a profound motivator for some people; certainly enough that they'll make things up.
We're in the midst of the storm just now... In the last 48 hours we've seen Charlie Rose implode and Pelosi call for investigations of Conyers. In the last few hours John Lasseter ended up in the spotlight and got LOA-ed out of Disney. It's too early yet, but at some point an accuser will emerge with provably false claims against a popular and sympathetic figure and the worm will turn.
You're leaving out the part of the story where all of the accusers were slammed as liars for years until they were suddenly believed by the general public in the face of overwhelming mass testimony.
Only two of the scandals involve recently disclosed assaults.
So, maybe it will happen as you say. I predict it won't be widespread. There will likely be another Duke, but it'll be isolated.
It’s already happening. George Takai’s accuser seems to not be believed. Also Al Franken’s accuser backed off when the photos of them hanging out being friendly came out along with a ton of witnesses who said they saw the two being friendly the whole time.
Al Franken’s accuser backed off when the photos of them hanging out being friendly came out along with a ton of witnesses who said they saw the two being friendly the whole time.
AFAIK there's a well-known phenomenon of victims later being friendly with their attackers. In general, it doesn't disprove the allegation (I don't know the details about Franken).
Based on my poor knowledge of it (and in the absence so far of anyone who knows more), it comes from the desperate need for safety by traumatized people (i.e., those in the fight / flight / freeze state), any way they can get it. That includes by later trying to placate their attackers and checking if the attacker is friendly (or safe). Remember, often attackers are someone the victims previously knew and trusted and then that trust was horribly violated, leaving the victim feeling utterly defenseless (i.e., dependent on the attacker's good will).
I thought so too because I remember hearing rumors about such things years ago and wondered if maybe the focus was moving towards woman now with this whole thing.
I don’t know why oracle would want it. Since buying sun the share and recognition of sun hardware is even less than the lowest point since sun owned sun. I haven’t seen a sun box in over a decade. Except eBay.
I guess oracle has the cash to just buy it to lessen competition? IBM I thought was focused on power like they always are but never do anything with it. It’s still damn near impossible to find a power 8 vendor.
So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them.
I guess oracle has the cash to just buy it to lessen competition?
So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them.
These two statements are at complete odds with one another. The only reason Oracle buys anyone is to kill competition against themselves - they are the penultimate 600 pound gorilla in the Enterprise Software space, with eyes on Microsoft's fast approaching taillights.
They bought Sun because it was the easiest way to get to MySQL. They wanted to buy MySQL because they thought that they could kill their single largest market competition in the FOSS database world simply by strangleholding it the same way they do with their other database products - fortunately it was protected by the GPL long before they got their hands on it. But the list goes on for as many companies as you can name that Oracle has acquired - Oracle is where tech goes to die, and where tech laborers go to retire.
And in some ways, that's okay. It's healthy for the market to have trusted, long term minded players - enterprises love companies like Oracle because they know what to expect. Big price tags, but phone support and a deep ecosystem of people skilled to fix and deploy their junk. It's healthy for employees not to be looking over their shoulders and hoping Wall Street's next sneeze doesn't put them on the bread line. It only becomes unhealthy when Oracle uses its multibillion dollar cash reserves to stomp the life out of a market because it can no longer compete against it.
But, all of that said, the argument as to why Oracle might want to pick up HPE is a bit dull, I must admit. Unless they want to go for a complete vertical integration play and make it so you have to also buy their hardware to run their database engines, I can't imagine anything sticking. I also can't imagine that play working without regulators crying Unfair Competition, even with the current state of the DOJ and the constant hum of megamergers being rubberstamped. But HPE is not currently a competitive threat to... anyone? Oracle buying HPE would be a very long winded mercy killing, just like Sun.
(obligatory "my words, not my employers, yadda yadda")
No. Oracle bought Sun for control over Java, and its (ailing) Enterprise datacenter marketshare to cross sell into. Having done Sun I don't think there's anything to gain by acquiring HPE (but maybe there's a low enough price which is right.)
Re:MySQL was an inconvenience to Oracle in the Sun deal, not an acquisition target. PostgreSQL was/is a stronger OSS competitor to their DBMS tbh, due to its closer feature parity, especially PL/pgSQL - and no sign of them sponsoring (controlling) that project.
That 51 MILLION $ golden parachute must be really nice. Now she gets to go to a new place and do this all over again.
Whitman would get nearly $91 million if HP gets acquired – more than double her peers – and $51 million if she's forced out (not fired for cause) – again, nearly double.
It's kind of amazing to me that there would be a bonus tied to being acquired. That would motivate the ceo to not act for the long term benefit of the company.
Shareholders are more than happy to carve up their company and feast off its remains if they come out ahead financially, and once you go public, they're all that really matters.
The new American Dream. Get to C-suite as quickly as possible, offshore as much as possible. Even if none of your "strategic" read consultancy driven plans work out, ka-ching! F-U money for life.
eBay is a shadow of what it could have been, and so I really can’t compliment her on her tenure there. She was on a rocket ship and took it to the moon instead of to mars. HP on the other hand was as tough as a gig as Yahoo. I don’t know how you turn around a company like that. HP is a zombie company living off of its legacy.
I was at HP during the Carly years and I would say that between her and Hurd, anything that made HP anywhere close to special was destroyed by indiscriminate financial engineering. During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers.
Our lab, which was one of the best places that I can look back on in my career, had been acquired by HP. Their messing about, sending us various failures as 'senior management' resulted in it draining all of its good people to companies such as Microsoft, Google, and etc. It was a terrible shame. Edit: I guess I was trying to say that HP legacy has been destroyed pretty good by all the mergers, cuts, 'retirements', etc.
Which is a good example of how good technology gets destroyed by management.
Watching Modula-3 from the outside, I saw DEC Olivetti being acquired by Compaq, followed by HP buying Compaq.
Nowadays their research results at HP Labs still lives on an HPE server that might eventually be turned off one day, leaving those of us that downloaded the papers as the sole owners of such copies. :(
EDIT: For those that might want to get those papers, search for HP labs, DEC and SRC.
During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers
This is a hallmark of the Telecom industry where Carly came from. Haven't spent many years there, I knew it was doom for an old tech executive to come to new tech.
During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers.
And it's not just the employees they're annoying.
I went to download a BIOS update for an old HP server last week. They wanted a support contract. The thing is ten years old, it's not in production, I'm just using it to test some hard drives.
When did companies forget how easy it is for a customer to scratch them off the vendor list?
I prefer that story! It leaves me with a picture of Dave and Bill paddling away quickly with a boat full of oscilloscopes (even though this was after their time)
Meg Whitman joined eBay when it had 30 employees. Even if it ended up worth tens of billions of dollars instead of hundreds of billions of dollars, I think she really deserves a lot of credit for its success.
HP over the last 10 or 15 years has been a complete mess. When Meg came on board she was determined to turn HP into a consumer electronics company, the way Carly had envisioned, so it's ironic that when they split into HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services, she went with the later.
It's really a shame what has happened to that company and how all of the parts of HP that made up it's soul were sold off for not being profitable enough. What we have now is just another bunch of Me-Too companies that do shame to the Hewlett-Packard name(s).
How do you turn around a hardware company, you dont. But it wont die either ... software rises and falls like a deritive stock, but hardwate is like the gold tgat is always good to have a stake in
My suggestion would be to become the mysql of hardware, be compatible with everyone, what if an hp could go from pc to mac? We have never had that direction. Impossible you say? That why theres profit , the market doesnt have it yet. (Mac to pc is there)
Cheaper hardware , but same env. Make it worth apples wild. Hp seems to have good salesmen and bizz connects. Big contracts are not just about tech.
Hewlett-Packard (known for (school/desk) calculators, PC printers, chips and computer) bought Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) (known for server, mini computer) and Compaq (known for desktop and notebook computer).
All three companies were in good shape, especially Hewlett-Packard and Compaq (one of two biggest PC¬ebook manufacturers).
Hewlett-Packard went all downhill in the 2000s onwards with changing CEOs doing greedy decisions and lackluster products and quality. It got worse in 2010s, and the company split to HP and HPE - now it's confusing for customers which company is responsible for what, e.g. HP "ePrint" iOS app (companion app for HP printer) is now owned by HPE and requires an enterprise login, whereas the consumer version got forked by HP and has to be discovered under a different name in AppStore. The network switches, notebook, printer, companion-software, keyboards, server storage, (most got renamed) and worse in every aspect. Yes Meg Whitman and the other CEOs (of both HPE and HP in 2010s) were bad.
I don't know much about her and why she's leaving, but I do remember her from two years ago or something when she announced, with quite a fanfare, "The Machine". I was excited about that, and even bought HP shares as a result.
Not long after that, HP stepped down from most of their ambitions with this thing[1]
I don't know if that explains Whitman's departure, but I would not be surprised if that was taken into account.
I dunnoh... even when The Machine was announced, it seemed like vaporware. If she was betting on that thing shipping, she's a bit crazy... and Ms. Whitman isn't crazy.
The quality of HP products appears to have gone downhill. They had a perfect reputation but the last HP Envy laptop I bought about 1 year ago had lots of problems and it kept overheating to the point that I couldn't even touch the underside of it. The fan was quite loud too. After only 7 months, the hard drive failed completely.
It had so many obvious problems, it felt like nobody had actually tried using the machine in real life.
I don't think I'll buy HP again. I've lost faith in the brand.
My current laptop is a Dell and it's a huge improvement.
In the end why was she pushed out? Was it a loss of credibility? Investors were probably happy about splitting the company. Did she lose internal credibility because she said she wasn't interesting in Uber (when she was)?
Non-paywalled: http://archive.is/jyavW
I use this as a bookmarklet to bypass some paywalls
This is genius. Can you explain how it works?
Websites don't want to block their articles from being shared on Facebook, so they allow traffic referred by FB through. That link is Facebook's warning to users that a link they clicked on will take them offsite.
It is one of the precursors to loosing net-neutrality i.e. a tax on non FB users who pay with their privacy.
If I remember correctly she said at her last HPE earnings call, "I am not going anywhere". She also stated she had much more work to do at HPE.
Now that was in response to Uber's courtship but this was so sudden you have to wonder what prompted it?
It's really not all that sudden. HPE appointed Neri as president back in June. From https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/hpe-appoints-first-... :
The move positions Neri to become HPE’s next CEO, CRN reports.
“This clearly lines up Neri to be the next in line to take the reins of HPE, there is no question about it,” Bob Venero, CEO Future Tech told CRN. “This looks like it is Whitman staying true to her statement that the next CEO of HPE would be born and bred in the HPE family.”
I've always been curious how those sorts of internal conversations go at that level at companies that size. Anyone have any insights to share?
Read Jack Welch's autobiography, very informative on the subject of internal car and successions
I've always been curious about this as well so thanks for the suggestion.
Perhaps CEOs lie to both investors and their employees.
Kind of. The manager in my team (hpe) hasn't been replaced for a few months after quitting, then the project was killed / people let go. Meanwhile, all the communication from the top was pretty much "this is an important project for us". And that's one of the reasons I'm unlikely to work in a big corp in the future.
This also happens in startups and scaleups.
Never trust the official communications, in fact you should treat them counter factually. More important, you need to be in some circle of know for highly political companies.
Why counter factually? I agree that they can be largely ignored and it's the actions that should be observed. But if things go well, some good chart will be presented, if not, some other good chart will be presented. What's the reason to go the opposite way?
If the higher ups feel the need to communicate how important X is to the company, it is usually because X is on shaky ground. If you knew nothing about X before, you know that about it now. If you think about the reasons behind why the message was communicated, rather than the message itself, you can get a lot more real knowledge out of it.
This should be a key point to surviving in the corporate world. Whenever the CEO or VP of engineering spoke, I always paid attention to what was glossed over or conveniently omitted from the official line. While I found it all somewhat distasteful and duplicitous, it's the game. As such, I occasionally found it entertaining to discern what was really being communicated to me. Most other people take these kinds of official communication at face value. Never turn off your brain at work.
You are better off not paying attention at all.
And what specific benefits did you get from this? What actionable insights did you get that your colleagues missed out on?
I've known quite a few monday morning quarterbacks/sophomore kremlinologists/cynics who would regale anyone who'd listen with their analysis of what management is really doing and (especially) what they obviously should have done. What is less clear is how this deep insight ever led to any actionable intelligence at all.
Somewhat? Manipulating your employees using lies and misdirection and then firing them should not be considered ethically acceptable.
He probably left because he learned that the project was going to be killed. Sad he didn't share that news with the rest of the team so you could all be hunting for a job while on the corporate payroll just like he did.
I know someone who was in a similar situation recently. The whole thing becomes catch-22. The manager shared his insights but was brushed off as sour grapes and biased against the company.
That said if it had caused some panic at the office the upper management might want to take steps against the said manager. So it's better not to say anything.
It could just as easily be that he was the lead cheerleader for the project and when he left there was nobody there to advocate for it, so it was first to go.
It wasn't needed. When the manager is gone and a replacement is not hired, it's pretty obvious you should start sending out CVs. Or prepare but stick around for the redundancy pay ;-)
HPE completed the divestiture of their software business to Micro Focus in September. This is the first earnings call since that completed.
Majority of the time when CEOs of major companies leave, it is because they have been asked by the board of directors to leave. This is especially true after unfavorable business/stock performance.
Since the HPE stock split, the HPE stock has lagged the Nasdaq composite index by almost 60%!
I never understood why she ever was.
She was hired as a hatchet man. A role she served well.
Huh. That's an interesting term. Thanks!
Well, she’s almost certainly been better than the previous few. There’d probably be nothing left if Apotheker had stayed.
Is she planning to run for Governor again?
More likely Senate. Feinstein is up in 2018 and the tides are turning against her. It would be a tough slog but doable. Oh and she'd have to run as a Democrat. I don't think a Republican could get elected in California in 2018.
The smart move would be to say she's switching parties because of Trump, run as a conservative Democrat left of Trump but right of the progressive wing.
I feel like 2018 is going to boil down to only whether you have an (R) or (D) next to your name, if the election in Alabama is any indication.
When people will vote for a pedophile to avoid putting a checkmark next to a (D), that's when you can give up faith in the average citizen's regard for the details of an election.
This is part of what I really like about California's top-two primary system - in a dominant-party system like we have, we end up in a situation where two candidates of the dominant party have to compete on ideology and policy, and the members of the minority party still get an equal say.
With regards to Alabama, the general vibe I've gotten is that the very large evangelical bloc in the state is conflicted - trapped between very strongly held policy preferences (especially on abortion and LGBT rights) and their views on personal morality. Moore has seen a large slide in the polls, including among evangelicals, but there are a lot that are willing to hold their noses and disbelieve for their preferred policies.
See this very interesting write-up: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-values-that-values-...
He seems to be a horrible person who’s done heinous things, but he’s not accused of being a pedophile (except on Twitter). Words have actual meanings, and using ones like pedophile outside their proper meaning reduces their value and impact.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/roy-moore-is-not-a-p...
http://time.com/5029172/roy-moore-accusers/
Your (and the author of that op-ed) opinion and my opinion of the definition of "child" differ greatly.
She fundraised for and endorsed HRC fwiw.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-whit...
A republican wouldn't even make the final ballot.
Exactly.
I don't understand the delusion that Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina are under to think they can win election to political office without ever having done so before with the charisma of a wet noodle and a mostly standard GOP platform. I hate Donald Trump who also never won political office prior to 2016 but I can comprehend his appeal to racism and promising the moon on healthcare/jobs being a drawing card. The GOP would have a better chance of picking a conservative actress who at least has charisma and can read a speech like the actor Ronald Reagan (who at least was able to win leadership of his state first). Maybe Sarah Shahi, GOP members would be able ignore her Persian heritage because of the R next to her name.
Some people think she may be thinking about running against Trump in 2020 - https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/kevin-oleary-thinks-meg-whit...
Silicon Valley is trending for like-ability about where Wall Street was in 2008. But of course she should run, as should Zuckerberg, Thiel, Altman etc because it would be a hoot watching them go down in flames.
but just imagine all the jingly-jangly campaign videos featuring $candidate doing yoga in the california sun and doing meet and greats while eating farm-to-table food in faux-rustic casual eateries!
She’d presumably be running as a moderate Republican primary challenger, so... probably not that.
If Clinton's 9-figure campaign couldn't get a handle on what the average American voter wants from their government, it would be downright hilarious to watch someone from Silicon Valley try. The region is so far out of touch, they aren't even on the same planet.
The problem wasn't Clinton's campaign, it was the candidate; it's amazing that a candidate that widely hated and whose negatives were rock solid from decades of political exposure still managed to get more votes than Trump, who came in with slightly higher negatives, but about whom voters had far less firm opinions.
Uh huh. Overt racism & sexism, foreign meddling, systemic disenfranchisement, Johnson & Stein pulling a Nader (+2m votes over 2012), $3b of free earned pro-Trump media, Comey’s sabotage, the electoral college, and 300k opioid addicts voting for the Big Chief were all totally irrelevant.
Nope. HRC was unlikeable. It’s all her own fault.
Look up "wikileaks piedpiper candidate" and decide whose fault is it
How about you just tell us.
I'll ask the same thing I ask when people claim homeless citizens voting steals elections: why do you think opioid addicts do not have the right to vote? If they registered legally, why shouldn't they have the right to vote like everybody else?
I’m for 100% enfranchisement. No taxation without representation.
I mention the opioid addicts specifically because their poster child Rush Limbaugh is a hard core fruit cake. I believe, but cannot yet prove, that pickling the brain turns people “conservative”, by which I mean absolutist and authoritarian.
How inconvenient that the minority vote of states without mass populations centers is valued.
I voted for Johnson, it was not a "Nader." If we don't like the system, then we must force pressure upon it.
States without mass population centers still get 2 senators, so they are valued, even without an electoral college...
I respect your vote. But. Elections have consequences. Voting is a chess move, not a valentines.
And any viable new third party must be grown from the bottom up. That’s just how it works. If you want more choices, I encourage you to advocate for Approval Voting (as I do). First a little, than a lot.
Look, let's consider the 2000 election for a moment: Florida was both brought within distance for theft to matter by Nader votes and actually stolen, resulting in the Bush victory. But the only reason the results, in Florida or nationally, were close enough for any of that to matter was because the Gore made the incredibly moronic choice not only fail to leverage the fact that he was Vice President to the most popular outgoing President in the history of polling, but to top that off my spitting in the face of that with the Vice Presidential pick.
Similarly, yes, all those things you mention were part of the context in which the 2016 election occurred but they were decisive only because that Democrats picked the weakest possible candidate, with higher unfavorable ratings than any previous major party nominee, firm unfavorability because of decades of national political exposure, and relatively little experience as a candidate in electoral politics (having only served a couple terms as a Senator in a heavily-selling state coming in onethe coattails her husband's Presidential popularity; she'd never been in a campaign where she needed more than the approval of the Democratic establishment to win.) Clinton had the worst negatives that can come with long political exposure, without the strengths that come from long and relevant electoral politics experience.
And, no, it's not her fault, it's the Democratic establishment's fault. Clinton didn't have the choice to be herself or be someone else, the Democratic establishment did have the choice not to decide to go all in for Clinton even before other candidates were declared.
Mostly agree about 2000. I mostly blame Liebermann. And the Supremes.
re HRC and the DNC... That’s just not how it works. There is no monolithic “Democratic Party”. Just loose coalitions of power centers, big and small, that brand themselves as “Democrats.” And 1/2 of “party politics” is always the candidates parasitic relationship with the various interest groups, making promises to earn endorsements and contributions, to be forgotten once elected. Use them and then disgard them. There is nothing (comparable to the right) on the left where elected are held accountable to their constituents.
If voters want more choices, then they have to lower the barriers to entry, by (greatly) reducing the cost of campaigns. Public financing, restore fairness doctrine, time box campaigns season, universal voter registration, compulsory voting (most campaign money on the left is spent on GOTV), etc.
Clinton’s public image and she is so unlikable we got Trump.
Funny and the DNC did everything in their power to make her their candidate over Sanders. I would have voted for him instead of an independent.
The conventional wisdom is that Bernie would have won the general election. I disagree with that - it's wishful thinking. His ideas might be palatable inside the democratic party, but I think he would have hard time pushing his ideas in the states that mattered.
Sanders did better in primaries that allowed people outside the Democratic Party to vote and was throughout the election seasons (and remains, as of the last pollI saw earlier this year) the single most popular national political figure in the country. Every objective indication is that he would have done better than Clinton in “the states that mattered”.
In any case, much as one might prefer policy ideas to be decisive, elections are less about policy ideas and more about soft personal factors than people like to think.
The opposition research against Sanders is brutal.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
Will never know. Keep in mind that only 28.5% of voters participated in primaries, so I am not sure the open primaries reasoning holds water. Plus, Trump also won more primaries when they were open. Precisely twice as often. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/22/trumps-big-advantage-open-pr...
Plus, Bernie wasn't attacked because of his policies because HRC's were similar. He would have been in the general election.
Yeah, but did you see Meg's campaign for governor? She spent a crapload of money and really didn't connect with the voters at all. I don't think she's a natural politician.
You think that the person who created the system that controls most middle-aged Americans news and emotions doesn't have a handle the electorate's feelings?
What's next? A movie star running for President?!
Ronald Reagan? The actor???
The systems they build and own might have a handle on the feelings of the electorate, but the people don't. Zuck builds walled hundred million dollar mansions on "stolen" land in Hawaii, while the people he "stole" it from complain about it on Facebook. Its one thing to know what people are mad about; its another to empathize and try to fix it, and you can't fake empathy. People see right through it.
I disagree partly, faking empathy and goodwill is a cornerstone of manipulation in politics. However, I agree it's not a long-term strategy and over the medium-term (months not years) people will learn to see through it. Some people are more transparent than others in this regard.
I think people could be persuaded to overlook the negative Silicon Valley sentiment if they believed the candidate knew how to make money and do good deals and improve their lot in life. Pretty much the "Yeah but..." argument I have heard from people who voted for Trump.
The press is doing a good job of highlighting the shortcomings and flaws of the Silicon Valley elite, but enough voters in the right places have shown they don't trust the press.
Of course, anyone coming from the Silicon Valley elite is going to have answer the question of how they are going to create new jobs... which would be interesting to see.
“Instead, we’re hard at work making you obsolete.”
Of course but I don't think they can convince the average voter - they have been concentrating huge amounts of wealth in a couple of cities.
Why would I trust them to be able to spread the wealth?
10 figure campaign. Total spending on Hillary Clinton 2016, at all levels and by all sources, was at least $1.7 billion. They spent $1.2 billion just trying to defeat Trump and half a billion dollars versus Sanders in the primary.
It's interesting that you bring this up, because she gave a quite politically charged speech at my graduation ceremony (CMU '17).
She made a lot of subtle jabs at the Trump presidency by referring to their dishonesty towards the public, then turned around and gave a generic "stop acting like snowflakes" bit that I felt was a little too broad.
Perhaps a week later, the latter part of her speech popped up on a right wing FB page with a clickbaity caption kinda like "HP CEO TELLS SNOWFLAKES TO GROW UP" or whatever. Curiously, the seemingly anti-Trump part wasn't mentioned at all.
She was an MBB consultant turned manager turned startup CEO one-hit wonder. Although I do remember seeing the “supercar showroom” parking lot on the west side of Grelands Drive around the corner from where I lived everyday as one bookend of the dot-com era. To her credit she incubated the PayPal mafia and inflicted Teletubbies on America.
You say that like you are insulting her, but to most people in the world, "MBB(?) consultant turned manager turned startup CEO one-hit wonder." would be the best thing that happened to their life. Your description is someone who is very good at running businesses.
MBB meaning McKinsey, Bain, and BCG, the Big Three of consulting.
She may be smart and a great communicator, but eBay was a rocket ship and is a shadow of what it could have been and there was no turn around story at HP. MBB folks are often perceived as the smartest people in the room, but their ability to see around corners and to be an entrepreneur —- that I’m not sure she demonstrated.
So, her foray into China with eBay was a case study of 'how-to" or 'how not to' expand into a new market? #CrocodileInTheYangtze
It certainly has been interesting being a customer of HPE's software business (now MicroFocus) over the last few years.
Is it sad that my first thought at seeing the headline was to assume she was one more person falling on their sword after sexual assault accusations?
What a world.
Same here unfortunately.
It really has been amazing to see the momentum building with people speaking out against aggressors. I wonder when critical mass will be reached in terms of when people feel that there's little negative consequence to sharing stories of harassment.
Sorry to be a cynic but the likely next phase will be a spate of false accusations and then a backlash. The so far largely credible victims have been receiving a great deal of well deserved attention, but attention is a profound motivator for some people; certainly enough that they'll make things up.
We're in the midst of the storm just now... In the last 48 hours we've seen Charlie Rose implode and Pelosi call for investigations of Conyers. In the last few hours John Lasseter ended up in the spotlight and got LOA-ed out of Disney. It's too early yet, but at some point an accuser will emerge with provably false claims against a popular and sympathetic figure and the worm will turn.
It's just the way of things.
You're leaving out the part of the story where all of the accusers were slammed as liars for years until they were suddenly believed by the general public in the face of overwhelming mass testimony.
Only two of the scandals involve recently disclosed assaults.
So, maybe it will happen as you say. I predict it won't be widespread. There will likely be another Duke, but it'll be isolated.
LOA?
My guess was leave of absence.
It’s already happening. George Takai’s accuser seems to not be believed. Also Al Franken’s accuser backed off when the photos of them hanging out being friendly came out along with a ton of witnesses who said they saw the two being friendly the whole time.
AFAIK there's a well-known phenomenon of victims later being friendly with their attackers. In general, it doesn't disprove the allegation (I don't know the details about Franken).
Based on my poor knowledge of it (and in the absence so far of anyone who knows more), it comes from the desperate need for safety by traumatized people (i.e., those in the fight / flight / freeze state), any way they can get it. That includes by later trying to placate their attackers and checking if the attacker is friendly (or safe). Remember, often attackers are someone the victims previously knew and trusted and then that trust was horribly violated, leaving the victim feeling utterly defenseless (i.e., dependent on the attacker's good will).
I thought so too because I remember hearing rumors about such things years ago and wondered if maybe the focus was moving towards woman now with this whole thing.
I would expect HPE to get bought by Oracle or IBM at some point in the next few years.
It's already dumped a lot of it's stuff to Micro Focus.
I don’t know why oracle would want it. Since buying sun the share and recognition of sun hardware is even less than the lowest point since sun owned sun. I haven’t seen a sun box in over a decade. Except eBay. I guess oracle has the cash to just buy it to lessen competition? IBM I thought was focused on power like they always are but never do anything with it. It’s still damn near impossible to find a power 8 vendor.
So I guess I just don’t see any reason for oracle or ibm to buy them.
For their sales and support contracts to a very large percentage of medium size businesses.
These two statements are at complete odds with one another. The only reason Oracle buys anyone is to kill competition against themselves - they are the penultimate 600 pound gorilla in the Enterprise Software space, with eyes on Microsoft's fast approaching taillights.
They bought Sun because it was the easiest way to get to MySQL. They wanted to buy MySQL because they thought that they could kill their single largest market competition in the FOSS database world simply by strangleholding it the same way they do with their other database products - fortunately it was protected by the GPL long before they got their hands on it. But the list goes on for as many companies as you can name that Oracle has acquired - Oracle is where tech goes to die, and where tech laborers go to retire.
And in some ways, that's okay. It's healthy for the market to have trusted, long term minded players - enterprises love companies like Oracle because they know what to expect. Big price tags, but phone support and a deep ecosystem of people skilled to fix and deploy their junk. It's healthy for employees not to be looking over their shoulders and hoping Wall Street's next sneeze doesn't put them on the bread line. It only becomes unhealthy when Oracle uses its multibillion dollar cash reserves to stomp the life out of a market because it can no longer compete against it.
But, all of that said, the argument as to why Oracle might want to pick up HPE is a bit dull, I must admit. Unless they want to go for a complete vertical integration play and make it so you have to also buy their hardware to run their database engines, I can't imagine anything sticking. I also can't imagine that play working without regulators crying Unfair Competition, even with the current state of the DOJ and the constant hum of megamergers being rubberstamped. But HPE is not currently a competitive threat to... anyone? Oracle buying HPE would be a very long winded mercy killing, just like Sun.
(obligatory "my words, not my employers, yadda yadda")
No. Oracle bought Sun for control over Java, and its (ailing) Enterprise datacenter marketshare to cross sell into. Having done Sun I don't think there's anything to gain by acquiring HPE (but maybe there's a low enough price which is right.)
Re:MySQL was an inconvenience to Oracle in the Sun deal, not an acquisition target. PostgreSQL was/is a stronger OSS competitor to their DBMS tbh, due to its closer feature parity, especially PL/pgSQL - and no sign of them sponsoring (controlling) that project.
That 51 MILLION $ golden parachute must be really nice. Now she gets to go to a new place and do this all over again.
Source: [2015] http://www.businessinsider.com/whitman-gets-51-million-if-hp...
It's kind of amazing to me that there would be a bonus tied to being acquired. That would motivate the ceo to not act for the long term benefit of the company.
Yet common. Stephen Elop (Nokia back to Microsoft) $25m https://news.slashdot.org/story/13/09/19/1834224/nokias-elop...
Shareholders are more than happy to carve up their company and feast off its remains if they come out ahead financially, and once you go public, they're all that really matters.
The new American Dream. Get to C-suite as quickly as possible, offshore as much as possible. Even if none of your "strategic" read consultancy driven plans work out, ka-ching! F-U money for life.
eBay is a shadow of what it could have been, and so I really can’t compliment her on her tenure there. She was on a rocket ship and took it to the moon instead of to mars. HP on the other hand was as tough as a gig as Yahoo. I don’t know how you turn around a company like that. HP is a zombie company living off of its legacy.
I was at HP during the Carly years and I would say that between her and Hurd, anything that made HP anywhere close to special was destroyed by indiscriminate financial engineering. During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers.
Our lab, which was one of the best places that I can look back on in my career, had been acquired by HP. Their messing about, sending us various failures as 'senior management' resulted in it draining all of its good people to companies such as Microsoft, Google, and etc. It was a terrible shame. Edit: I guess I was trying to say that HP legacy has been destroyed pretty good by all the mergers, cuts, 'retirements', etc.
Which is a good example of how good technology gets destroyed by management.
Watching Modula-3 from the outside, I saw DEC Olivetti being acquired by Compaq, followed by HP buying Compaq.
Nowadays their research results at HP Labs still lives on an HPE server that might eventually be turned off one day, leaving those of us that downloaded the papers as the sole owners of such copies. :(
EDIT: For those that might want to get those papers, search for HP labs, DEC and SRC.
During Carleton's (Carly's real name) reign of terror, you would not be able to get office supplies at certain times of the month to make the quarterly numbers
This is a hallmark of the Telecom industry where Carly came from. Haven't spent many years there, I knew it was doom for an old tech executive to come to new tech.
And it's not just the employees they're annoying.
I went to download a BIOS update for an old HP server last week. They wanted a support contract. The thing is ten years old, it's not in production, I'm just using it to test some hard drives.
When did companies forget how easy it is for a customer to scratch them off the vendor list?
HP was going down the pan when they spun off Agilent with their original business. That was the rat leaving the sinking ship.
More like the captain breaking out of the brig after a mutiny and stealing a lifeboat.
I prefer that story! It leaves me with a picture of Dave and Bill paddling away quickly with a boat full of oscilloscopes (even though this was after their time)
If eBay is doing poorly after her departure, is it really on her?
Meg Whitman joined eBay when it had 30 employees. Even if it ended up worth tens of billions of dollars instead of hundreds of billions of dollars, I think she really deserves a lot of credit for its success.
And so she leaves the company gutted. Painful to see HP in tatters.
HP over the last 10 or 15 years has been a complete mess. When Meg came on board she was determined to turn HP into a consumer electronics company, the way Carly had envisioned, so it's ironic that when they split into HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Services, she went with the later.
It's really a shame what has happened to that company and how all of the parts of HP that made up it's soul were sold off for not being profitable enough. What we have now is just another bunch of Me-Too companies that do shame to the Hewlett-Packard name(s).
I've been saying for years that HP is where good products go to die. They've been a mess, as you said, and it's not going to get any better.
How do you turn around a hardware company, you dont. But it wont die either ... software rises and falls like a deritive stock, but hardwate is like the gold tgat is always good to have a stake in
My suggestion would be to become the mysql of hardware, be compatible with everyone, what if an hp could go from pc to mac? We have never had that direction. Impossible you say? That why theres profit , the market doesnt have it yet. (Mac to pc is there)
Cheaper hardware , but same env. Make it worth apples wild. Hp seems to have good salesmen and bizz connects. Big contracts are not just about tech.
Hewlett-Packard (known for (school/desk) calculators, PC printers, chips and computer) bought Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) (known for server, mini computer) and Compaq (known for desktop and notebook computer).
All three companies were in good shape, especially Hewlett-Packard and Compaq (one of two biggest PC¬ebook manufacturers).
Hewlett-Packard went all downhill in the 2000s onwards with changing CEOs doing greedy decisions and lackluster products and quality. It got worse in 2010s, and the company split to HP and HPE - now it's confusing for customers which company is responsible for what, e.g. HP "ePrint" iOS app (companion app for HP printer) is now owned by HPE and requires an enterprise login, whereas the consumer version got forked by HP and has to be discovered under a different name in AppStore. The network switches, notebook, printer, companion-software, keyboards, server storage, (most got renamed) and worse in every aspect. Yes Meg Whitman and the other CEOs (of both HPE and HP in 2010s) were bad.
The network switches and storage actually improved through acquisition which replaced their flagging HPE lines. Aruba & Nimble
I don't know much about her and why she's leaving, but I do remember her from two years ago or something when she announced, with quite a fanfare, "The Machine". I was excited about that, and even bought HP shares as a result.
Not long after that, HP stepped down from most of their ambitions with this thing[1]
I don't know if that explains Whitman's departure, but I would not be surprised if that was taken into account.
1. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-mach...
I dunnoh... even when The Machine was announced, it seemed like vaporware. If she was betting on that thing shipping, she's a bit crazy... and Ms. Whitman isn't crazy.
https://www.labs.hpe.com/the-machine perhaps you should've just waited.
The quality of HP products appears to have gone downhill. They had a perfect reputation but the last HP Envy laptop I bought about 1 year ago had lots of problems and it kept overheating to the point that I couldn't even touch the underside of it. The fan was quite loud too. After only 7 months, the hard drive failed completely.
It had so many obvious problems, it felt like nobody had actually tried using the machine in real life.
I don't think I'll buy HP again. I've lost faith in the brand.
My current laptop is a Dell and it's a huge improvement.
HP is pretty much three brands. Business HP, “Prosumer” HP and Consumer HP.
The first too are quite good, the last has never been great. (The Spectre x360 is great, the Envy x360... not so much)
Their printers have been terrible for a long time. Just the driver issues alone are a horror story.
In the end why was she pushed out? Was it a loss of credibility? Investors were probably happy about splitting the company. Did she lose internal credibility because she said she wasn't interesting in Uber (when she was)?
Why did it take too long?