
Meg Whitman to Step Down as HPE CEO - praneshp
https://www.wsj.com/articles/meg-whitman-to-step-down-as-hewlett-packard-enterprise-ceo-1511300946
======
justboxing
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.

Source: [2015] [http://www.businessinsider.com/whitman-gets-51-million-if-
hp...](http://www.businessinsider.com/whitman-gets-51-million-if-hp-axes-
her-2015-3)

~~~
coupdejarnac
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.

~~~
cvsh
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.

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rdlecler1
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.

~~~
abawany
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.

~~~
mathattack
_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.

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frik
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&notebook 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.

~~~
edkennedy
The network switches and storage actually improved through acquisition which
replaced their flagging HPE lines. Aruba & Nimble

------
rmason
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?

~~~
briankelly
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-...](https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/hpe-appoints-first-
president-antonio-neri-22-year-hp-veteran/2017/06/) :

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.”

~~~
shostack
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?

~~~
randoramax
Read Jack Welch's autobiography, very informative on the subject of internal
car and successions

~~~
alexpotato
I've always been curious about this as well so thanks for the suggestion.

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pcl
Non-paywalled: [http://archive.is/jyavW](http://archive.is/jyavW)

~~~
m-p-3
I use this as a bookmarklet to bypass some paywalls

    
    
      javascript:window.location="https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);

~~~
digital_trench
This is genius. Can you explain how it works?

~~~
quantumwannabe
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.

~~~
heisenbit
It is one of the precursors to loosing net-neutrality i.e. a tax on non FB
users who pay with their privacy.

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1024core
Is she planning to run for Governor again?

~~~
jedberg
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.

~~~
briholt
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.

~~~
komali2
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.

~~~
djrogers
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...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/roy-moore-is-not-a-
pedophile/2017/11/19/1a9ae238-cb21-11e7-aa96-54417592cf72_story.html)

~~~
komali2
>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.

[http://time.com/5029172/roy-moore-accusers/](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.

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grondilu
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...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/207897-hp-kills-the-machine-
repurposes-design-around-conventional-technologies)

~~~
cbsmith
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.

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jondubois
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.

~~~
BoorishBears
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)

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cptskippy
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).

~~~
jlgaddis
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.

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hkmurakami
And so she leaves the company gutted. Painful to see HP in tatters.

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mathattack
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)?

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jackvalentine
It certainly has been interesting being a customer of HPE's software business
(now MicroFocus) over the last few years.

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himom
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.

~~~
goialoq
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.

~~~
rdlecler1
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.

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nickpeterson
I would expect HPE to get bought by Oracle or IBM at some point in the next
few years.

~~~
X86BSD
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.

~~~
awalton
> 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")

~~~
guiriduro
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.

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ahmetyas01
Why did it take too long?

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Cyberdog
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.

~~~
tabeth
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.

~~~
topspin
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.

~~~
jedberg
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.

~~~
forapurpose
> 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).

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adamnemecek
I never understood why she ever was.

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ProAm
She was hired as a hatchet man. A role she served well.

~~~
tormeh
Huh. That's an interesting term. Thanks!

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iteriteratedone
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.

