Fear and Loathing at HP

[unixronin]

The Register reports that HP has slipped completely off the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, on which it was in 10th place when Carly Fiorina took over in 1999 (and that was after her predecessor had already begun the task of destroying HP and its culture that Carly is so ably completing).

It's depressing to see a once-great company destroyed by naked greed and stupidity.  Cthulhu in a merrywidow, people, Bill and Dave built HP from the ground up, kept it running for almost 60 years, and made a really great company out of it by using their heads and sweating the details, instead of blindly following the Wall Street flock.  Weren't you people fucking paying attention?

Oh, sorry, I forgot, when you have a Harvard MBA, you don't need to know dick about the company you're running or the industry it operates in, as witnessed by Carly's non-memorable predecessor's brilliant idea of discarding HP's core business for 50 of its 60 years into a spinoff, under the woeful misapprehension that the metastatic PC division operating in a cut-throat market with razor-thin margins was HP's core business.  (Yeah, the PC division that doesn't even manufacture any of its own products any more, just rebrands and resells.)

Comments

three words

[mrquacker.livejournal.com]

"Boycott. HP. NOW."

A list of products and companies HP competes with should be gathered and a web site created similar to "boycotthp.[com|net|org]".

Even resellers in India - importer of Silicon Valley tech jobs - are boycotting HP and Intel (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9809). If they can do it, so can we.

Re: three words

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

DUDE. Thanks for the linky.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I've watched a lot of companies get driven into the ground by the Harvard MBA philosophy. (And worked for a few on the way down...) It comes back to bite you eventually. Like "offshoring" jobs for some short-term greed will come back to bite folks, eventually.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup. The idea that nothing is more important than the bottom line on this quarter's balance sheet is destroying American industry from the inside.