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Meg Whitman to Step Down as HPE CEO

184 points| praneshp | 8 years ago |wsj.com | reply

146 comments

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[+] justboxing|8 years ago|reply
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...

[+] vfulco|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] coupdejarnac|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] rdlecler1|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] cjsuk|8 years ago|reply
HP was going down the pan when they spun off Agilent with their original business. That was the rat leaving the sinking ship.
[+] lacker|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] mathattack|8 years ago|reply
If eBay is doing poorly after her departure, is it really on her?
[+] frik|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
The network switches and storage actually improved through acquisition which replaced their flagging HPE lines. Aruba & Nimble
[+] rmason|8 years ago|reply
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?

[+] hristov|8 years ago|reply
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%!

[+] lamp_book|8 years ago|reply
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.”

[+] fullshark|8 years ago|reply
Perhaps CEOs lie to both investors and their employees.
[+] KevinEldon|8 years ago|reply
HPE completed the divestiture of their software business to Micro Focus in September. This is the first earnings call since that completed.
[+] pcl|8 years ago|reply
Non-paywalled: http://archive.is/jyavW
[+] m-p-3|8 years ago|reply
I use this as a bookmarklet to bypass some paywalls

  javascript:window.location="https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href);
[+] 1024core|8 years ago|reply
Is she planning to run for Governor again?
[+] jedberg|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] grondilu|8 years ago|reply
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...

[+] cbsmith|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] jondubois|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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)

[+] dreamcompiler|8 years ago|reply
Their printers have been terrible for a long time. Just the driver issues alone are a horror story.
[+] cptskippy|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] hkmurakami|8 years ago|reply
And so she leaves the company gutted. Painful to see HP in tatters.
[+] mathattack|8 years ago|reply
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)?
[+] jackvalentine|8 years ago|reply
It certainly has been interesting being a customer of HPE's software business (now MicroFocus) over the last few years.
[+] himom|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] nickpeterson|8 years ago|reply
I would expect HPE to get bought by Oracle or IBM at some point in the next few years.
[+] X86BSD|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] codefined|8 years ago|reply
It's already dumped a lot of it's stuff to Micro Focus.
[+] Cyberdog|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] _m8fo|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] shard972|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] Tade0|8 years ago|reply
Same here unfortunately.
[+] CrackingYz|8 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] dang|8 years ago|reply
This sort of personal attack isn't allowed here because, irrespective of the person at issue, it degrades discussion. We've banned this account.
[+] adamnemecek|8 years ago|reply
I never understood why she ever was.
[+] ProAm|8 years ago|reply
She was hired as a hatchet man. A role she served well.
[+] rsynnott|8 years ago|reply
Well, she’s almost certainly been better than the previous few. There’d probably be nothing left if Apotheker had stayed.
[+] iteriteratedone|8 years ago|reply
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.