[GPSCC-chat] "Killing the competition"

[alexcathy at aol.com]

Dear Green Friends, 

This post is a follow-up on a thread begun last week when Gerry Gras posted a link to a "Harper's" article on "Killing the Competion." 

It is a damning commentary by Adam Hartung at (of all places) Forbes Magazine about Meg Whitman and 10 years of screw-ups at Hewlett-Package. I am old enough to remember when HP was the queen of Silicon Valley. Now, does anybody remember when Ms. Whitman, the clueless 1% hack, was running for governor of California as a "Job Creator?" And how come our know-it-all mainstream media was not reporting this stuff when both Whitman and Fiorina were campaigning for high office promising to, as they like to say, "run California like a business" and Laura Wells was being dismissed as a weirdo?  

As I have said many times, the Green Party up in Santa Clara and down here in Los Angeles have a special responsibility to go beyond cliches and slogans of so-called liberal Democrats in One-Party Democratic Santa Clara and One-Party Democratic Los Angeles. One of the things we must do is "blow the whistle" on all the lies of the "job creators" who, in fact, are systematically destroying California. 

Alex Walker
Los Angeles Greens 

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Posted on Forbes Magazine, May 25, 2012
HP Is Broken, And Meg Whitman's Not The CEO To Fix It
By Adam Hartung


Things are bad at HP these days.  CEO and Board changes have confused customers, the management team and investors alike.  Despite a heritage based on innovation, the company is now mired in low-growth PC markets with little differentiation.  Investors have dumped the stock, dropping company value some 60% over two years, from $52/share to $22 – a loss of about $60billion.

Reacting to the lousy revenue growth prospects as customers shift from PCs to tablets and smartphones, CEO Meg Whitman announced plans to eliminate 27,000 jobs; about 8% of the workforce.  This is supposedly the first step in a turnaround of the company that has flailed ever since spending $26billion to buy Compaq and changing the company course into head-to-head PC competition a decade ago.  But, will it work?

Not a chance.

Fixing HP requires understanding what went wrong at HP.  Simply, Carly Fiorina took a company long on innovation and new product development and turned it into the most outdated industrial-era sort of company.  Rather than having HP pursue new technologies and products in the development of new markets, like the company had done since its founding creating the market for electronic testing equipment, she plunged HP into a generic manufacturing war.
Oops! Five CEOs Who Should Have Already Been Fired Adam Hartung Adam Hartung Contributor
America's Highest Paid CEOs Scott DeCarlo Scott DeCarlo Forbes Staff
How Industrial, MBA-Style Leadership Killed The Once Great Sony Adam Hartung Adam Hartung Contributor
Meg Whitman: Leading With A "Bias For Action" Moira Forbes Moira Forbes Forbes Staff

Pursuing the PC business Ms. Fiorina gave up R&D in favor of adopting the R&D of Microsoft, Intel and others while spending management resources, and money, on cost management.  PCs offered no differentiation, and HP was plunged into a gladiator war with Dell, Lenovo and others to make ever cheaper, undifferentiated machines.  The strategy was entirely based upon obtaining volume to make money, at a time when anyone could buy manufacturing scale with a phone call to a plethora of Asian suppliers.

Quickly the Board realized this was a cutthroat business primarily requiring supply chain skills, so they dumped Ms. Fiorina in favor of Mr. Hurd.  He was relentless in his ability to apply industrial-era tactics at HP, drastically cutting R&D, new product development, marketing and sales as well as fixating on matching the supply chain savings of companies like Dell in manufacturing, and WalMart in retail distribution ...


READ MORE AT: http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/05/25/can-meg-whitman-and-layoffs-turn-around-hp-nope/ 


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