Yep, you called it first.

Here lies Robert Cringely. He was either brilliant or stupid. Sometimes he could be both at the same time. Regardless he always made his readers think. In each column he would fearlessly throw out some ideas and pay close attention to the response both positive and negative. The world could use more Robert Cringely’s.

Kudos!!

Now, Meg might be a good move-she at least has taken a company from $0 to a billion.

As to the rest of the Board – time for them all to go!

Without waiting for your next column, may I propose the following. Merge HP, Yahoo, RIMM & Nokia together and have Whitman run it into the ground. Customers can ignore their products. Stock holders can short their stock. Employees can find jobs in companies that have a clue. And the rest of us can get on with our lives.

What, H/P needs to be run by a second failed California politician???

HP needs a new CEO but also a new board with people that understand HP’s business, customers and the future of technology. The board is just not a good fit and as reported by the HYt was negligent in its duties most board members did not even bother to interview the new CEO or check his history or background. The board is made up mostly of Venture Capitalists or Private Equity specialists (Venture Capitalist (2) and Private Equity (5): Marc Andreesen: VC, Lawrence Babbio: PE, Rajiv Gupta: PE, Raymond Lane: PE, ex-EDS, Gary Reiner: PE, Dominique Senequier: PE, CEO of AXA Private Equity , G. Kennedy Thompson VC & ex-CEO Wachobvia, Shumeet Banerji ex- CEO of consulting firm Booz & Co., John Hammergen CEO McKesson Health services, Ann Livermore ex HP VP, Patricia Russo ex-CEO Alcatel-Lucent, Meg Whitman ex-CEO eBay. Ms. Sari Baldauf: ex Nokia Exec.). HP needs a board made up of people that understand the products and services that HP needs to build and sell, can identify with the customer base and can work as a team. The current HP board has proven that it’s failure on the three accounts. None of the board members has a technology or an enterprise software background which would help explain their disdain for the PC division, the exit from the iPad business, the choice of Autonomy and the overpayment. It’s unfortunate that HP is mainly owned by mutual fund companies (State Street, Dodge & Cox, vanguard, etc.) so probably no action would be taken and we will see the gradual decline of another american icon.

Leo’s plan lacked originality he wanted to mimic IBM, Oracle, & SAP’s strategy. Staying in the commodity business of printers and PCs was not a viable alternative either. Buying Autonomy was a poor choice if Leo wanted to steer HP towards software and enhance its profile among HP target customers. His main target customers are the Global 1000, and they are not clamoring for this niche software yet (Intelligent search and Machine learning). A middleware or a straight BI type company would have been a better choice but very few acquirable companies with proven technology remain in this space, most have been acquired by IBM, Oracle or SAP. Leo did not need to spin-off the PC business or exit the iPad business, he could have delegated the management of these entities to one of the many capable mangers at HP. The next HP CEO would have to cancel Leo’s decisions and start from scratch to build the future products and services that would be needed by the two converging customer segments of HP. He will also need to reinforce the research capability of HP, just like in IBM’s case HP Labs could help determine what young companies to acquire.

After reflecting back on the train wreck that was her election campaign, I think the most polite thing I could say about Meg Whitman is that she knows how to spend money.

She doesn’t know how to get results, talk to the media, inspire troops, get votes, impress people, speak in a coherent manner that gets traction or for that matter, how to get elected, but she does knows how to spend money.

Lets face it, the future for computing is going to be laptops, cell phones and notepads. These are all things Leo is trying to kill and that boggles my mind.

I do not know if HP could do any worse with Meg Whitman over Leo. However, to her credit, Meg Whitman is an over-achiever and who knows how badly she could do if inspired.

I know this is a silly question, but do I short HP stock now or a month from now?

Congratulations on being seven months ahead of everyone (particularly the HP board) on this one. A couple of lesser noticed points you made last February:

” Enterprise software right now is less than five percent of HP’s total business and that has to change if Apotheker is to survive.”
I guess Leo skimmed your column, but figured that in order to buy SAP he’d have to sell off HP’s hardware business.

“I know I am speaking early about this but that’s why I get the big bucks.”
In order to help you earn those big bucks, I just clicked on the Microsoft Office 365 ad banner that appears to the left of this column.

Here is how I see it. Apotheker made all the right moves. But he failed on the most important duty as a CEO. He didnt properly sell the vision. Im not sure how this happened. Maybe he has bad breath, who knows. Its business, this happens. Anyway, something is up, moves are already in motion. I see it as a win win. Wall street further punishes HP. Stock drops. Oracle moves in and is handed a blockbuster acquisition. Hurd gets HP back, whip in hand. Ellison gets Autonomy, the enterprise search monster. Scary? Well, then reward HP, push up the stock price. Can they capture the enterprise market? No? Feed them to Oracle.

Here is how I see it. Apotheker made all the right moves. But he failed on the most important duty as a CEO.

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