PC spin-off: Carly’s final goodbye
With news that Hewlett-Packard skeleton to spin off a PC business, a struggling association can finally bid adieu to Compaq, Carly Fiorina, and other bad memories from a past.
By Duff McDonald, contributor
Sorry, Carly.
FORTUNE — Hewlett-Packard, a world’s biggest mechanism maker, announced that it’s formulation to spin off a personal mechanism business and will buy a UK-based program developer Autonomy for about $10 billion. The news allowed HP batch to quarrel a catastrophic fasten for a nanosecond (up 8.3% during one point) though a shares shortly assimilated a rest of a famous universe in free-fall. They sealed a day down roughly 6%.
It’s not a startling move, even for a association that doubled down on PCs reduction than a decade ago around a 2002 partnership with Compaq Computer. Most people — yours truly enclosed — suspicion a understanding was foolish from a unequivocally day it was announced, evoking that aged chestnut, “two drunks disposition on any other to stay upright.” But Carly Fiorina, afterwards CEO of a storied record company, rammed a understanding down shareholders’ throats — shareholders that enclosed a bubbling insane Walter Hewlett, son of a company’s founder.
Fiorina got a boot from a association on Feb 9, 2005 for unwell to broach on a guarantee of a partnership — news of her ouster sent a batch mountainous 6.9%. It seems a approach to make income on HP (HPQ) is to wait for it to do something stupid, give them 5 years or so to be means to gracefully retreat course, and buy in expectation of a contingent announcement. (Let’s not even get into a whole liaison of Mark Hurd and a flattering PR lady that got him booted from HP. We’ve never really gotten to a bottom of that one, have we?)
Sure, Fiorina left HP 6 years ago, though today’s news is a genuine finish of her tenure. Yes, she was a failed California senatorial candidate in 2010, though did she ever unequivocally severely consider she’d win? On a other hand, she positively spent a lot — $5.5 million of her possess income — on her folly. (Among a ladies of technology, Meg Whitman blew distant some-more income in a gubernatorial competition — $143.6 million — though she is most wealthier than Fiorina.)
Back to HP and a shutting of a Fiorina era. Billions of dollars, tens of thousands of layoffs, and a mechanism model change after (from PC to tablet, pleasantness of Apple’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs), and one of a dumbest decisions in corporate memory is finally being unwound. You’ve got to give it to her, though: she got a tip pursuit and she done a confidant move, that during slightest done examination a association some-more fun than checking a ticker fasten on Dell (DELL) or IBM (IBM). But that still doesn’t meant a understanding wasn’t dumb.
Maybe someone should have told her that using for bureau on that kind of lane record is unfailing to be a unsuccessful gambit, even if we are a hard-nosed Republican in a state indispensable a unfortunate sip of financial discipline. Maybe someone did, and she abandoned them. And because not? Fiorina has a robe of removing credit for things over her control—her appointment to HP came after a army in sales during Lucent, which, while praised, came during an epoch when any dope with a briefcase and a compendium of telecommunications terms could have sole a few million bucks value of rigging each week.
Is Walter Hewlett — who fought tooth and spike with Fiorina — carrying a final laugh? Maybe not. The HP of currently is behind to coughing on IBM’s exhaust, after a brief pre-Carly impulse when it looked like it competence benefit a step on Big Blue.
Thanks to Carly, that idea is off a table. You’ll see her inaugurated Senator before that happens.
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