Sure the HP board is incompetent, but that has been true since the Compaq merger. Boards generally get stacked with yes people and the good old boys and girls. so what is really expected.

There is so much more to the Hurd ouster than meets the eye. Negotiating a new, even more lucrative, having n inappropriate relationship with a woman not his wife and being totally despised by the employees is just the tip of the iceberg here. I am sure another soap opera book in in the works.

In the meantime, the employees continue to suffer, the company image continues to suffer and in the end, the shareholders will also suffer because HP will little to offer the IT world except ink and resold products. No innovation any longer.

You have to laugh at Horowitz who stayed at HP just long enough to get his golden parachute. the Poor guy must really be suffering.

Horowitz sure comes up with a lot of nonsense, especially for a guy who has his own ethical problems of some substance. Just google “opsware and Weisel.”

I suspect Ben’s a puppet in this, having his strings pulled by Marc. But before he gets up on his own high horse again, he should be a little bit more honest about his own issues.

You were wrong to leave it out, so I had to point it out.

Fiorina valued form over function, and was followed by Hurd, who tried to manage by accounting (which you can’t do when you are in a business that is constantly evolving, like everything HP does). When you run a company where 80% of your product sales (or some other large percentage) are due to products introduced in the last two years, you cannot decimate your R&D budget. When your “brand” is dependent on being synonymous with technological leadership, you can’t cut investment to puff up your quarterly numbers as Hurd did (his sole advantage over Fiorina was his ability to manage costs beyond just cutting programs). And now the board has followed up both of these mistakes with yet another, hiring somebody with no experience is building or selling hardware, and who arrives with a resume as ethically tainted as the outgoing CEO.

I’m going with Nocera’s take on this mess, that HP’s board fired Hurd because he was weakening their long term ability to remain a factor, and were too chicken to use that excuse, but they are still incompetent fools. But why single out HP’s board? Most boards of publicly traded companies are rubber stamps for the CEO, comprised of CEOs of other companies who want the same hands-off treatment from their boards. It’s politics, just like the government (isn’t that what people want? A government run like business?)

Ask Jack how many times his company covered up problems with their engine division, risking the lives of thousands of passengers daily. Is that what the CEO of the century does, or someone who belongs behind bars?

As for the HP BOD, it’s been an atrocity for years. Carly Fiorina did a great job, and the evidence is the performance during the first few quarters after Hurd took over. That performance could not have been due to Hurd, because big companies do not turn around that quickly. Hurd’s timing was fortuitous.

Ask Jack how many times his company covered up problems with their engine division, risking the lives of thousands of passengers daily. Is that what the CEO of the century does, or someone who belongs behind bars?

As for the HP BOD, it’s been an atrocity for years. Carly Fiorina did a great job, and the evidence is the performance during the first few quarters after Hurd took over. That performance could not have been due to Hurd, because big companies do not turn around that quickly. Hurd’s timing was fortuitous.