Hewlett-Packard’s Meg Whitman reverses her predecessor’s moves

The market was created by Apple. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a strong No. 2 player.
Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman • Reversing course entirely on two of former CEO Leo Apotheker’s key decisions as CEO — the departure of the tablet market (and the ensuing lulz) and the spinning off of the PC market. As for the latter, Whitman claims it would’ve been far too expensive — it would’ve cost billions and would’ve proven extremely inefficient. “If you try to hive a division off, it’s really hard because you almost have to recreate the whole thing,” she said. Will this be enough? source

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These guys are a bunch of clowns, surpassed in incompetence only by Yahoo’s board.
Ironfire Capital managing member Eric Jackson • Expressing frustration with the Hewlett-Packard board, which reportedly leaked the news of Leo Apotheker’s ousting, and subsequent replacement with former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, hours before the announcement was to be made. Not that Jackson is a big fan of Apotheker or anything. “Apotheker is the worst CEO hire in the last decade,” he says. But the problem is the process that led to his hiring — some messy rumors and an internal investigation led to the board dumping a pretty good CEO, Mark Hurd, and hiring Apotheker without even meeting him — meant that he turned out to be a horrible fit. Whitman at least has a shot at being good at this CEO thing, but the board sounds like the real problem. source

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Oracle’s Larry Ellison really dislikes HP, apparently. First, he swiped their former chief executive, who was not only good at his job, but was removed for fairly questionable reasons. (HP didn’t like that, by the way.) Now, Ellison’s company has their sights set on their new CEO, Leo Apotheker, the weirdly hired former SAP CEO. See, a subsidiary of SAP, TomorrowNow, reportedly engaged in software theft from Oracle. Oracle thinks SAP owes them billions of dollars; SAP claims it’s closer to tens of millions. Either way, Oracle has hired a private investigator to find Apotheker after HP would not accept Oracle’s subpoena for Apotheker to testify in court about the case (and Apotheker skipped an earlier trial). In other news, Silicon Valley business is pretty cutthroat. (Above: Artist’s depiction of what we think the private investigator looks like.) source

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28 Oct 2011 09:00