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First Yahoo, Now Hewlett Packard: Board Said To Weigh Apotheker Ouster, Shares Soar
When all else fails, scapegoat, which in corporate America means fire your CEO. According to a headline from Bloomberg right now, HPQ (and soon many other companies) will follow Yahoo in dumping its CEO, Leo Apotheker. The result: a surge in the stock. Our question: will Leo draft his "WTF" letter from an iPad as well? Expect the Netflix board to "spin off" its CEO next.
From Bloomberg:
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ)’s board plans to meet to consider whether to oust Leo Apotheker as chief executive officer after less than 11 months on the job, two people familiar with the matter said.
Under a scenario being considered, Hewlett-Packard’s directors may appoint former EBay Inc. (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman as his successor, possibly on an interim basis, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t public.
If the board carries through on the plan, Apotheker, 58, would depart after slicing sales forecasts three times since he became CEO in November and presiding over strategy shifts that left shareholders doubting his credibility. The company’s stock has plunged 47 percent on his watch, and “investor exasperation” with management is at its highest in more than a decade, Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., said in a research report last week.
Whitman, who joined Hewlett-Packard’s board in January after a failed bid to become California’s governor last year, had a mixed record at EBay. As CEO for a decade, she took the company public and pioneered online commerce for small businesses. Yet she also failed to halt a slowdown in revenue growth and overpaid for Skype Technologies SA after a three-way bidding war with Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc.
Pressure on Apotheker intensified last month after he announced a sweeping overhaul that included a $10.3 billion acquisition of Autonomy Corp. and a possible spinoff of Hewlett- Packard’s personal computer division. He also reversed course on a plan announced only five months earlier to put the WebOS mobile operating system onto the company’s computers.
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Short list of new HP CEOs:
You omitted Carly Fiorina.
Carol Bartz ftw.
You mind as well throw Bill Parcells in there. At least he knows how to turnaround bad teams..
How about Bob Uecker?
Miami Dolphins fans would disagree with you.
So would the Cowboys
atlas will shrig until the age of envy collapses under it's own weight
http://covert3.wordpress.com
Only Reed Hastings is qualified for the job, he's got the touch.
or will he use the iResign app?
He's got his tech folks trying to figure out whats wrong with his printer so he can keep a resignation letter for his file.
I vote for Bill & Dave
I think firing CEO in most cases is a correct steps. i mean how the F can you fuck up a product line
i dont think Apple "dumped" their CEO
.
not to mention thier golden parachutes...
if hpq just kept naming and firing ceo's over and over, their stock would be up 100%
Yeah, that whole being able to charge a premium because your product is better engineered than the competition thing is so overrated.
The skies are bright with reflections from horizon to horizon as the skies are filled with golden parachutes and ceos dangling with pockets brimming with cash.
Just another day in paradise.
Do stocks need a reason to soar these days ?
'The shares 'soared' from 22 to almost 24'? Wow, Im completely underwhelmed.
Almost back to 2009 lows!
Apotheker's an idiot, but let's not forget who gutted one of America's great companies--Fiorina & Hurd.
let me be the first to say, "Yahoo."
Ahh, the go-go 90s.
just another golden parachute to fund, makes everyone happy.
sorry , didnt think i punched save twice, but tubez says otherwise.
Where they really got hammered is with the employees not getting first shot at the Touchpad at the $99 and $149 price point. They offered it to the public before the employees knew anything about it and ran out of stock. I know a few HP folks and they said every employee in the company was furious they did not get a chance to buy them before the public.
OMFG if I didnt get first dibs on a Touchpad for $149, I'd definitely pull a Milton Waddams and burn the fucker down!
Not to worry, they'll be giving them away as parting gifts when they commence layoffs.
I bought one from HP the day before they closed orders on August 22nd. I heard that those orders were only possible because fo an employee error of not shutting down 32 GB orders. I heard the employees got some of the left-overs from the last manufacturing run to satisfy the manufacturers and those customers who ordered after the product was sold out. In short it was a cluster fook. You can still buy one from the idiots, (market savy), on ebay.
Tyler, I am with you 98% of the time but "Steve Jobs being dumped" is just plain wrong. The man, no matter how you feel about him personally, turned a company around and made it one of the most profitable and successful companies on the planet. And the fact that he is most probably dying from his cancer and other medical problems and has stepped down on his own, is far from being "a CEO that was dumped". My guess is he has less than 3 months to live.
You're giving away your ignorance. Steve WAS dumped. The company didn't turn around until after he came back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
1985. Might have been before you were born?
We are not talking about 1985 but last month DC as I interpret the post.
Can we fire the CEO of corporate America? Today please.
Spin off Obama, sounds good.
The US IS a corporation.
The President IS the CEO. Bush Jr. was not kidding. He let out a lot of truths under his gee whiz, aw shucks exterior.
Truth about America
auf Wiedersehen, bitchez!
They should opt for "no ceo" then use the millions they would have paid him/her to buy back stock.
Acquiring Palm, then releasing touchpad with a lousy HW and then to shelf the entire platform and WebOS was a loooussssy decision. He needs to be fired.... Nothing less will do. It is not scapegoating it is firing for sheer incompetence and poor judgement...
To be fair, HP acquired Palm before the acquired Apotheker.
True, but it was Apotheker who said that WebOS was going to be on the phone, tablet, PC, etc. etc.. and then in a matter of months killed it. It is also under Apotheker's direction that they killed their PC business. You don't announce you are evaluating strategic alternatives that may take 12 - 18 months to finalize. Who is going HP PC's now for their Windows 7 deployments? I think IBM basically announced that they sold their PC business to Lenovo (after a few days of rumors).
No argument there. And for the record, I'll be glad to see him go. I just hope he gets the boot before next Friday, so he gets the "less than a year" brand of shame.
Anyone considering anything beyond 'stock price' that Yahoo and HP simply just suck and are out-dated?
Whats next, a story about AOL CEO being oustereded?
Thanks for the discounted Touchpad Leo.
Carly Fiorina and Aglient spun the brains out of HP. Whittman ruined ebay, screwed up Playschool, puched stride rite.. Screw wall street and bring in engineer... that knows how to source technology and get the pencil out of the a$$ on development. These clowns are unreal.
The market cannot forever blame HP Management. There is something wrong with the culture at HP. The people who work at HP are spoiled brats who have been selling printer cartridges for far too long. HP is a victim of politically correct bigness, where there are women in simpleton positions like marketing and management, accounting, HR and legal, where they are quite able to simply destroy value as they freeload on the true innovators. This is endemic at American companies. Just like America had to prove to itself it wasn't racist, by electing Obama, many corporations have to prove to themselves they are not bigots, by promoting women unjustifiably. Well, this the the outcome. It's not a referendum on all women. There are a few standouts who pull their weight. It is also not a call to return to the good old days. Men have had their far share of cronyism and non-productivity. It's simply to say that social engineering, in any environment, be it corporate, education or goverment, simply doesn't work. HP would be fine if a lot of useless people there were fired. As it is now, the company should be renamed HR.
Of course you are correct, but they will hate on you for saying so.
I would have purchased one of those $100 touchpads but I have no use for one. You can't eat em and they don't have any Au or Ag in them.
I'm gonna install Windows 8 on mine. Or it can sit there displaying my family photos.
News of firing the CEO just crams a whole lot of headlines in the news feed so the stock jumps. Just like when 100 law firms say they are going to investigate a corporation, the stock soars. Then after the algos have pumped the stock the insiders can dump their shares.
HP is a lost corporation, everyone should get out now. They aren't very good at printers anymore, they aren't very good at computers, and somehow they will be good at software?
Maybe Google should buy them so they can add another hardware arm along with Moto and they get a printer business as well for all that cloud printing. I'd rather have a Googlepoly than an Applepoly any day. At least Google doesn't seem interested in gouging consumers and is actually trying to lower the cost of computing. There is that privacy thing with your information, but who are we kidding there is no such thing as privacy anymore. At least let me pay less to have my privacy invaded.
Interest rates not far from WWll rates. The absurdity of it all.
Netfux is history.
They have the kiss of death upon them.
All they had to do was nothing at all, instead they sliced their market cap in half and both sides will sink into the bowels of "nobody saw it coming" history. It's been a while since I've seen a [former] growth company roll its shareholders, customers and employees up in a joint and watch the competition smoke it.
Mr. Hastings deserves a failed company with his name on it. All the hype to subscribers crying about having to pay to supersize their meal and not a peep to shareholders. Wow. That in itself is all one needs to know.
Netfux RIP, maybe someone will author a case study about them, but I doubt it.
As soon as the Darwin award is presented and the burnt shareholder leprosy wears off expect to see Netfux as an acquisition target.
I don't know about HP, but I do know about Microsoft. If the board grew some balls and fired Ballmer (and all his cronies), the stock would soar.
Obummer, CEO of America
Hi everyone.
I just wanted to let everyone know I just got fired over the phone by the board.
Thanks to all who was on my team which successfully wound down our WebOS strategy. I couldn't have done it without you.
Plus a special shout out to same said board who approved the purchase of the PALM OS which HP used to develop WebOS. And hired the marketing folks who did such a great job in marketing the product and the hardware team who saddled it with shit specs and the accountants who priced it way to high for what you got.
Leo Apotheker
sent by HP Touchpad
a new handy way to stimulate economy: fire some CEOs every 3 months!
someone tell BofA and Goldman how to fix their prices