The only thing worse than keeping Meg Whitman, is firing her?
When is the world going to figure out that, as CEO’s go, Meg Whitman is a lightweight? Hewlett-Packard remains in deep trouble. Still too dependent on hardware, yet late coming to tablets. Late coming to the cloud in a big way. Recently cutting a deal to sell Foxconn low-margin servers — after IBM exited that business.
HP announced its quarterly results last Thursday and with them another, even bigger round of layoffs. The results themselves were mildly encouraging, which is to say PC sales were up and everything else was down or flat. I think it’s a problem when being a PC maker is shoring up your enterprise business.
Since announcing 27,000 job cuts in May 2012, the company has repeatedly increased the number, all the time talking about how rosy is the company’s outlook. There’s a five-year plan, don’t you know?
First, the job cuts estimate was raised to 29,000 the following September. Then to 34,000 in 2013. Now, HP says it will cut an additional 11,000-16,000 positions, bringing to total to 50,000 jobs lost. And that’s provided the bleeding as been stopped. The company claimed 317,500 workers at the end of 2013.
HP followers — and you are forgiven if you have given up on the once-mighty Silicon Valley stalwart — may remember when Whitman said the job cuts would stop. That was back when the total was 34,000.
This time, she is repeating the “no more layoffs” promise in an interview with Re/code, but it’s hard to take her seriously.
“The longer we’re here,” Ms. Whitman, who became chief executive in September 2011, said in a New York Times interview after the earnings release, “the more we realize about the business processes. It’s the normal course of business; it’s never easy.”
Does she always refer to herself in the third-person like that?
Should HP keep Whitman?
.
The only reason I can imagine HP staying with Whitman is because getting rid of her would make the company even less stable than it is today. That’s not much of an endorsement, but it’s the best logic I can find.
If you take it that I’ve never been impressed with Meg Whitman, you are correct. I don’t usually dislike CEO’s essentially on sight, but I never considered her such a win for eBay and believe she floated to HP on a reputation she didn’t really deserve. It’s hard to say her HP tenure has been a disaster, but there hasn’t been the expected improvement, either.
photo credit: tracie7779 via photopin cc
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