No. 6 on “Tech’s all-time top 25 flops”: Carly Fiorina
6. Carly Fiorina. Call her the anti-Steve Jobs. During her 1999-2005 tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina proved that she could reverse decades of geek goodwill and alienate customers like no one else. She oversaw the spin-off of HP’s well-respected instruments and medical equipment business, outsourced its beloved calculator division, then issued 7,000 pink slips. Under Fiorina’s tenure, HP brought in more profits from printer ink than PCs. But she’ll be remembered most for HP’s acquisition of Compaq, among other dubious efforts to give the “stodgy” HP a more consumer-friendly face (does anyone remember the licensed iPods?).
Fiorina has stuck to the Corporate Right (as opposed to the Lunatic Fringe Right, the Xenophobic Right and all the other Rightwings that seek even the most meagre political justification for their vicious hatred of … whomever). Be interesting to watch Wikipedia’s entries on her and her doings.
newspeak 