|
| Whitman at HP? The idea distresses tech world |
| David Streitfeld / Sep 23, 2011, 00:26 IST |
|
As speculation swirled that Meg Whitman might be brought in to save troubled Hewlett-Packard, the tech world rendered a verdict: You have got to be kidding.
“The notion that HP can be fixed by adding a celebrity chief executive is laughable,” said Roger McNamee, managing director of Elevation Partners, an investment firm.
Whitman would be “an unmitigated disaster,” said Charles House, a longtime HP engineer who is chancellor of Cogswell Polytechnical College in Silicon Valley. “Her style is so arrogant, it gags.”
Against such critical backdrop, Jeffrey A Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management ranks as a Whitman booster. “It’s not a ridiculous choice,” he said. “But they could have done better.”
As the HP board — a group that includes Whitman — was considering firing the current chief executive, Léo Apotheker, Wednesday afternoon, the former eBay executive and unsuccessful candidate for California governor was said to be the leading candidate to succeed him.
Apotheker will have lasted less than a year, apparently because the board deemed his efforts at reviving the company too radical. It was the latest bout of executive turmoil at the once-staid firm.
Whitman, 55, would bring a high profile to the job, as well as some baggage. She is bit of a lightning rod in Silicon Valley, where founders are allowed to have outsize personalities but mere managers are not. She turned eBay into a rousing first generation dot-com success, but her venture into politics last year proved a costly debacle. Each vote she received cost her about $45. The Democratic candidate, Jerry Brown, who spent little by comparison, handily won.
She is now a “strategic limited partner” at the venture firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers. Her role, whatever its exact dimensions, did not prompt a lot of news. She did not return a call for comment.
After starting her career as a brand manager for Procter & Gamble, Whitman became a consultant, then had executive stints at Disney, Hasbro and Stride Rite. Her arrival at eBay in March 1998 was a sign that the first-generation internet companies were growing up and needed professional managers from outside the industry to prosper.
Over the next nine years, Whitman took the fledgling auction site from a few employees to 15,000. Revenue grew from less than $100 million to nearly $8 billion. She oversaw two major acquisitions — the online payment firm, PayPal, a good idea, and the internet telephone company, Skype, which was not.
But eBay, like that other sensation in the first dot-com boom, Yahoo!, seemed to stall in the middle of the last decade. Grand plans to extend the site’s dominance into local commerce went nowhere. Wall Street noticed; its stock has been flat for years. How much of this is Whitman’s fault is a matter of debate.
She left in 2007 with a fortune exceeding a billion dollars. She then decided to run for California governor, an unusual move for someone who was revealed during the campaign to have rarely bothered to vote. She won the Republican nomination but had a great deal of trouble articulating her vision for making the state solvent again. The campaign was marred by mishaps, including the revelation by a Whitman housekeeper that she was undocumented, and Whitman had known it.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Read Business news in |  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Advertisements |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Content Guide
