Why Leo Apotheker will be fired from Hewlett Packard
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I don’t think Leo Apotheker is going to survive long as CEO of Hewlett Packard. This is not based on any inside information, just my own pondering. And when Apotheker does go down, I’m pretty sure I know who will take his place.
The players in this drama are Apotheker, various HP executives, and the HP board, with the important bit of information being that the board has changed substantially in composition since Apotheker was appointed last year. It’s a new board.
Leo Apotheker was a dark horse candidate to run HP. He’s German, comes from an enterprise software background at SAP, the big German software company, and has no history in hardware. All previous HP CEOs have been American, most came up through the company, and all but Carly Fiorina had clear backgrounds making and selling the kind of hardware HP is known for. Fiorina, of course, came from Lucent Technologies and sold into the telco market where HP is not a player. Still she had a background selling big iron.
That the HP board chose Apotheker wasn’t such a surprise given the mood of that board, which was trying to fight against its own bad reputation for infighting and poor conduct (hiring private detectives and unethically gaining access to board member private phone records), bad hires (Fiorina), and worse hires (Mark Hurd). That board felt they needed a new CEO who was clearly different from both Fiorina and Hurd and came from a C-level job at a leading technology company.
Apotheker certainly qualified on those terms with the only downsides being his lack of hardware experience and that he’d been fired from SAP after only seven months. But heck, he was available.
And the guy might have succeeded but for two events beyond his control — the Oracle lawsuit against SAP, in which Oracle tried to call Apotheker as a witness, and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s loss in her run for governor of California.
SAP didn’t want Apotheker to testify in the lawsuit over SAP’s admitted theft of copyrighted Oracle materials and HP didn’t want their new CEO dragged into it either. So at just the moment when new CEO Leo should have been knocking back brewskies at HP Friday beer busts, proving to the company that he was a real engineer, Apotheker was instead on the lam to avoid being served with a subpoena, orbiting in an HP jet anywhere but Silicon Valley. This hurt Apotheker and HP and didn’t help SAP all that much, either, since that company ended-up having to pay more than $1 billion in damages to Oracle.
On the chickenshit-horseshit-bullshit spectrum, Apotheker hiding from the court was definitely chickenshit behavior that probably reflected the old HP board and hopefully not the new one.
That lawsuit is history, but the damage to HP and Apotheker lingers. Now add to that HP’s weak earnings and its warning just this week of soft earnings to come and Apotheker’s position is further compromised.
Then someone remembered the SAP employee survey just prior to Apotheker’s firing there where he was shown to be distant and unpopular. And while he’s not yet viewed broadly at HP as distant and unpopular, neither is he close and popular. He’s still an enigma to most employees. And Apotheker will get no help from the HP executives who were passed-over to hire him.
Then there’s Meg Whitman, who expected at this point to have resigned from the HP board to spend all her time running California as governor. But that didn’t happen, so now what is she to do? You can only get so many pedicures. She’ll eventually get around to hip-checking Apotheker and taking his job. Meg can knock back brewskies as well as any man and will probably fill those CEO shoes even better than Apotheker.
I know I am speaking early about this but that’s why I get the big bucks.
There is only one chance Apotheker has to save his job and that’s by buying his old company, SAP. A merger would transform HP, instantly making it a power in enterprise software, much more competitive with both Oracle and IBM, and strongly emphasize Apotheker’s strengths. Enterprise software right now is less than five percent of HP’s total business and that has to change if Apotheker is to survive.
So Apotheker could make a bold move, transform the company in his own image, and save both his job and the day. But I don’t think it will happen because SAP is on a roll and getting more expensive by the day. At more than $60 billion, it’s probably too expensive now for HP to buy.
It might have worked had Apotheker bought SAP on his first day of work at HP but he didn’t know then what trouble he was in. Now it is probably too late. And while his end, I think, is inevitable, it should also be very entertaining because Meg Whitman will take out Leo Apotheker with some real boardroom flash and style.
Remember you read it here first.
I understand chickenshit as being cowardly, so what is the difference between horseshit and bullshit? Don’t they both mean lying? HP could use your help – not that I could see that happening.
So, I think the continuum Cringley presents here is based on the character of fecal material itself. Chickenshit is by nature small and by itself presents a minor annoyance but something that can usually easily be dealt with. It should be noted that in large quantities chickenshit can become a serious problem (have you ever been in a chicken coop?). As a colloquial reference Chickenshit is usually reserved for silly rules and regulations and other bureaucratic – well, chickenshit or behavior that is less than what you like to expect from yourself or someone else.
Horseshit comes in much larger chunks but is usually fairly dry, having been fully processed by the hay burner’s system. Stepping in it is not comfortable but also not dangerous. In common parlance I think horseshit is used to describe statements that might be unintentionally false, inscrutable, incorrect or crazy (see Batshit) or situations that are extremely annoying, but not insurmountable.
Where horseshit might be embarrassing, uncomfortable or inconvenient, bullshit is big and wet and slipping in it can get you seriously messed up or even killed. It refers to out and out black lies, deliberate fabrications, falsehoods and major deception; basically, big mendacity and/or serious attempts to rewrite history. That would be, almost anything coming out of Washington D.C. Good examples of bullshit would be, “Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction” or “the Gulf of Tonkin incident”. Bullshit can and does kill.
In everyday speech I think horseshit and bullshit are used interchangeably with bullshit used for frequently. For a more complete discussion see “On Bullshit”, Harry G. Frankfurt, Princeton University Press, 2005. Hope this helps.
You called it right on the dot! He’s out! Meg Whitman in!
I hope you put a tenner on that one.
How prophetic! The author definitely earns the ‘big bucks’…
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[...]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Why Leo Apotheker will be fired from Hewlett Packard – Cringely on technology[...]…
On the money! But does Meg have the same big iron background?
Bravo!! So now what’s your next prophecy on HP??
On boingboing, the story about this (Whitman replacing Apotheker) included the comment “let [HP's] deathwatch commence”… I’m inclined to agree, do you? Why or why not?
Guess you called that one!
Wow what an amazing explanation and prophecy!
Léo’s mistake was looking at IBM, and saw that HP had made some (dubious) acquisitions under Fiorina and Hurd (rhymes with…) that looked like building blocks (Compaq, EDS, and Mercury come to mind) that could lead him to out-IBM IBM.
However, there were major problems: 1) IBM knows what it’s doing; 2)a IBM z/Architecture mainframes kick the major league crap out of Intel servers for real business data processing; 2a) HP put all of its server eggs in the Itanium basket after Intel realized it was a lemon; 3) HP’s corporate culture, despite the infection by Compaq, is still about excellent printers/plotters and not so much with the computers.
I will applaud Meg if she resurrects the TouchPad. There is interest in it, just not at the ridiculous original price point. And webOS is really good. I’ll also applaud her if she cleans out the Compaq cultural remnants.
[...] leave a comment » Cringely Called It: [...]
Next prediction. Oracle to announce biggest tech merger in history (Buying HP) before summer next year (after 3 more failed quarters not helped by global financial mess).
Meg will announce 10% lay offs after Xmas.
Mark Hurd will call Randy Mott out of retirement to lead the integration.
[...] Pour y voir plus clair on peut demander à Horace Dediu (Asymco / HBR) ce qu’il pense de la stratégie produit d’HP. On peut aussi avoir une vue plus manageriale avec l’avis de Ben Horowitz. Et quand on remonte le temps, on réalise que certains avaient déjà prédit le drame l’année dernière, et pas des moindres, entre autres Larry Ellison et Robert Cringely. [...]
Unbelievable! Who in this day and age has the kahunas to make a big prediction like this and nail it! Well done sir!
Bob, you never disappoint…
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