Ms. Fiorina

[BoSoxGal]

She's my favorite of the bunch of crazies. I'm even thinking of registering Republican so I can vote for her. Stupid batshit crazy comments about planned parenthood aside, I think she's better than most of the clowns by a wide margin. Not sure why she's not higher in the polls than nutjob Carson and wildman Trump?

[Lord Jim]

Fiorina had a pretty strong performance last night, but relatively speaking she didn't do as well as she did in the last debate where she was the clear winner...

In terms of performance points this time I would give Rubio the Gold, Ted Cruz, (of whom I am no fan) the Silver, and Chris Christie the Bronze...

I thought Trump and Carson both turned in mediocre-to-poor performances (which of course means their numbers will probably hold steady or go up )

I think Kasich made a big mistake by telegraphing his punches in advance, which enabled Trump to prepare a personal counter-attack that blunted their effectiveness...(even though everything John said was absolutely correct)

Paul and Huckabee were barely present and didn't help themselves. Huckabee got off one good line in response to one of the many really awful questions from the moderators, but Paul was completely flat.

But the big loser of the night was Jeb Bush...

He needed a strong performance to reassure his donors that he's the guy to carry the establishment GOP banner, and he got just the opposite...

The time he chose to have his "moment"... going after Rubio on a topic voters don't care about; his Senate voting attendance record... completely blew up in his face and wound up being a winning moment for Rubio...

(His only good moment was one that probably almost nobody noticed; when he asked Huckabee if his "Trump tie" was made in Mexico or China...)

I saw a couple of his supporters in the after debate discussions on the news channels looking and sounding pretty glum...

This debate may be most remembered not for who it helped as much as for being the beginning of the end of the Bush campaign....

[Econoline]

"Beginning of the end"? That was a while ago. This is more like the end of the end.

[wesw]

the most significant thing that I learned from the debate was positive.

the crowd was positively fed up with politics as usual and totally and completely fed up with biased journalism, trivial topics, and with their obvious pitting of us against one another. bravo to the crowd for their smackdown of the moderators, which left them taken aback, to my great amusement....

perhaps the electorate is not as stupid as the elites believe them to be. duh.

[Big RR]

My real concern about Fiorina is that she will do to the US what she did to HP; and that scares the hell out of me.

[wesw]

I also was happy to see some candidates refuse the bait for a change. Kasich flubbed up when he tried to make an opening statement of prepared attack, which sounded forced, and which the moderators were sure to get to anyway. he did ok after that. trump looked reasonable, for a change. carson stayed the course. cruz looked and sounded better than I had heard him do before, he may not be the devil after all..... fiorino is just not impressive to me, she certainly has a place, 1600 penn ave just ain t it. Huckabee is all one liners this cycle, Rubio seems too young and still wet behind the ears. paul is just wasting space up there.

Christie is effective as a public speaker, but he is not someone I would want to work for or would want to elect. his police state, big brother, mentality is anathema to me. the govt s main job is to defend the nation, not keep us safe..., you blubbering bully.

[Joe Guy]

The candidates defeated the moderators and made them appear very immature.

After Trump was asked if he was conducting a comic book version of a presidential campaign, I figured the moderators were more interested in trying to embarrass candidates than moderating a debate.

Ted Cruz put it best with, "The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media," Cruz said. "This is not a cage match."

The debate was fun to witness for all the wrong reasons, like it is here sometimes.

[Guinevere]

"Beginning of the end"? That was a while ago. This is more like the end of the end.

Agreed.

[Guinevere]

My real concern about Fiorina is that she will do to the US what she did to HP; and that scares the hell out of me.

Also agreed. Pay close attention to her California Senate campaign, where she was pretty looney tunes herself.

[Guinevere]

The candidates defeated the moderators and made them appear very immature.

After Trump was asked if he was conducting a comic book version of a presidential campaign, I figured the moderators were more interested in trying to embarrass candidates than moderating a debate.

Ted Cruz put it best with, "The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media," Cruz said. "This is not a cage match."

The debate was fun to witness for all the wrong reasons, like it is here sometimes.

On the other hand, Cruz chose to deflect a direct question about policy, in order to scold the moderators. Most of them avoided actual answers, to the handful of real questions they were asked. It was a disaster on both sides of the podia.

[oldr_n_wsr]

My real concern about Fiorina is that she will do to the US what she did to HP; and that scares the hell out of me.

There's always more to the story:

Carly Fiorina's controversial record as CEO, explained
In Wednesday's Republican primary debate, moderator Becky Quick challenged Carly Fiorina over her tenure as CEO of HP between 1999 and 2005. "Someone who invested a dollar when you took office had lost half of the dollar by the time you left," Quick said. "Your board fired you. I just wonder why you think we should hire you now. "

Quick is right: HP struggled under Fiorina's management and it hasn't done that well since then. But it wasn't entirely, or even mostly, Fiorina's fault. HP's poor financial results under Fiorina's tenure mostly occurred because she ran the company during a severe economic downturn.

Fiorina was certainly not as talented a CEO as peers such as Apple's Steve Jobs or Amazon's Jeff Bezos. But she seems to have been a competent and effective CEO who led HP through challenging economic times.

HP was a mess when Fiorina took over
The reality is that Hewlett-Packard was a deeply troubled company when Fiorina took it over, and she did quite a bit to turn it around.

HP had a half century of spectacular success between its founding in 1939 and the late 1980s. Under the leadership of founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the company grew from two employees to tens of thousands. It became a sprawling company with profitable businesses in electronic instruments, computers, printers, and much more.

Fiorina wasn't a CEO who made big bets

But during the 1990s, the elderly founders became less and less involved in the company (Packard ultimately died in 1996, Hewlett in 2001) and the company fell on hard times. HP had always had a highly decentralized structure, giving engineers in each of the company's many divisions a great deal of autonomy. Under Fiorina's jovial predecessor, Lew Platt, this decentralized structure was taken to extremes. And Fiorina biographer George Anders has argued that this led to a dysfunctional corporate culture:


It was easy for [employees] to regard HP as nothing more than an endless cookie jar, dispensing whatever resources employees needed to pursue their favorite interests. Increasingly, HP was being defined by the intensity of its recycling program, its community activism, and its after-hours orchestra, rather than by its commitment to win brilliantly and relentlessly in the business arena.

The result: during the late 1990s, a time when the rest of the tech industry was enjoying an unprecedented economic boom, HP lagged behind. Anders writes that in 1998, HP's sales "advanced only 9 percent, one of HP's worst showings in history."

Fiorina was a detail-oriented manager, not a visionary
The best business executives develop ambitious new visions for the companies they run — think, for example, of Steve Jobs developing the iPhone.

The least successful executives, on the other hand, are executives whose ambitious visions fail. For example, the merger of AOL and Time Warner in 2000 was an attempt to create a new kind of media company — and it didn't work at all. Combining a traditional media company with a dial-up ISP made no sense, as Time Warner was forced to admit three years later when it took a huge write-down on its AOL assets.


Fiorina loved to say that HP and Compaq "fit together like a zipper."

But Fiorina wasn't a CEO who made these kinds of big bets. She was more of a detail-oriented manager, looking for a lot of small ways to make the organizations she ran more efficient.

Even Fiorina's biggest and most controversial move — acquiring computing rival Compaq — fit this pattern. The merger wasn't supposed to help HP enter major new markets or transform how HP did business. Instead, the idea was that the two companies would be able to do the things they already did more effectively if they joined forces.

Management consultants who examined the merger for HP found that (as Fiorina loved to put it) HP and Compaq "fit together like a zipper." HP was strong in markets where Compaq was weak, and vice versa. The merged companies would be able to find some cost savings by eliminating redundant facilities and personnel. And Fiorina believed that HP needed to get bigger to go toe-to-toe with IBM in the lucrative market for corporate services, where a broad range of product offerings is essential.

Fiorina wasn't a great CEO, but she wasn't a failure either
Fiorina announced the merger proposal in September 2001, and it soon ran into stiff opposition. Bill Hewlett's son Walter opposed the deal, and he rallied the rest of the Hewlett and Packard families to his cause. After a bitter campaign, Fiorina won a razor-thin shareholder vote with 51 percent support.

The merger occurred in the midst of the 2001-3 recession, which was particularly brutal for technology companies

Hewlett's critique of the deal was simple: Compaq was primarily a PC company, and the PC business was not very profitable. By merging with Compaq and swapping stock between the companies, HP was effectively trading a share of its more profitable businesses — especially its lucrative printer business — for a share in Compaq's less profitable PC business.

Hewlett also argued that the merger would cause distractions and culture clashes that would ultimately wind up costing more than the potential cost savings.

So who was right? It's hard to say. There's little doubt that the merged company didn't achieve the lofty financial results Fiorina had projected when she was promoting the deal. And it's true that there were few profits to be found in the PC business in the years after the merger.

However, the merger occurred in the midst of the 2001-03 recession, which was particularly brutal for technology companies. HP and Compaq would have struggled even if they had stayed as separate companies. And while losses in the PC sector were bad, it's quite possible that the efficiency gains achieved in other parts of the company more than offset the increased exposure to the PC business.

One of Fiorina's critics, Andrew Ross Sorkin, asserts that "Hewlett-Packard is still recovering" from the merger. But he doesn't cite any hard evidence for this. And the same seems to be true of the many other Fiorina takedowns that have popped up over the years: they all claim she ruined the company, but it's hard to find any hard numbers to back up the the claim.

It's also true that Fiorina's own boasts about her tenure don't really stand up to scrutiny. Fiorina liked to boast that she "doubled revenue" during her time at the company, but that's largely because of the Compaq merger rather than organic growth she created. She also claims to have boosted the company's growth rate, but that seems to be the result of cherry-picking statistics.

The bottom line seems to be that Fiorina's tenure was neither a big failure nor a big success. She managed HP during one of the most difficult periods in Silicon Valley history, and was forced to lay off tens of thousands of people. That has naturally made her a lightning rod of criticism. But the evidence that she ran the company into the ground just isn't there.

The board that fired Fiorina was deeply dysfunctional
Critics have cited Fiorina's firing, which occurred about three years after the merger, as another piece of evidence that she did a poor job running HP, but the firing may be a reflection of HP's dysfunctional board more than problems with Fiorina's leadership.

We don't know exactly why Fiorina was fired. In Fiorina's version of the story, the firing came about after Fiorina reacted angrily to an anonymous board member leaking private information to the press. In her memoir, Fiorina claims the board never explained why she was being fired or gave her a chance to address her critics' concerns. And as far as I can tell, HP board members have never given a clear explanation for why they let her go.

What we do know is that the board that fired Fiorina proved to be highly dysfunctional. After Fiorina's departure, the board became embroiled in allegations that it had used legally dubious means to obtain peoples' phone records in an effort to determine the source of the leaks that had occurred in the runup to Fiorina's firing. Board chair Patricia Dunn was forced to resign in 2006 as a result of the scandal.

Of course, the fact that the board was troubled doesn't prove that Fiorina's firing was unjustified. But neither does the fact that she was fired demonstrate Fiorina was doing a poor job. The firing may have been the result of personality conflicts, less-than-stellar performance, or — most likely — some combination of the two.

And as Fiorina pointed out in Wednesday night's debate, one member of the board that fired her, venture capitalist Tom Perkins, now says he regrets the decision. In a full-page New York Times ad funded by a pro-Fiorina super PAC, Perkins argued that Fiorina had been a "transformational leader" at HP and endorsed her for president.

We shouldn't read too much into Fiorina's tenure at HP
Ultimately, I think Fiorina's performance as the CEO mostly reflects favorably on her potential to be president of the United States. She's an energetic and accomplished executive with a wealth of experience managing large organizations. Her victory in the Compaq merger fight — which required many weeks of grueling meetings and phone calls with shareholders to convince them of the deal's merits — suggest that she has the kind of political skills and work ethic the presidency would demand.

Fiorina did not have a transformational vision for HP, and is never going to rank among the best CEOs in Silicon Valley. But that's asking the wrong question — like judging Ben Carson's fitness for the presidency based on whether he was a great doctor or just a pretty good one. The real question is whether she can convince voters that she has the best vision for the country's future.

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/17/9346877/ca ... tt-packard

IMO HP never should have even become a PC maker. They should have stayed true to their roots as a test and measument equipment maker or at least the T&M division should have kept the HP name. They made the best equipement in that arena (also the most expensive, but you get what you pay for). That division spun off and became Agilent who in turn got rid of it's test and measurment part (in 2014) which is now Keysight.

[Big RR]

Well oldr, certainly there can be differing views on her tenure, but this is one of the first I have seen that said "she did quite a bit to turn it around". IMHO, the Compaq deal was a disaster, as was the overall cheapening of HP's equipment to make them competitive with the bottom of the market competitors. sure, she was there during a bad time, but so what? She clearly was hired (and paid the big bucks) to achieve results, not blame others. But IMHO her biggest failure was that she refused to recognize what made HP great, and continued with her asinine cost-cutting and layoffs (and acquiring a company that had little in common with, zipper or not) instead of fostering the inherent creativity that was in the company and encouraging them; she took prime rib and sold it as chop meat, and ended up with a gutted company that lost most of the creative people. And that is a shame.

But what I really think demonstrates the silliness of the editorial is that the author concedes that she is not a visionary, but then states the test should be "whether she can convince voters that she has the best vision for the country's future". That statement just seems ridiculous.

[Sue U]

Oh yeah, lots more:

***

But that’s not really the point, says Levy. The real point is that Steve Jobs could easily afford a kind word for Fiorina, since she’d very helpfully made him a lot of money in one of her many management debacles at HP: the sorry and forgettable “partnership” between HP and Apple that resulted in an abominable, largely forgotten technology footnote, the HP iPod. Levy knows a thing or two about that misbegotten artifact of the early Aughts, since he literally wrote the book on the iPod. Or at least, a book on it.

When the iPod was still so new and revolutionary that everyone was still gaga over it:

"[Jobs and Fiorina] made a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple’s wildly successful product. Nonetheless, HP still managed to botch things. It could not have been otherwise, really, because Steve Jobs totally outsmarted the woman who now claims she can run the United States of America."

No, kids, this piece is not going to be kind to Fiorina.

Under Fiorina’s direction, HP fudged almost everything it could in its iPod “partnership” with Apple, although the relationship sounds a bit more like the “partnership” of the USSR and its Cold War satellite states. Jobs pretty much dictated the terms under which HP would make and sell its version of the iPod, and he made sure that Apple had the better deal in every aspect of how it was rolled out. His biggest advantage was getting Fiorina to pre-install Apple’s iTunes music service on all its new computers:

"This was a hugely valuable concession. Apple had only recently begun to push this key software into the Windows world. Millions of HP/Compaq customers would instantly become part of Apple’s entertainment ecosystem.

"If it were a straight deal for HP to include Apple’s software, the fee might have been hundreds of millions of dollars … Even better, preinstalling iTunes was a way for Apple to stifle Microsoft’s competitor to the iTunes Music Store. As an Apple leader at the time puts it, 'This was a highly strategic move to block HP/Compaq from installing Windows Media Store on their PCs. We wanted iTunes Music store to be a definitive winner. Steve only did this deal because of that.'”

Levy ventures that because HP was barely making a profit on each PC it sold, the deal almost certainly created more value for Apple than it did for HP. And then there was the HP iPod itself, which never really competed with the Apple version because shortly after HP got its version on the market, Apple came out with the next generation of its iPod, with more storage and better bells and whistles. This left the HP version perpetually behind:

"Fiorina apparently did not secure the right to sell the most current iPods in a timely fashion, and was able to deliver newer models only months after the Apple versions were widely available."

At its best, the HP version never made up more than 5 percent of iPods sold. It didn’t even do well in Iran! Jobs dictated even the tiniest detail of the HP version’s design: Although Fiorina proudly showed off a pretty blue HP iPod prototype, the Apple device came only in white, and darned if the actual production models from HP weren’t white, too.

Fiorina even screwed HP beyond the end of her tenure, since her agreement with Apple committed HP to not producing a competing music player until 2006 — well past her firing in February 2005. Even after her successor ended the iPod deal in July 2005, HP/Compaq computers came bundled with iTunes until January 2006, when HP made a deal to include the Rhapsody music service:

"Rhapsody Co-chair Rob Glaser, who had observed the drama from his Seattle base, now says, “Steve and Apple fleeced HP in that deal — HP’s version of the iPod was a failure, and Apple was able to grow the iPod.”

So Fiorina made a deal to sell an HP iPod that would always be obsolete compared to Apple’s and to install software that made Apple rich. Great negotiating, Donald Trump would be proud! Anything else?

Oh yes. Levy points out that when HP bought Compaq, it acquired Compaq’s many patents on digital music player technology that Fiorina could have leveraged to HP’s advantage in negotiating with Jobs, since “she could have credibly claimed that the iPod infringed on HP’s intellectual property” — if she’d had any idea that her company owned the patents. Nope. Levy sums up:

"In short, Fiorina’s 'good friend' Steve Jobs blithely mugged her and HP’s shareholders. By getting Fiorina to adopt the iPod as HP’s music player, Jobs had effectively gotten his software installed on millions of computers for free, stifled his main competitor, and gotten a company that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was a superior inventor. And he lost nothing, except the few minutes it took him to call Carly Fiorina and say he was sorry she got canned."

Yep, that’s the brilliant business experience that Fiorina wants to bring to the Oval Office. As Levy says, it’s not an especially “encouraging precedent for a person who wants to deal with Vladimir Putin.”

Source

[Gob]

This debate may be most remembered not for who it helped as much as for being the beginning of the end of the Bush campaign....

[rubato] Evil little slave owning whoremongers, they hate America and want to enslave women and use them for breeding stock to replenish their factories with worker drones, and to sell your daughters into sex slavery.[/rubato]

[rubato]

You appear to be claiming that is a quote. Can you show where it is a quote from? That way we can see the context and better understand what it is a response to.


Otherwise, it has no relevance here in a thread where I have said nothing.


yrs,
rubato

[Joe Guy]

I see it as a rubato-like statement, not a quote. Otherwise Gob would have designated it as a quote.

yrs,
Joe Guy

[wesw]

satire is hard to understand.

yrs
explanato

[Lord Jim]

a thread where I have said nothing.

Which would describe most of the threads in which you have posted....

[rubato]

So it was just another shit-bomb echoed by the asshole chorus.


Well, that was obvious enough from the start.


yrs,
rubato

[dales]

So it was just another shit-bomb echoed by the asshole chorus.


Well, that was obvious enough from the start.


yrs,
rubato

You are a joyless little fuck.

yrs,
rubato

Always bringing the level of discourse up to your high standards, rube.