If Carly Fiorina is McVain’s ”advisor” on the economy, we all better just tighten our belts it’s gonna be a bumpy effin’ ride. Between her and the Gramms this country will be circling the economic drain faster than a cockroach chasing a turd.

Ms. Fiorina, as some may (or may not) remember is the wunderkind CEO who managed to ruin not just one but three successful high-tech companies known for their innovation, quality products and customer service. Which companies? Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and DEC simultaneously! Quite an achievement for someone who didn’t know a CPU from a toaster (which might explain why she managed to do that…) !!!

But she walked away with a sweetheart severance package which allows her the luxury of being able to shill for a man who can’t even turn on a computer and not worry about paying her bills by doing any actual, you know, constructive work. Not that that was ever an issue before.

old digital emp here – fiorina can be blamed for hp for sure – but not for all that went wrong with dec (prior to hp buy out via compaq).

HP *used* to be known as the maker of the best test instruments, period. A solid reputation that was built up over ~50 years.

Carly pissed it all away in a few years. Now HP’s “signature” product is a shitty cheap printer. Way to go, Carly!

Of course, the GOP built a brand on “fiscal responsibility” (never mind that they never delivered). Dubya and Carly must be soulmates or something.

Remember, in her world, it’s not how well you do, it’s how much you make…

Hey she got rid of 17,000 leeches who were sucking off of the corporate teat. Obviously those worthless slackers were contributing nothing of value to the bottom line and their subsistence level salaries were a serious drain on the Corporation. Unlike her salary which she earned by getting rid of deadwood remnants of the past. MBA, MBA, MBA!

old DEC customer here. No, that was Ken Olson, lining his pockets by flushing DEC down the crapper.

A crying shame, but that’s what you get when you hire CEOs whose first thought is “how can I get more money for ME?”

Hey, I might be bitter-I saw Jack Welch change GE from a great place to work into a place where engineers were a commodity. Now they advertise themselves as a financial services company and they no longer make appliances, consumer electronics, or lightbulbs. Neutron Jack they called him when if he visited your site, when he left all that remained were the buildings.

There are many, many people who would be honored to serve in McCain’s cabinet, and depending on the opportunity, I would be as well,”

so we’re gonna have a vice president gramitcally challenged?

what does she mean, “depending on the oportunity”?, the oportunity is “if you were offered the position as vice president would you take it?”…so we are gonna have another moron in our administration

wonderful

Fiorina would be a great veep for the Ds to run against, given her record (imagine an ad saying under her leadership HP lost xx% of its labor force and 58% of its stock value and can we expect the same for the U.S. economy under her guidance) but somehow in Obama’s let’s all get along campaign, I don’t see that happening.

Spot on about the test equipment, HP was top notch. DEC had the VAX, at GE Syracuse we had an enormous VAX cluster, biggest one in NY.

No, DEC never got the hang of PCs – they blew three tries at it. Their minis were damned good, though, and I know someone with a microVax as his home computer *g*

Of course, the GOP built a brand on “fiscal responsibility” (never mind that they never delivered). Dubya and Carly must be soulmates or something.

they built their entire party around the rediculous “theory” that private industry is more efficient then government providing “commons”

it’s a rediculous theory, proven all over the planet that private industry is the LEAST effecient running government services, but the marketing strategy plays here in america

that’s our fault, the progressives don’t jump down their throats whenever they try to make the claim so the claim appears to be a fact when it is an oposite

“One of the great things about my life right now is I have lots of options and lots of opportunities, and I have learned that if you’re open to options and opportunities, the future tends to take care of itself. So I’m not really worried about what’s next.”

Those would be STOCK options, right?

i have blamed olsen for a lot – but lining his own pockets to live the life of luxury wasn’t one of them. you got any links to back that up?

I have a tough and uncompromising character, and would be honored to serve on McCane’s cabinet too.

industry bases their price on what people will pay, there is no “supply and demand” model, that model while it seems to be true is actually the tail wagging the dog, the real model is “what people will pay determines the market amount of the product, creating less desire for the product and driving the price down

so I just layed generations of economic theory to waste, there is no “supply and demand” model, that model is simply coincidental congruous with what’s really going on

that’s the perris economic principle and I am going to be more famous then freidman when I go live with my new book

not to mention it’s collapse in product confidence

i loved, loved, loved the reliability of vms. of course we used vax clusters also – those suckers ran 24/7 for years with no down time (for folks who don’t know, the cluster allowed for individual computers to be removed, for pms and upgrades and then put back into the cluster).

Computers got PMS? Who knew! (teasing, of course)

I once had to do some industrial history research and found out a very interesting thing: in the early 1900s, there were two dedicated R&D laboratories in New York State(I emphasize ‘dedicated’ – other companies certainly were doing research and of course, Edison had his laboratory complex in NJ). GE in Schenectady and Corning in Corning, NY. Some of the products that came out of those two places are still in use today(Pyrex being one of them).

It’s hard to kill a DEC machine.

The friend with the microVax was on one job where they did something the engineers at DEC said was impossible: they dual-ported a disk drive between a Vax and a PDP 10 (a KA model: think antique, even 25 years ago).
(For those who never met either, a Vax uses 32-bit words and a PDP-10 uses 36-bit words. That mismatch is what made it interesting and difficult.)

It’s totally irrelevant, but I was just surprised to see, in the above photo, that McCain’s two ubiquitous pilot fish ever took a break.

bingo. the birth of pcs was the death of digital.

lol – for awhile i had one of the first vax workstations as my home computer (owned by my employer, ‘natch) – that sucker was ginormus (i say as i type on a 12′ ibook) and, iirc, had 4 MB of RAM.

long time and about 3 life-times ago.

I believe vax created the first practical model of a virtual memory machine with a workable memory manager that made the unit capable of preforming multitudes more at the (virtual) same time, with real time model the computer can only use whatever memory is available, virtual memory models give the computers the ability to swap memory in and out of differant operations as the users need demand

linux, xp, macntosh all pretty much took their model from vax

I have to put in a plug for Corning’s wonderful Museum of Glass, located unsurprisingly in Corning, NY. Worth a look if you are ever up that way. I checked but one of my favorite pieces the flawed 200 inch telescope mirror is currently in storage. It is/was the biggest single piece of glass ever made.

Getting fired from your CEO gig AND getting a cool $45 million as a reward is definitely the kind of “change” a Republican can believe in.

I don’t know about that, Attaturk. Isn’t $45 million kind of small potatoes for a CEO buyout? Finfacts notes how the really nice payouts are in excess of $100 million. By that standard, I don’t see how a GOP CEO type would be able to take her seriously.

Great Post Attaturk. But Carly is so vain she probably thinks this election is about her (Secretary of Treasury?).

Carly likes her outsourcing. The global economy is too important to keep American jobs in America. God told her that no American job is safe. Why does Carly hate Americans.

Fiorina Called the Outsourcing of American Jobs ‘Right Shoring.’ As HP CEO, Fiorina made comments in Washington alongside Intel’s CEO that “drew an unusually strong reaction from workers, who suggested the pair forfeit their own highly paid jobs to Chinese or Russian executives working for a quarter of their pay.” Fiorina said that “there is no job that is America’s God-given right anymore” and also said called what is generally referred to as ‘offshoring,’ the outsourcing of jobs to cheaper labor centers overseas, as “right-shoring.”

Carly also likes no taxes for the rich corporations. Why should HewlettPackard need to pay taxes, when they can use off shore tax havens. Oh, that is why she hates America.

Fiorina Admitted That As CEO, She Kept “Billions” of Profits For HP By Parking Income Overseas. Carly Fiorina pointed out at an economic roundtable with John McCain that, as CEO of H-P, she purposefully parked “billions” of cash overseas to avoid paying taxes. She said, “The tax rate for us had a huge impact in terms of where we parked cash. And, of course, cash is important in a business, so when we looked at the tax rates here, and what it would cost to bring cash from overseas to here, we left billions of dollars of cash overseas, because of the differences in tax rates.” [11]

HP Kept $14 Billion In Profit Overseas to Avoid Paying Taxes, Slashing Its Tax Rate. “By the end of its 2003 fiscal year, Hewlett-Packard Co. had ‘indefinitely’ deferred taxation on $14.4 billion of foreign earnings, according to SEC filings, a move that helped lower its effective tax rate from the statutory corporate income tax rate of 35 percent to 12 percent. [12]

I remember seeing that mirror on field trips when I was in elementary school. The DH and I are members of the museum. We go to all the openings (just fantastic) and we have taken glass classes there. They do, IMHO, the best job of any specialty museum anywhere(and we’ve seen a bunch in Canada and the UK). They also are very hooked into the local school systems and provide a lot of service, education and internship opportunities to local kids. Just a great resource for the area – a terrific museum and much overlooked.

From the AP: US exports to Iran rose in Bush years
Not letting Evil stand in the way of $’s!

bingo. the birth of pcs was the death of digital.

Selise, I think it also had something to do with Digital being so heavily entrenched into manufacturing, which of course tanked.

Confession. My past life includes a stint as an IT recruiter specializing in the Digital market.

add a management boorish management style and disregard for pesky privacy issues and you have the perfect followp to 8 years of BushCo

No, no links. I just know from other tech buyouts that the top brass and the board generally gets a “special sweeteners” for a deal, that ordinary stockholders don’t. And mostly don’t find out about, either.

Olsen’s sellout was at the leading edge of tech buyout mania, so he didn’t benefit from the huge inflation of benefits. But still, he sure seemed determined to dump DEC PDQ. If he just thought DEC was doomed, why not just retire?

At the time, I thought that the sensible strategy would be to split hardware from software operations. WinNT could run on alphas, DEC had good (unique?) binary translation software (VAX to Alpha) to make software independent of hardware, so one could see a future in which the hardware could “run anything” and the software could “run anywhere”.

But no, DEC had to be sold to a maker of toy computers. Cui bono?

well, i do think that later the weight of the manufacturing plants made responding to market conditions harder – olsen was famous for not having layoffs until the board of directors made him do it. he didn’t think that was the way to treat employees – loyalty should be returned with loyalty – which is why i still think well of him. but long before that became a problem, imo it was the inability to do for the pc market what digital had done for the mini. part of that, i think, was that marketing/advertising/sales was something the co never really didn’t “got” – it was a bunch of engineers selling to engineers. the pc market was about selling to consumers. without a strong marketing group that had a big say in product development and without a sales department that knew how to sell into the consumer market it was a disaster (or rather a series of disasters).

p.s. don’t know if this is still true – but the way to tell a digital customer from a digital employee? one called the co DEC and one called it digital.

sorry for the reminiscing… but for a while it was a great company to work for – one where employees were very well treated (thank you ken) and engineering creativity and real contribution (substance vs perception) were respected.

that buyout was before buyouts became fashionable and before the amounts went so high. She cleaned their clocks. Period.

funny how all of the geekdom arises in posts like this.

OT.
I was just reading about how the “public” is now getting all enthused about off shore drilling and ANWAR (read any local paper’s LTEs) and realized that the high gas prices are just what the repigs in high places want in order to rile the public up to support their rape of the land, air, and sea for profit. Don’t know why that had not sunken into my thick skull before. Duh.

Replying to your OT:

And just in time for the election. How perfect! I have had the same thought. They couldn’t get what they wanted without some sort of event to change people’s minds (a “Pearl Harbor” if you will).

Some people seem to think that gas proces will fall right before the election, making people more complacent about the economy. I think they will continue to rise. The election will not be directly about the economy. It will be about gas prices.

i think you are wrong about ken (although am, of course, willing to reconsider if there is info i don’t have). for years before the buy out he made business decisions that were good for the employees (not the stockholders) – and continued to live in his modest home from before the days he was filthy rich. if you were a stockholder and not a employee i can see that you might not think well of him – but that doesn’t mean he was in it for lining his own pockets and imo it’s not fair to judge him by the buy out deals that came later.

again am willing to reconsider with new info – i left digital and the high tech comp industry in the early nineties and didn’t follow (except through friends who were still there) events closely.

Losers of a feather, flock together. Bloody sow!

whatever happens – it’s always good for republicans. shock doctrine – shit happens and they are ready with their fucked up “solutions”.

Oh please!!!! Even better than Mittens. Wow. George Bush level incompetence.

A Vice President’s opportunities…getting any companies you represent and ‘big oil’ companies a wide open ‘back door’ to the ‘White House’.
It’s a Vice President’s job, no obligation to screw America.

Bush/Cheney have re-written the job descriptions now and forever. I think we will not see a roll-back when Democrats are in power. More of the same, mostly.

Got misogyny?

Good Morning Attaturk and Firedogs,

Selise, RevDeb, and SnarkiChildofLoki -

Geek Bonus: WIRED article – Soul of a New Machine – 20 Years Later

WIRED
(mostly about DG, but y’all might enjoy just the same)

NPR just had a hard-hitting fluff piece pushing back on Wesley Clark’s statement that McCain’s being a POW didn’t qualify him for President. They took a glowing look at his time as a squadron commander. They quickly glossed over how he got the job (Can you say Daddy?). They also didn’t go into why he didn’t stay in the Navy to make Admiral (Because it wasn’t going to happen.) Somehow this was supposed to be evidence that he could run the country.

NPR immediately followed this with an even harder hitting piece about how popular General Petraeus is in the Green Zone and all the photo-ops he does with everyone there. I guess this will qualify him for the Presidency too at some point.

Carleton Sneed business plan:

1. Merge with unprofitable competitor;

2. Fire 17,000 workers, drive founders from board, burden merged company with billions of debt;

3. ???? (sit and watch things go to hell for five years)

4. Profit!! (personally — other insiders, all outsiders screwed).

It is like the Bush career all over again.

What– no tophat, cane, or tux for the Creature?

a.b. normal indeed.

As a cabinet member, it sure sounds like she’d get along well with Phil Gramm…

thanks!

LOL. That’s funny. Puttin’ on the Ritz.

Conservatives have developed an effective way of dealing with liberal organizations. Infiltrate them and turn them against the liberal movement. They did this with NPR, PBS, AARP, and I think also Sierra Club. And of course the TV news industry. It works very well. I don’t know the secret– how do they do it? We need to understand it to counter it and possibly respond in kind. It has been a devastating weapon for them.

I don’t know the secret– how do they do it?

$$$$$$$$$$$$

funding. hard to bite the hand that feeds you.

Good points Selise. I would like to add a couple of logs to that fire. Compaq took over Tandem, and then, before the dust had settled from that little deal they tried to absorb DEC (which did make excellent products for what they were).

They almost choked from the DEC thing, and never really recovered. Just as they were staggering like a drunk after last call, HP stepped in and scooped them up.

Everything now has HP’s name on it, except the pool. Which I think still says “Tandem” at the bottom.

Quick note Jane,

It would be nice if the StrangeBedfellows site would include a chart showing the growth of $ donations in addition to # of contributors.

Great Ad. Power to the People!

Attaturk’s brilliant caption to the odious photo up top…

I think they started out hungry with something to prove and then progressed to comfortable and realized that those people they used to criticize really were actually pretty nice. They also had these amazing cocktail wienies.

Oh, I hadn’t even noticed the caption. Very good, Attaturk. Maybe somewhere along the line we could come up with something about McCain’s temper and the “No matter what I say, don’t let me out,” scene.

Oops! Wrong Thread! My apologies.

Everything now has HP’s name on it,

including my (very small) pension plan.

NPR’s Bob Siegel begins his introduction to the July 1 Michele Norris interview with Wesley Clark with this lofty statement:

We begin this hour with politics, and the power and pitfalls of words.

Some NPR anchors and correspondents keep a ready supply of lofty language for presenting themselves as being above the frays of the lesser beings.

I sent a response a few weeks back when she started lingering about the McCain camp about how Carleton Sneed Fiorina created the corporate environment (i.e. internecine paranoia) that ultimately led to the downfall of the next HP Director hired to clean up her chaos.

Lemme put it this way…

If McCain selects Carleton Sneed as his Veep watch the Silicon Valley money pour in…

…to the Obama campaign!

From thinkProgress: Fiorina touts insurance plans that cover birth control, but forgets McCain opposes them.