Poor Meg

David Streitfeld has an article in The New York Times about H-P:

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 H-P 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 H-P engineer who is chancellor of Cogswell Polytechnical College in Sunnyvale, California. “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 H-P board, a group that includes Whitman, was considering firing the current chief executive, Léo Apotheker, 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 and 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 of 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 fifteen thousand. Revenue grew from less than one hundred million to nearly eight billion dollars. She oversaw two major acquisitions: the online payment firm PayPal, which was 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 that Whitman had known it.
“She was undone by her housekeeper,” said tech analyst Rob Enderle. “H-P’s biggest problem right now is leaks from one or more disloyal employees. If Whitman can’t contain a housekeeper, it is unlikely she’ll be able to address this problem.” Enderle and other analysts said there was a difference between creating a consumer tech company like eBay and fixing a diversified and complicated firm like H-P, whose roots stretch deep into Silicon Valley history, but where the morale is low after a string of scandals and the path to recovery is murky.
“Whitman took eBay and made it an intergalactic colossus, but built it, rather than doing a turnaround,” Sonnenfeld said. “She’s untested.” On the plus side, he said she had “magnificent communication skills and a laserlike focus.” She will need all that and more if she wants to be the first H-P chief executive in many years to survive the post.

Rico says he used to live just down the road from H-P, and dated Janie Packard in high school...