HP Is Broken, And Meg Whitman's Not The CEO To Fix It

http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/05/25/can-meg-whitman-and-layoffs-turn-around-hp-nope/

Things are bad at HP these days. CEO and Board changes have confused customers, the management team and investors alike. Despite a heritage based on innovation, the company is now mired in low-growth PC markets with little differentiation. Investors have dumped the stock, dropping company value some 60% over two years, from $52/share to $22 – a loss of about $60billion.

Reacting to the lousy revenue growth prospects as customers shift from PCs to tablets and smartphones, CEO Meg Whitman announced plans to eliminate 27,000 jobs; about 8% of the workforce. This is supposedly the first step in a turnaround of the company that has flailed ever since spending $26billion to buy Compaq and changing the company course into head-to-head PC competition a decade ago. But, will it work?

Not a chance.

Fixing HP requires understanding what went wrong at HP. Simply, Carly Fiorina took a company long on innovation and new product development and turned it into the most outdated industrial-era sort of company. Rather than having HP pursue new technologies and products in the development of new markets, like the company had done since its founding creating the market for electronic testing equipment, she plunged HP into a generic manufacturing war.