New York Times: Women are better than men, except when they are Republican?

by philg

“Carly Fiorina’s Record: Not So Sterling” is a New York Times article beating up on Carly Fiorina for failing to light the fires of innovation in between the cubicles of Hewlett-Packard. Certainly that does not seem to be the strongest part of her resume, but this is the newspaper that celebrated Ellen Pao and expressed confidence that she should have been promoted to a variety of jobs ahead of all of the men on the planet.

Separately, the people who took over from Fiorina at HP haven’t had any better success, have they? She never did anything as monumentally stupid as Leo Apotheker’s acquisition of Autonomy, for example (HP’s lawsuit against Autonomy’s executives, Michael Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, is still going, trying to recover some of the $5 billion of shareholder wealth squandered). Perhaps HP is simply tough to grow in a world where Apple owns the hipsters, Microsoft owns the desktop and workgroup, and IBM owns the core IT functions. (Note: I joined HP Labs as an 18-year-old (so long ago that Northern California had running water, no traffic jams, vaccinated children, etc.). I helped Russell Kao implement a prototype minicomputer that implemented the new HP Precision Architecture, subsequently part of the Intel Itanium CPUs.)

Readers: Is the fact that Fiorina is a Republican the reason that she is being judged by the NYT so much more harshly than other women?

9 thoughts on “New York Times: Women are better than men, except when they are Republican?”

  1. “Fires of innovation” Phil? I wasn’t at HP but at lucent she was purely a sales executive. (Art history and then an MBA). The rapid rise in her sales numbers at LU depended on the innovation of “vendor financing” to everybody and anybody including many very shaky outfits who had nothing to lose in taking these deals. Her coup de grace was to collect a nice signing bonus from HP while leaving just in time before LU exploded when it was clear many customers couldn’t pay back their loans to Lucent.

  2. > She never did anything as monumentally stupid as Leo Apotheker’s acquisition of Autonomy

    Uh, her $25B acquisition of Compaq was stupider times 5. After buying Compaq they immediately killed the beloved Compaq brand and stopped selling all Compaq’s robustly engineered computers. Total fail.

  4. she did try selling ipod with HP branding.
    That worked out well.
    but I guess it is fault of Apple that it went to consumer in 80s
    and HP stayed in Enterprise even when they bought Compaq.
    What happen to Compaq iPaq. That didn’t sustain their mobile effort.
    Or Windows in cellphone wasn’t good enough to sell to consumers.
    Again that must be Apple’s fault.

    Badmouthing will continue until moral improves.

  5. Carly tried to compare herself to Disney except she had to lie about him
    to do so.

    Standard operating procedure.

  6. Nah, I don’t think so. Ellen Pao wasn’t running for President of the United States of America. The difference in degree requires a much tighter screen.

  7. Well, as they say, if you want any accountability in the White House, you better elect a Republican.

    In any case, it would sure be interesting to see Carly and Hillary in a debate.

  8. Thanks for reminding me that of all her fail at HP, the Autonomy deal wasn’t one of them. I had lost track of who was responsible for that. What I know about the Autonomy deal is that at the time it happened I knew it was insane. And I’m no financial genius, just a guy who used to read Autonomy job postings. And I knew from reading those that there was no there there.

  9. David-2: Yes, it was pretty obvious that Autonomy was not worth $5 billion (as noted in one of my previous postings, Sikorsky was sold for $9 billion!). With the benefit of hindsight, Fiorina’s Compaq deal may not have been a great one but at least Compaq was a real company.

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