She spent 11% of her net worth on the campaign? How's she gonna afford to retire?! She's gonna end up on the streets with all those people she laid off..!

This is the norm. CEOs want to show fast profit margins, and the best way to quickly boost the black is identify areas that "might do okay when stripped threadbare" and strip those payroll leaches outta there. She'll be gone in a few years and none the worse no doubt with several million to send her off. HP? well, it had to die sometime, right?

I could have sworn that there was a stockholder revolt and they kicked her out, but I guess I was wrong.

@2
Exactly.
Layoffs mean increased profits and increased profits mean bonuses AND better stock options for her.
She leaves before the company completely collapses (maybe after selling off some of the divisions) and moves to a different company to repeat the process.

This is probably why the voters chose Brown over her.
Running a state into the ground is a lot different than running a company into the ground.

Did you even read the article Toby?

1.6 billion in profit is fucking great, but the demand for cloud based server equipment is growing and HP needs to invest billions on that just to keep up. Firing 27,000 fucking sucks, but it free's up 3.5 billion to invest in hardware used for Cloud Computing. If HP doesn't do this, they wont be able to keep up with demand and other companies (who dont have a problem laying off tens of thousands) will get those sales, leaving HP behind and losing money if they cant sell product in large volumes.

Companies that bid on cloud contracts, will lose those bids if HP cant supply them with the needed hardware. If a competitor can supply the needed hardware, they'll re-bid using them. If HP cant keep up with demand, they'll lose sales. Who wants to buy 250,000$ worth of server equipment from HP if it takes them 6 months to fulfill that order?

Sure its fucking lame to see thousands lose their jobs, but HP is a public company, if Meg wont lay people off to free up money, the board will fire her and hire someone who will. Almost every company selling cloud based services, or hardware, is doing this, HP shouldn't be a stranger.

@1:

Hence the massive lay-off. The sudden, drastic reduction in payroll expense will go on the books for the next couple of quarters, driving up profits, which in turn will increase shareholder value, and therefore justify the obscene bonus she'll no doubt receive as a result.

Or, like, what @2 said...

I'm the last person to give Meg Whitman the benefit of the doubt, but HP has been the poster child for silicon valley mismanagement and bloat for years now. HP has somewhere in the vicinity of 300,000 employees: I have no trouble believing that you could cull 27k without doing the company any substantial harm.

Supply driven economics, it just doesn't work.

@5
I don't buy that.
You're saying that HP needed $X to buy hardware/craftsmen/technology so that HP could get more sales.

So in order to get $X, HP fired a lot of employees.
Because HP only had $X-Y in the bank or available via loans.
After $1.6 BILLION in profits last year.

But HP makes servers/switches/printers/etc.
1. So the money HP needed would go to raw materials?
2. Or to people to turn the raw materials into product? Should already have these, right?
3. Or on tools for the people in 2? Should already have these as well, right?

I always wonder where, exactly, the "investment" will be spent when I hear things like that.

HP fired a competent CEO for a minor sex-with-coworker scandal. The replacements have been disasters. Mystery Meg continues to tear down a formerly great company. Much more of this to come.

Never had a computer die as quickly as the HP laptop bought under the Whitman reign; they promised to repair and return, but THREE MONTHS LATER, I still had no computer.

Weeks of screaming and crying and begging, they finally sent me a "replacement."

Which died within a month -- I handed it off to my disabled neighbor, to do what he could with it. I couldn't bear the idea of being lied to by HP customer service again.

I will never buy HP, ever, ever, ever again.

Thank God Whitman didn't get her hands on California.

@10
You seem to think that all technology is the same and that all employees can do all the same work. Do you really believe that an assembly line worker can use a printer HP sells at Staples to somehow take HP into the cloud computing business?

If highly profitable corporations that lay workers off to make the books look better found themselves without any tax deductions, such that they were paying taxes on their gross income, they'd stop.

We could really do with a stick or two in our corporate tax policies, as the great piles of carrots we shovel at them don't seem to motivate corporations to not ax yet more jobs, much less add new ones.

#13
"You seem to think that all technology is the same and that all employees can do all the same work."

Well if you want to focus on that, okay.
Someone running a machine to make motherboards for printers should not have much trouble running a machine to make motherboards for servers.

"Do you really believe that an assembly line worker can use a printer HP sells at Staples to somehow take HP into the cloud computing business?"

I believe that if the person makes motherboards for product A then he can make motherboards for products B, C, D and so forth.

If you are claiming as @5 did that these layoffs are so that HP could get more money to produce more hardware then my point still stands.

@12, you gave your dead computer to your disabled neighbor? How kind.

There seems to be some confusion about what "cloud-based businesses" means. It doesn't mean new or more server hardware - quite the opposite. It means hosted software solutions like Amazon Web Services, EC2, Windows Azure, or Google App Engine. It includes business software hosted in the Internet and sold via subscription - think Google Apps or Salesforce. It is fewer companies building and upgrading their own data centers in favor of essentially renting time on someone else's.

Note the companies I mentioned above; none of them are hardware manufacturers. The market is all about software and service. If HP wants to move into this space, they will need to reshape their workforce. That said, they are way late to the game, and HP doesn't have much of a track record for reinventing itself. I predict this goes about as well as the Palm acquisition did.

The Japanese treat labor like a fixed cost, so instead of the ups and downs of the layoff / rehire craziness here, their workforce is ready when sales begin to increase as opposed to here where a company has to frantically hire workers, which means many will be substandard and all will be untrained.

The Japanese way makes more sense for the long-term health of the company, but criminals don't plan that far out - they just rape whatever's on hand.

To say that Meg is a megalomaniac is just stating the obvious. This wacky woman leaves a sordid trail of collateral damage wherever she goes.

The consolation, of course, is that California voters saw through her phony campaign that trumpeted her alleged business success. She reminds me of the Kathy Bates character in Misery - when you see this feral, full-of-herself female coming toward you, run for your life!

To make the company's stock look attractive in the short-term, top management likes to fire off huge segments of the company's staff so as to reduce costs. In the mean-time, the company runs purely on the fumes of its previous achievements; in a few years time, the company will have failed (I love using he future perfect) to produce new significant products, will be making no good fucking money, but all the upper management will get their golden fucking parachutes while all new management is brought in to correct their intentional mistakes and begin hiring new technical talent and produce more products. Otherwise, HP may be purchased which may well produce similar results or better.

In the mean-time, watch HP's stock as it peaks out in the next year and then begins plummeting dramatically as investors realize the company is totally empty on the inside. Nevertheless, if and when the company is able to make a comeback within the next decade or so, it may be a good time to invest when it totally bottoms out. This all assumes the company doesn't become totally insolvent. I don't personally think that will be the case.

@17: HP is getting into the cloud services business : selling cloud services directly to customers from HP data centers. It's a great gig to charge that kind of money. They also have some rather nice stuff that comes in handy if you are moving traditional mainframe apps into a virtualized system. E.g. wicked fast I/O into very large data stores that support many hardware servers at once.

Starting from scratch you can often use commodity equipment because your business processes are engineered with that in mind from the start.

I have heard that all corporate charters include language like "...and for the public good" but that this were a dead-letter because 0.) enough people buy the argument that all public goods are obtainable via individual selfishness, and, more significantly, 1.) no-one has ever successfully sued those running a firm for failing to act toward the public good---it's hard enough to get anywhere suing on the basis of their having failed to meet their fiduciary obligations....

But I don't know. Who does, here?

My last (and my VERY LAST) HP purchase was replaced by a Macbook six years ago. This is just another reason not to go back.

@5 has it right. But I like the chances of a box.net to eventually win out in the enterprise cloud space. If your business is to sell servers, it's tough to cannabalize your server business with a less profitable cloud solution. Good luck, HP. If Goldy were in charge, they'd still be making these bad dogs over there so as not to lay off any workers. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/comp…

HP recently blew a wad of $10b buying back shares. That money couldn't have possibly been used to invest in cloud projects, hence sticking the shiv in 27k workers.

One new CEO after another, and they can't ever seem to flush out the corporate stupid at HP.

After Carly and now Meg it's pretty much guaranteed that I'll never buy another HP again. I just bought a new notebook too, an Acer. Hopefully no one from Acer will come along and run for office in CA.

@ 29,

Some of my family worked for HP back in the day they only made 2 models of calculators for engineers and Hewie and Packy were still alive, and yes it was a great company that treated it's workers and customers with respect and produced a high quality product. The nanosecond the founders died it went straight to sh*t....but at one time it was indeed a great company.