re: #19 Skip Intro

In other news, Happy Memorial Day to HP employees.

zdnet.com

I despised Meg as a potential governor. But despite the whining I see among investors and here, I’m impressed what she’s done for HP.

When she took over, conventional wisdom was that HP was doomed. Year on year profits were down a lot, personnel were being madly slashed just to keep from bleeding quite so badly - it was a mess.

When she took over she made several statements. First and foremost among these, she said it would take five years to make the company profitable again. She also noted that three would be consolidations along the way - that people were going to lose their jobs, not because they were bad, but because the time to decide which of the parallel processes was successful and if that wasn’t your track, well, bye.

Not yet at the five years the company is profitable. (The whining now is “not profitable enough.” No, seriously, it met earnings so the investors sold enough shares for a 2% drop. Think about it a minute.) And the number of people being cut over the year is being increased by 20%, to about 50,000 employees. Which is less than the 100,000 that were expected when the year began, and is a lot less that “HP is in receivership.”

btw (and this is in response to another comment), one of the smart things Meg did was keep the printers. The idiot before her had put those on the block, but that line didn’t leave the comany.