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Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid it is much too late. Cringely had an excellent discussion of why and how it is too late: http://www.cringely.com/tag/bill-hewlett/

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Cringely had an even better call in February:

http://www.cringely.com/2011/02/why-leo-apotheker-will-be-fi...

He can be a bit of a nutter sometimes but man was this spot on with the Whitman call and Apotheker's hail mary of a huge enterprise acquisition:

"Then there’s Meg Whitman, who expected at this point to have resigned from the HP board to spend all her time running California as governor. But that didn’t happen, so now what is she to do? You can only get so many pedicures. She’ll eventually get around to hip-checking Apotheker and taking his job. Meg can knock back brewskies as well as any man and will probably fill those CEO shoes even better than Apotheker.

I know I am speaking early about this but that’s why I get the big bucks.

There is only one chance Apotheker has to save his job and that’s by buying his old company, SAP. "

It's downright scary how accurate that prediction is.

The same could have been said for Ford, and several other large companies. However, under good management, you'd be surprised how much "bad" can be undone.

HP still brings in a ton of money a year and has a huge market share in several different markets.

It can be fixed, however they have to find someone extraordinary to fix it. Meg Whitman probably isn't quite the right person, she doesn't seem to be the "let's turn this place around" type person.

You're absolutely right, HP right now is in better shape than Apple was in 1996. So, I cannot imagine that it cannot be fixed, but I don't believe it will stay one company.

> American firms have been laying-off their engineering staffs for years. In today’s world of MBA-managed companies, R&D is perceived as not being a good use of money.

I love this guy's writing.

That's a great article. Thank you for pointing it out.

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