Meg Whitman Says HP Was Defrauded By Autonomy; HP Stock Plunges 237
McGruber writes "CNBC is reporting that Meg Whitman claims HP was defrauded in its purchase of Autonomy. 'We believed there is a willful effort on the part of certain members of Autonomy management to mislead shareholders when Autonomy was a publicly traded company, and to mislead potential buyers including HP,' Whitman said. 'We stand by the forensic review that we've seen,' she added. I wish her the same level of success I had when I filed an eBay claim."
Also covered at SlashBI, which names the write-down damage: $8.8 billion.
Meg, Carly (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a love letter...
Please don't run any other companies into the groud. Please stop whatever you're doing and go home, and avoid public life as a CEO, or politician. You've both proven you don't know jack.
The world would be better off without either of you.
Thanks;
The rest of the planet.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Informative)
She wasn't the CEO of HP when the acquisition happend this one isn't her fault.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Informative)
She wasn't the CEO of HP when the acquisition happend this one isn't her fault.
It's at least partially her fault. Per the FA:
In an interview with CNBC, Whitman said she regretted voting to approve the deal with Autonomy,
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However, if there are no lawsuits and no one goes to jail for fraud, then Occam's razor suggests the fault for a bad purchase goes to HP.
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HP has asked the USA and UK to start a criminal investigation - not civil.
And Meg did thrown in the phrase “deliberate misrepresentation”, which crosses the big red line between window dressing and outright fraud.
So, yeah, grab some popcorn and what the show.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Autonomy tried to sell to Oracle for $6billion, which Oracle rejected as overpriced.
2) Autonomy CEO denied ever trying to sell to Oracle, said Oracle didn't know anything about Autonomy's financials.
3) Oracle called the Autonomy CEO a LIAR, publicly, and shared his presentation with the whole world to prove it.
They put all the info on a page called, "Please Buy Autonomy." You can read it now yourself and decide if you would have bought autonomy in 2011. I've always thought Oracle would be a miserable place to work, but now I see some people are definitely having fun, just not programmers.
Mod Parent Up! (Score:2)
Mod this up. It's fascinating!
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"I've always thought Oracle would be a miserable place to work, but now I see some people are definitely having fun, just not programmers."
I've always thought Oracle would be a miserable place to work, but now I see Larry Ellison definitely having fun, just not people-who-are-not-Larry.
FTFY
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Oracle has its issues, to be sure, but they have been fairly careful about doing acquisitions (despite doing a lot of them), and have a better track record than Hp of keeping the businesses they bought alive and making profits (not to say that they've never had misses).
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True, but if you read the article you'd see that the Autonomy writedown is only a portion of the loss.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, you have that back-to-front. The loss was $6.9B while the writedown was $8.8B, so without the writedown, HP would have reported a profit!
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The Autonomy thing wouldn't be such a big deal, except it's starting to look like a pattern. First the Palm thing, then this. Both were very public debacles. Granted, HP has been on a buying spree for a decade [wikipedia.org], most of which gets little press, and the Palm aquisition was almost pocket changes, but it generated a lot of bad p
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HP bought both Compaq and EDS!
They _are_ that clueless.
127% is a large portion (Score:3)
The $8.8 billion Autonomy write-down is "only" about 127% of the $6.9 billion quarterly loss.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:4, Informative)
She wasn't the CEO of HP when the acquisition happend this one isn't her fault.
Nor has she "run any other companies into the ground". Ebay's revenues increased by 200000% while she was CEO. Meg Whitman is not Carly Fiorina. Unlike Carly, Meg has a solid track record as a successful CEO.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Insightful)
A dead parrot could have run ebay just as well. They were alone in a huge growth market.
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Two words: Skype purchase.
When Meg took over as CEO, the company was already headed skyward, already had upward momentum. Mostly she just had to not screw up too badly to make it successful. EBay was actually rather late to implement such features as "Buy it now" which were already innovated in competing marketplaces that didn't have the same mind share. (I should'a patented that one, oh well)
Ebay's purchase of Skype was the most random purchase ever, it was for a quajillion dollars (Ebay lost virtually all
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Informative)
No...Ebay eventually made money on the Skype purchase.
They bought for 2.6 billion in 2005
Sold 70% of it for $1.9 billion in 2009
Made an additional $2.55 billion when Microsoft bought the remaining 30%.
So they actually made 1.85 billion on an initial investment of 2.6 billion. Not terrible over 7 years.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Interesting)
Two words: Skype purchase.
Two more words: Paypal purchase.
Probably the best business move that Ebay ever made - sucks for customers but the vertical monopoly it created is great for Ebay. Also occured while Whitman was CEO there.
I'm not a Whitman sycophant, I just think that if you are going to cherry-pick you should at least pick a good cherry when you pick a bad one.
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But she was on the board and did vote in favor. So, the primary fault should be assigned to the old CEO, but she has to take some of the blame.
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"Whitman said she regretted voting to approve the deal with Autonomy"
CEO, no. On the board that also approved the buy out, yes.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Funny)
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And your argument RETURNS to Carly Fiorina.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Funny)
Look at the picture on CNBC.
I'm pretty certain, based on this evidence, that Meg Whitman is Steve Ballmer in drag.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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PayPal will take every opportunity to steal your money.
And this is different from other financial institutions... how?
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Insightful)
PayPal will take every opportunity to steal your money.
And this is different from other financial institutions... how?
The difference is that "other financial institutions" are regulated as such, and there are fairly significant consequences to stealing money (of course that doesn't mean it won't happen). The process of regulating banks through several boom, exploit, bust cycles has taught the regulators a LOT about what to watch out for. Paypal, on the other hand, just steals indiscriminately and has no regulation at all to answer to. Oh yeah, and they are the "de facto currency" of many businesses, meaning that to participate in the free market it is very difficult to avoid PayPal.
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:4, Informative)
Example: PayPal lets you open an account with minimal information, and lets you send money to that account no limits.
Now suppose you're a European citizen. The second you receive more than 2500 euros in your account, they're going to lock it and ask you to provide extra information to prove who you are.
They do this *after* they let you open the account, and *after* the money is in said account.
Then, if you can't or won't provide the information they ask (passport, proof of address), they'll lock your account with your funds in it. They'll only allow you to get the funds after 180 days, and you must initiate the process, or they'll just keep the money.
A bank would never be allowed to do such a thing. They'd have to verify who you were *before* they gave you an account, and they would never be allowed to lock your funds for half a year _after_ you received said funds. Unless you were part of a criminal investigation, of course.
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Traditional credit card processors are even worse. They rake you over the coals when you sign up AND they keep your money (for 6 months in my case) when your account hits certain, unknowable magic thresholds. In my case it was because we were selling data.
Now, in their defense, we DID have idiots claiming chargebacks months and months after the transactions were posted. I can't really fault them for their policy of holding on to the money - but their policy of not disclosing this up-front is borderline crim
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I have used PayPal as the payment processor on my website for years. I run an honest service, I resolve any purchase disputes quickly. I am as ethical in my transactions as I know how to be. I have never, ever, had any problem with PayPal, or access to my money. In fact, they recently upgraded my account standing with them so that in the event of any customer dispute, funds in my account are no longer held by them, because I have demonstrated that I am a trustworthy user of their services. Zero problems wit
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I have used PayPal as the payment processor on my website for years. I run an honest service, I resolve any purchase disputes quickly. I am as ethical in my transactions as I know how to be. I have never, ever, had any problem with PayPal, or access to my money. In fact, they recently upgraded my account standing with them so that in the event of any customer dispute, funds in my account are no longer held by them, because I have demonstrated that I am a trustworthy user of their services. Zero problems with PayPal.
Just saying... sometimes the problem isn't with them... sometimes it's a problem with what people try to get away with when using their services.
It's interesting that every defense of Paypal comes from an AC.
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Dear HP,
Why don't you just print yourself some more money, or have you run out of toner?
Re:Meg, Carly (Score:5, Funny)
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Red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it hard to believe that the management of HP failed to uncover fraud of this magnitude during their evaluation in the purchase of Autonomy. What this really means is management failed to do their due diligence in evaluating Autonomy and now need to to distract from poor financial performance due to a lack of competence at the executive level.
Re:Red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's clear that the HP management needs a massive pay rise while everyone else in HP needs to take a pay cut and work longer hours to cover this loss!
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No, no. You're thinking in the right direction, but not going far enough. A mere 'massive' pay raise can't possibly help the company enough to pull it out of the slump it's in. HP executives need a truly epic pay raise, at least two orders of magnitude more than there making now. And as for having workers work longer hours... while I'm sure you didn't plan on paying those workers for longer hours, more work does mean more costs for HP. Along with gargantuan pay raises, HP needs to fire workers. Lots of work
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Some sales are made because current owners or management does not have the ability to deal with current situation or take advantage of current opportunities, but I think most purchases are like buying a used car, it is being so
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I find it hard to believe that the management of HP failed to uncover fraud of this magnitude during their evaluation in the purchase of Autonomy.
Really? In an era where regulators can't tell when a company's books are cooked [wikipedia.org], let a former Nasdaq chairman can run the largest Ponzi ever [wikipedia.org], and let insider traders and naked (aka illegal) short sellers cripple businesses and lives [deepcapture.com] (mostly [wikipedia.org]) unworried, I fail to see what makes you think that HP's staff and lawyers might do a better job at identifying cooked books.
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Regulators don't have the same skin in the game that company executives have with their own company. Oversight committees and regulators will never have the same level of motivation to ferret out every little detail because frankly there's no financial incentive to do so. It's not like regulators will make any more money working harder and longer by discovering fraud than if they just put in their 9-5. C-level execs, on the other hand, stand to make huge windfalls with these kinds of large deals and will
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Regulators don't have the same skin in the game that company executives have with their own company.
If hundreds of billions in taxpayer-funded bailouts, not to mention trillions in FED-related balance sheet tricks, is not having skin in the game, I'm not sure what can possibly be...
Oversight committees and regulators will never have the same level of motivation to ferret out every little detail because frankly there's no financial incentive to do so.
You might hold a very different opinion if a tax inspector ever gives more than a cursory look into your or your company's returns. They ruthlessly request explanations and justifications for even the most trivial-looking details, and they're absolutely merciless if they find anything worth their time. They're commissioned on w
My guess (Score:5, Interesting)
I see this as kind of a variation on the way that decisions sometimes got made in the old USSR. During the days of the Soviet Union, bureaucrats got into the habit of anticipating the needs/wishes of their superiors. I'm guessing that there's probably a culture of fear in HP where the masses are afraid of layoffs and those at the top probably shoot the messengers when they get bad news, so this was a natural outcome.
(CULTURE OF FEAR) Re: My guess (Score:2)
Re:Red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
Autonomy was a successful money-making business. When HP bought it, there wasn't a soul alive who couldn't see that they were paying an extremely generous price. Take the following article on the BBC at the time:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14582489 [bbc.co.uk]
HP paid 64% above the publicly-traded market price for the company. On the markets hearing the news, HP shares ended the trading day 7.6% down, making them the worst faller in the Dow Jones Industrial Average that day.
Maybe the management at Autonomy were telling porkies to convince HP to pay that much- but why the hell would HP swallow it? If everybody else could see it was mad, why couldn't they?
Re:Red herring (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the important line from the article you quoted:
"The implied valuation of the company is equivalent to 47 times the pre-tax profits earned by Autonomy in the 12 months to June this year."
If you buy a company on valuation terms like that, the way HP did, whoever voted for the decision should be held accountable by their stockholders and be facing jail time. If it happened because Autonomy sold them some story about future profit magic and they bought it, that does not change the fact that HP was criminally negligent in paying that much for a company.
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That is not a red herring. Really this is pretty simple: if Autonomy engaged in fraud in reporting their earnings, HP is (largely) off the hook. Fraud invalidate their market capitalization before the offer as a basis for price paid.
That said, HP... well... what can you really say-- they are the epitome of Epic Fail from Carly on.
Re:Red herring (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should they go to jail? Honestly, there are people who fuck up entire countries and their partners, and not only get away with it, but actually get applauded at the end of their terms.
Yes, all of those people should be in jail too. The fact that a large swath of our government and corporate officers are corrupt and criminally negligent, and that's considered fine by many of the ignorant masses who believe what the news tell them, is one of the largest structural problems in the world right now.
Car analogy (Score:2)
Re:Red herring (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it hard to believe that the management of HP failed to uncover fraud of this magnitude ...
I have sat on a few boards (none nearly as big as HP) and I am not surprised in the least. The CEO wants to "make a deal" to "execute a strategic vision". So he sells it to the board, which is too busy with pissing contests and bike shed arguments [wikipedia.org] to spend much time on it. Then the deal is publicly announced. Only then is the "due diligence" done. If any problem is found, there is enormous pressure to "make the deal happen" to avoid losing face by unwinding the deal. 80% of all mergers end badly for both customers and shareholders, yet every CEO thinks his deal is one of the other 20%. HP was in a bad situation, with their commodity businesses in PCs and printers generating little profit and even less growth. So their "strategic vision" was to move into software and services. The Autonomy merger was part of that, and if it fell apart other potential partners would shy away, and the strategy shift would likely fail. So it is likely that the accountants pointed out lots of problems, but were overruled by people with too much at stake to let the deal fall through.
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Thanks for the reply and +1 for giving me inspiring my personal education today as I looked up "bike shedding". Pretty informative and usable for future reference!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_Law_of_Triviality [wikipedia.org]
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Remember folks, *THIS* is why they make the big bux!
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I find it hard to believe that the management of HP failed to uncover fraud of this magnitude during their evaluation in the purchase of Autonomy.
I don't find it hard to believe at all.
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I find it hard to believe that the management of HP failed to uncover fraud of this magnitude during their evaluation in the purchase of Autonomy. What this really means is management failed to do their due diligence in evaluating Autonomy...
That's pretty much how I read the summary. HP makes a bad purchasing decision, and later management makes the excuse that Autonomy "tricked them" in some way into buying them. I even heard it in the voice of a couple kids on the playground in my head.
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Bullshit. For almost 12 billion dollars, you should have an army of accountants and lawyers going over every book with a fine-toothed comb. The whole point of due diligence is that YOU DON'T TAKE THE WORD OF THE COMPANY YOU'RE BUYING.
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And yet that magically makes it ok for Autonomy to lie through its teeth?
It's a good idea to lock your doors, but failing to do so doesn't automatically make it ok for a burglar to rob you.
I'm tired of "due diligence" being used as a blank cheque for companies to lie.
Re:Red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
To fulfill your obligatory car analogy: It's like you not locking someone elses car doors and the thing getting stolen. Yes, you *are* responsible to that person now as you acted with negligence, this doesn't disavow the thief but responsibility to the car's owner is squarely on you not the thief.
Re:Red herring (Score:4)
It's a "two-fer."
Fraudsters should fry, civilly and criminally for their deceptive conduct.
Corporate execs who blow money without due diligence should be out of a job.
Re:Red herring (Score:4, Informative)
Due diligence is a blank cheque for companies to lie. The due diligence, if done ... diligently... is supposed to catch these things. There is a whole discipline in the business world that focuses on these transactions.
Here is just one example of how common due diligence is...
http://www.steptoe.com/assets/htmldocuments/Jeffrey%20Weiner%20Chapter%20Business%20Due%20Diligence%20Strategies%202010.pdf [steptoe.com]
If the executives were doing their job, they would be assuming that whomever they are trying to acquire is going to lie to them and is going to do everything that they can to inflate the value of their company. The more I deal with lawyers, the more I realize that the laws are there because everyone is trying to screw everyone else. If someone is a CEO and has not realized that yet, they need to be fired. The corporate world is an evil, predatory place where con artists are paid big money to deceive, lie, cheat and steal to get ahead.
Every single major consulting firm (Deloitte, KPMG, etc) all have extensive M&A practices. Presumably whomever HP engaged to handle the M&A work dropped the ball in a major way.
This is the kind of thing that is likely going to result in a shareholder lawsuit. This is just the first inning. HP is doing what they can to get out ahead of the problem. I would not be surprised if they end up going after their auditors, or whoever they hired to do the M&A. If their own internal legal team handled it, they are screwed.
Re:Red herring (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck with that. There are numerous cases in recent history where large companies have managed to hide their problems prior to a merger, or prior to going completely bust. It can be very, very difficult to figure out the details of how big complex companies are put together - even for the company's own accountants. It can be analogized to the halting problem, or the shortest route problem. A big company's internal transactions constitute a huge dependency graph with an almost unlimited opportunity for cycles within the graph, and then there are all the external transactions - which ones are truly 'external'?
For example, a company like Best Buy may have over one thousand subsidiaries, nested three to four levels deep, in over 100 countries. None of those countries require the level of accounting rigor of the US, especially since Sarbanes-Oxley (the so-called 'Enron law' - case in point). Now try to analyze millions of transactions large and small between the various subsidiaries and to/from outside entities, and determine which of those transactions is part of a complex money laundering process, and which ones are part of some accountant's method for skimming money off the top. In fact, with a company that big and complex, the odds are that several of the accountants or executives in smaller subsidiaries are, in fact, skimming - perhaps by 'selling' goods to a dummy company that never happens to pay its bills. Now separate those actions from some larger process that the parent company has set up to avoid visibility of losses.
It can happen by accident as well, without any intent to do evil. I know of a at least one IPO that was cancelled when a company doing the required due diligence before going public discovered to their dismay that while they thought they were going gangbusters, they were in fact insolvent (hint: growth is expensive). So instead of IPO, bankruptcy followed.
There are zillions of other ways to use 'creative' accounting methods to hide problems - companies often don't know until it's too late. It's a mistake to consider a large corporation as a monolithic entity. One group of large companies that I work with literally don't know who their customers are - they are the product of dozens of mergers over decades, and have never integrated the accounting systems together - I won't go into why that is but there are good reasons, which are related to risk, cost and disruption.
tl;dr: the complexity of companies can be arbitrarily large; finding problems may be impossible with the limited data available prior to merger.
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From NYTimes story:
"...relied on Deloitte’s auditing of Autonomy’s financial statements. As part of the due diligence process for the deal, H.P. also hired KPMG to audit Deloitte’s work."
So how do you know in advance how many levels deep you need to go to get the truth? At some point you write it off to the inherent risk of doing a buy out.
Crashy (Score:4, Interesting)
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Wait a second... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, an 8.8 billion write-down on an 11.2 billion purchase and they are only alleging that "serious improprieties", rather than something like "epic, the-whole-boardroom-is-going-to-federal-country-club-for-maybe-five-years-or-so, fraud"?
Either corporate PR drivel is unusually polite, or white collar crime is absurdly superior on a risk/reward basis compared to little people crime...
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Are you kidding? They're the elite! We're talking 100k fine, tops!
Re:Wait a second... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Look at their income.
Gross income is the $127 billion [corporate-ir.net] figure I quoted. That's the income before taxes and expenses, which is comparable to the $50,000 income I quoted for a middle-class (American) family, which is also before taxes and expenses.
If it weren't for the almost $11 billion in unusual expenses they incurred this quarter, they would have earned about $5 billion in net profits. Instead, they lost over $5 billion for the year. That's more than two year's worth of profit gone up in smoke. It doesn't take many of those to make a bankrupt company.
Blowing $3,500 on a crappy car also wipes out a hefty chunk of a middle-class family's profits, and might even take multiple years to save up for.
In HP's case, since they also hold almost $129.5 billion in assets and have only $22.5 billion in debt, they have $109 billion in net assets (
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The latter. The best way to rob a bank is to own one [utexas.edu]
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Many years ago (so adjust for inflation) I had a friend of mine tell me that an attorney friend of his told him that if he ever stole/defrauded for less than a million, he was an idiot and would go to jail. If more than a million, call me and we will work something out. So, yes, the rules are different.
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I don't know Bill Veghte - were you being serious, or ironic?
Must be more to this story (Score:2)
tax savings galore (Score:2)
Why is everyone bashing HP and Meg Whitman for this? The purchase happened pre-Meg, and this write-off is a great decision on HP's part. There's a fair chance that the purchase decision wasn't even as poor as HP's making it out to be, and this write-off is just being maximized for tax purposes.
Hate HP for making us individual taxpayers pick up the slack, but don't hate them for being stupid (in this case).
Re:tax savings galore (Score:5, Interesting)
Hate HP for making us individual taxpayers pick up the slack
So you are arguing that taxes should be paid on total gross revenue, regardless of costs? That's gonna make your grocery bill go up by about 30% (grocery stores typically run on 2% to 5% margins, so taxing on gross revenues instead of profits means they will pay taxes of 35% of the total bill rather than on the 2% profit.)
I'll just add that according to many economists, as a class corporations essentially don't pay taxes - they only pass those taxes on to customers (whether corporate or individual) as increased prices.
And if you think the money just goes to management, that's rarely true (though widely publicized). When competition is working as it should, corporations that keep the money that would have gone to taxes will be forced to reduce their prices to match their competitors. And if board management is working (which it often isn't), even if they can keep the prices and profits up, the money will be passed to the investors as dividends and/or stock price increases. Since the vast, vast majority of stock is held by institutions such as 401-K funds, pension funds and the like, most of the money still ends up eventually in the hands of individuals like you and me.
Step 1. Buy a really expensive company... (Score:5, Informative)
Kind of depressing hearing about HP.
Step 1. Buy a really expensive company.
Step 2. Ignore it for a year or so.
Step 3. Rationalizing how to dramatically throw it away.
Step 4. Profit? Whats a few billion $ between friends?
Here's a longgg list of HP acquisitions [wikipedia.org].
Some of the more notable ones that caught my eye:
Verifone 1997 $1.1 (billions)
Compaq 2002 24.0
P&G IT: 2003 3.0
Peregrin 2005 0.4
MercuryInter. 2006 4.5
Knightsbridge 2006 ?
Opsware 2007 1.6
EDS 2008 13.9
3Com 2010 2.7
Palm, Inc 2010 1.2
3PAR 2010 2.3
ArcSight 2010 1.5
Autonomy 2011 11.0
So have any of these actually been profitable for HP ?
I knew that Palm tanked (bye bye, WebOS).
I haven't heard good things about Knightsbridge.
Compaq seems like it was a break-even deal.
Re:Step 1. Buy a really expensive company... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a very persuasive argument to be made that the Compaq acquisition is what really finished HP as an engineering company. Apparently there was some ferocious in-fighting after it. Sadly, the Compaq guys won for the most part and took the company to an almost entirely sales and marketing based strategy.
Those of us who cut our teeth on HP test equipment, early HP/UX workstations and servers, HP LaserJet printers, and HP calculators still mourn the death of Bill and Dave's dream. :-(
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I bought one, and only one, piece of hardware from Compaq...lesson learned with that piece of crap.
Re:Step 1. Buy a really expensive company... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm looking forward to Agilent buying back the HP name from a bankruptcy court.
Then again the court may wind up paying someone to take the brand over. They are approaching Packard-Bell in brand value.
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Those of us who cut our teeth on HP test equipment, early HP/UX workstations and servers, HP LaserJet printers, and HP calculators still mourn the death of Bill and Dave's dream. :-(
HP/UX 9.04 was their peak and 10.x was the beginning of the disaster that is now HP. That was long before Compaq was involved.
Damn. Now I'm missing my old 715/33.
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They used to have a thing at HP called, "The HP Way."
What you are describing, is sadly, "The New HP Way."
Nice bunch of people (Score:5, Interesting)
My little article is here [usenetreader.co.uk]
After Autonomy's lawyers bullied me and anyone who supported me to take my article off line. I eventually lost my net access after Autonomy complained to BT, my ISP; they never issued an explanation or apology but still took money from my account. It took years and a letter to the BT chairman before I got a refund.
The article was originally subtitled "Stress Is More Fun" but seems to have got lost; if you read the article, you'll find out why it had this moniker. To find out what others think, look at Glassdoor [glassdoor.com]
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I used to work for Autonomy. I have no sympathy for them. My little article is here [usenetreader.co.uk]
I hate to seem rude, but you seem a tad bit overly sensitive. You also seemed to be pretty quick to point fingers yourself. Of course Autonomy was chasing the almighty dollar (or pound in your case). That's what corporations do. Certainly some corporations value employees more than others, but you have no employees if you have no money. Would it have made more sense to have the Spaniard fix his own code? Yes. Is it annoying to be asked to debug an issue that you know someone else can fix in 2 minutes
Your part of the reason IT has such a high churn r (Score:3)
Your part of the reason IT has such a high churn rate.
30c is NOT an acceptable temperature for an office, sure it can happen during extreme weather from time to time but in normal companies, everybody then works together to make conditions tolerable. Extra ventilators, portable AC's.
IT needs all the people it can get and being a programmer is NOT supposed to be a stock exchange trader type job. Constant stress is not good for a job that relies a lot on creativity and deep thought.
Your arguments don't even h
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Man, that was a painful read. I'm starting to feel sorry for Autonomy. Not everything has to be persecution, sometimes people are just a bad fit.
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I agree with some of what you've written, but not all of it. What I agree with you is 1. the constant pestering (what a great way to kill productivity), 2. the unbearable heat in the office - we've had the same problem, and had a LOT of difficulty getting those who hold the purse strings to do something about it until legal requirements were pointed out about ventilation. It seemed like a pretty toxic work environment. I would have quit too.
However, a software developer should be able to figure out for them
misheard (Score:3)
"Autonomy"? I thought we were buying "Anonymous"!
Another blunder... (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, she is not directly responsible for this fiasco although she does admit to voting for the sale. Just seems odd that one bad move after another seems to follow her wherever she goes. Honestly, I think that her and Carly are locked in a fierce battle for worst CEO of all time. Oops...look out...Balmer is closing fast...
I have an idea! (Score:2)
Due Dilligence Fail (Score:4, Interesting)
It never ceases to amaze me how often this happens. I have seen it first hand during an acquisition I was aware of, and here it is at HP. In the case I was aware of, my co-workers and others were doing everything we could to illuminate the problems before the acquisition went through, but the concerns fell upon deaf ears. It took years to clean up that mess. Of course the senior management who were responsible for the acquisition came through it unscathed, while the rest of us worked our asses off to "make it work". It looks like the same thing happened at HP.
As an executive, these people are paid to take care of these things. They are supposed to be able to handle M&A work. That is what all of those fancy degrees and business school is for. In the tech world, if you say that you can build an environment and then fail, it is obvious and you get fired. Yet some how in the C-suite world, if you say you can build a company and fail... nothing happens. I am totally in the wrong profession.
Family Guy (Score:3)
My warped mind goes there every time I see her name in an article.
I bet meg tries to socialize the loses (Score:2)
Autonomy a Bad Online eBay Buy for Meg? (Score:2)
Trying to convince me that you examined and investigated a target with your top notch professional team and then did the deal and you bitch about it is an ADMISSION OF FAILURE.
The CEO and the entire due diligence team should be canned along with board members who were involved in the deal.
Weren't the forensic accontants bonded? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ohhh, you want to buy a company? (Score:3)
I'm willing to sell for only $10 million.
Yours Truly,
Tommy Flanagan
HP seems incapable of doing anything right (Score:4, Interesting)
They are done. They are Alcatel and Xerox. They are profoundly broken and no amount of strategizing the paradigm and clousourcing the B2B experience is going to fix that. HP is now just a brand with nothing behind it and dysfunctional organization that doesn't know what the fuck its doing behind it.
They finally reached the critical mass of disorganized bullshit and mismanaged acquisitions run by a senior staff of psychopathic feudal warlords who do nothing except protect their own shit while the CEO, is busy molesting secretaries or running for public office.
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Re:Corp looking to committ suicide? Hire female CE (Score:5, Insightful)
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Recent studies have shown that there are many similarities in the personality traits of psychopaths and successful leaders. The problem is where the fine line lies - or where it is put for a given company/nation.
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Care to give a solid example instead of a hollow-yet-snappy retort?
John Sculley
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Steve Jobs.
Not the best example? He was all the things you list, just successful.