They hired "good" CEO's. And paid them a lot of money.
Hewlett-Packard Revisited: Lowest Tech Valuation in 20 Years
My experience is that "good" CEOs don't drive the company valuation to record lows... CEO Fiorina drove the stock price down 41%, CEO Apotheker drove the stock price down 40.6% Mark
Hurd escaped with his reputation intact.
When I worked in the Computer Industry (mid-80s), HP was considered a leader in the industry and a great company to work for. See " the
HP way." It was a company founded and lead by engineers.
In 1999, the board decided to make
Carly Fiorina with her Medieval History undergraduate degree and Marketing Masters CEO.
She spun off the soul of the company which went on to become
Agilent Technology.
Before she was fired six years later, HP had lost half of its market value.
As
Forbes put it:
"
... Carly Fiorina took a company long on innovation and new product development and turned it into the most outdated industrial-era sort of company."
Today CEO Meg Whitman has HP "... on the same road as DEC, Wang, Lanier, Gateway Computers, Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics ... And that’s lousy for investors and employees alike."
Of course, Meg Whitman will do her best to grab as many millions for herself as she can while she continues to both make billions of dollars of HP equity and thousands of jobs disappear.
That's not magic, that's mediocrity.
Uno