So, Carly Fiorina. I feel like that woman is really crazy and should not be a senator. But here’s some other things I do know about her.
- She really wanted HP to merge with Compaq. Really. She even fought the son of one of the founders of the company to make this thing happen, and the fight was nasty. But the merger happened, and thenĀ HP became the biggest computer manufacturer in the world. Though there was a dip for a time, the company is the biggest today, and much of that is due to her insistence on that merger. Because, really, HP computers were kind of a joke before then. Now you can’t walk through a college campus without seeing a ton of HP laptops looking sad and depressed next to the much cooler Macs.
- Walter Hewlett warned that if HP focused on the personal computer market, they would lose the lead they had in printers. Remember when HP’s printers were the best, hands down? The merger ended that. So, uh, thanks Carly?
- A lot of the shit she got as CEO of HP seemed to me, at the time, to be fueled not by her actual management, but by sexism. She was the first female CEO of a Fortune 20 company and Forbes named her one of the most powerful women in America. And whenever a woman gets too powerful, people bring out the knives. Now, it may be true that she wasn’t a great CEO. But so much of the rhetoric about her at the time (that I remember) was so tinged with sexist overtones, that I always had a hard time believing she was as bad as men said she was.
- All that aside, she should not be a senator. She thinks that other Republicans are demon sheep. That’s not healthy.