Monday, October 6, 2014

Reactions-Roger McNamee

Reactions out there.... McNamee, you might recall, was the guy who 
rescued Palm before HP rescued him.  

This clip re HP is on CNBC at http://www.cnbc.com/id/102062097 

The clip of McNamee explaining how cool the Palm Pre 
is to the Wall St. Journal seven years ago is at: 
http://www.wsj.com/video/d7-video-roger-mcnamee-and-jon-rubinstein-
on-the-palm-pre/106DC3C8-EC62-426C-BE1F-C2C73E79E101.html 

HP has the agility of 'a bag of cement': McNamee
Drew Sandholm@drewsandholm    6 Hours Ago    CNBC.

Hewlett-Packard's plans to split into two companies is too 
little, too late, technology investor Roger McNamee said 
Monday.

"They have all the agility of a bag of cement," McNamee, 
co-founder of Elevation Partners, said on "Squawk Alley." 
"It seems to me they've been at least two, maybe three years 
behind every important trend."

Rival IBM, on the other hand, divested PCs and servers 
years ago on the realization these businesses have little 
growth potential, McNamee said.(he's omitting the fact that 
IBM was 4th in a field of 3, losing money on PCs, when they
divested; HP has been 1 or 2 for a decade, making fair $$)

"In fairness, I think HP has been horribly managed for 
20 years (so he indicts Lew Platt quite as much as Carly 
Fiorina, etc) and, you know, so [CEO] Meg Whitman didn't 
inherit a great situation, but I don't think there's any evidence 
that she's gotten control of it, that she has any idea what they 
ought to do next," he said. "I don't see any plan for either side 
of these things that's going to make a difference to 
shareholders... the long-term outlook for both sides of this 
business is terrible."

On the tape, McNamee assails the plan because more execs 
will milk more money from the treasury.  
He should know, he got plenty from HP at a time that Palm's 
old boss, Todd Bradley, took home $27M to run PCs for a year. 
for HP--a year that Hurd and three others milked $110M in 
salaries and perks from a company they stole blind.

Earlier, Hewlett-Packard surged after saying it would split its 
hardware and services businesses from the personal-computer 
and printer business, forming two publicly traded companies.

"We think this is the best tactic to continue this turnaround 
journey and position HP into two great new companies that 
are real scale and have a real chance to make a real 
difference on a go-forward business," Whitman said on 
"Squawk on the Street."

"We're really excited about this," she said. "I think it's going 
to be better offerings for customers and partners, career 
opportunities for employees and we believe it will create 
real shareholder value."









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