Carly Fiorina was a disaster for HP. She almost single handedly destroyed "the HP way", presided over a terrible decline in company morale, an exodus of talent and a loss of vision. She pushed through the disasterous merger with Compaq (and yes, it was a disaster) from which HP is only now recovering.

Carly Fiorina did not bump into a glass ceiling. She bumped into a ceiling of hubris, arrogance and incompetence, all of it her own. The real problem is not that she was a woman, the real problem is that she was treated like a star, given more than 20 million (!!) dollars to leave HP instead of being dumped on her behind with 30 days pay like so many loyal HP employees had been during her reign. In short, the problem is that she was hired to begin with. The two words I had when Ms. Fiorina left HP were "Good riddance!"

Here's a sharp CEO for you: When Microsoft was pushing their tablet PC initiative, Bill Gates and multiple CEO's shared a stage for the intro. The CEO's of Toshiba, Sony and other companies all sat there proudly holding an example of their tablet PC product to show off when they were named. Carly Fiorina? She was holding a tablet. As in a writing tablet. Small issue? Sure. Indicative of her overall effectiveness and attention to detail as a CEO. You betcha.

If Ms. Fiorina gave a damn about HP and HP employees, perhaps she could have gotten by with 2 million instead of 20 million when she was fired and asked the board to use the remaining 18 million bucks to help take care of the employees she had screwed over.

Stop whining, Carly. You blew it all on your own. Good riddance.

As the previous poster rightly pointed out, perhaps she would've had a better post-HP reputation if she didn't need a $20 million kiss-off package.

My father worked at HP and along with everyone else had to trim his already thin budget to pay for the package. Of course, after being forced to lay off his staff, he was laid off himself.

I also did some work at HP as a consultant years before during the Carly days and the merger was a complete boondoggle designed largely to keep the ground shifting to avoid getting and firm metrics on performance.

I think she might have made a passable CEO at a stable company, but as the article pointed out, these are trying times for technology companies. However, she was the worst CEO for HP which was one of the traditional old-school companies. Very R&D driven, HP had a well-deserved enginerring reputation, which she spun on its head from quality first and the 'HP way' to complete marketing fluff. She made her disdain for the 'geeks' known from Day 1 and she still hasn't acknowledged that 'geeks' made that company what it was when she inherited it.

Who's stereotyping who: "Because there aren't enough women in business, the stylistic differences get magnified. That's one of the reasons women get caricatured. The traditional style of the technologist is to be introverted, not terribly communicative, really in love with the technology, kind of geeky and awkward, that's the archetype. Women tend to be more communicative, collaborative, expressive. The stylistic differences get in the way. That's why diversity in the workplace takes real work."

Notice no mention about the positive aspects of the technologist personality, nor the weaknesses of the 'communicative, collaborative, expressive' personality. You need both, and she still doesn't recognize that. Moving a company from being weighted heavily in the first style to a balanced approach at the very least requires at least having some respect for their contributions.

This fundamental lack of understanding is why she failed, not because of any global male consipracy.

Plus: Why in the world didn't the interviewer ASK Carly about that giant severance package? It completely undermines everything else she has to say, which is a shame, because she makes some valid points. But. That woman is beyond "set for life." Her children and grandchildren are "set for life." There is no excuse for avoiding that subject in an interview with her. Sheesh.

Compaq was a dying company before this merger came up. They had an "in" into many large corporations, and they had the service end of the business. But they were on the way out due to the total commoditization of the PC market.

Fiorina keeps defending the merger, hints that HP would have been worse off without this merger, but does not give any details of the advantages this ill matched merger, nor its tremendous cost. Two alien culture companies forced to merge so that HP could get the established seats Compaq had in corporations before it went the way of most PC companies?

HP had some of the best technology in printers and the printer division was supporting a lot of fluff departments that were not making money. In the end, the printer division geeks probably ended up covering her huge severance pay too.

As a former HP employee during Fiorina's tumultuous reign, I recall a depressed stock price, a lot of ambitious talk but underperforming results, and a workforce increasingly skeptical of its leadership's abilities. Perhaps these factors, rather than the sexism canard, contributed the the rockstar CEO's dismissal. That she would later attempt to spin her ignominious departure in her favor is consistent with her marketing mentality, and her penchant for refusing accountability (I recall that she once blamed other executives for a missed-earnings quarter in a company-wide address).

And she is (still) a Republican. Is there any more reason to be a Carly-hater?

Fiorina's firing did not come about because she bumped into a "glass ceiling", instead she proved herself the epitome of the Peter Principle at work.

Her time at HP proved that she had no idea how to run the company and the purchase of Compaq was one of the worst business decisions in American business history. She can act now as if she was treated unfairly but the fact is she was deservingly fired and, as an HP employee, I only wish it would have happened sooner. With her pathetic performance and the outrageous golden umbrella she received she should have disappeared and never mentioned HP again; at least then she would have only been known as a complete failure as HP's CEO as opposed to a whining, lying complete failure.