Sunday, November 27, 2011

Carla Fiorina was Bill Hewlett's Babe Herman

Fasten your seat belts, all 8 our faithful blogreaders are in for a bumpy ride. First, you have to be old enough to remember when baseball preoccupied the minds of much of the male population. Before you become really absorbed, you must bear in mind that most of what your blogger remembers comes from reading history. Thus, your blogger's recollections.
Casey Stengel spent two or three years as player-manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, which assemblage contained a slugging outfielder named Babe Herman; Herman was not dumber than an ox, but not much smarter either. Early in one game, as he tended left field, he tried to catch an easy flyball; he wandered around out there and finally let it fall untouched. Casey lectured him gently but hoped for better. In a succeeding inning he let another one drop. Furiously, Casey jerked Herman and substituted himself. On the next fly to left, he wandered around and he let it fall: at the end of the inning, he stormed in and yelled at Herman "See, you've got left field so screwed up nobody can play it!"
William Hewlett and David Packard got their start selling audio generators to Walt Disney to make weird sounds in the movie "Fantasia" They progressed to manufacturing a wide variety of electronic instruments that were crucial to the World War II effort. After the war, IBM found they could sell computing machines for over 100 kilo dollars. HP thought they could sell a more modest machine for a few kilodollars, but found they were getting too massive, so they split off the instrument division, called it Agilent, and then hired an ambitious young woman called Carly Fiorina to run the computer division, which assumed the name Hewlett Packard. Carly, under the impression that HP could corner the computer market, thought she should merge with another hardware company, not realizing that the big profits come from selling printers ink a milliliter at a time, and soon she succumbed to stockholder restlessness. The next CEO, from a software company, proposed they depart the computer business entirely. The present CEO has greatly dissipating a sizeable nest egg, earned by putting sellers and buyers of lawnmowers together, in an unsuccessful run at the governorship of California.
Finally, perhaps, maybe Bill and Dave are too tough an act to follow.