More on Carly Fiorina

Carly's Way
slashdot.org -> technologyreview.com :

An electronic engineer who worked as a Research Scientist at the Hewlett-Packard Imaging Systems Laboratory starting in 1975 until he resigned in 2003, G.S. thought HP represented the very best of American character - "a spirit of adventure and a belief in unlimited possibilities." He charges, though, that starting in 2000 the can-do attitude was killed by management choices intended to placate nervous investors and board members rather than benefit the company and its workers over the long-term. He warns that sustained cut-backs to R&D budgets over the past half-decade may have irreversibly damaged H-P and the entire U.S. technology industry.

... working for Carly Fiorina reminded me of my days working for that farmer. I remember the first time she walked into the Hewlett-Packard labs. She said that our new company slogan was "Invent." Then she told us that the technology industry would never again be as exciting and profitable as it was in the '90s. That we'd all need to grow up now and face that fact.

I knew from that moment that HP's best days were behind us ...

Carly's Gone. HP Celebrates
technologyreview.com :

Just after the official announcement came down that CEO Carly Fiorina would be sacked, corks were popped and bottles were opened. There was little time for empathy. No pangs of sadness. Inside the company, workers openly celebrated their liberation from "Her Royal Horribleness," a nickname bestowed upon Fiorina for her abrasive treatment of line workers. There was little love lost between the CEO and the 151,000 HP workers who have, almost consistently since 1999, made hating their boss a very personal, full-time mission. "When the news was officially announced this morning, people were dancing - literally dancing - around their cubicles," an employee in the business division writes in an email ...

Fiorina's obsession with Wall Street pushed much innovation to the side, and eventually led to a rather unsettling change in the HP work environment: the company's very first layoffs. When it was all said and done, 15,000 of the then 85,000 workers found themselves without a job by the end of 2003 ...

"Steve Jobs used to say that HP was the inspiration for Apple's emphasis on innovation," says a former HP Labs employee. "Fiorina never understood that you have to spend a little money to make money. "That's why HP went from a respected, innovative company that made quality products to one that makes most of its profits off printer ink." ...

- Well, you know, at least Carly was right about one thing - that the tech industry had peaked in the 90's. Whether you call it the tech bust, the NASDAQ bubble, the energy transition, unsustainable societal complexity (Tainter), or the second depression, one thing is clear : that the next Big Thing will not be technology. It will not be IT, nor anything tech-related. The leading industry in the previous phase will not ever be again the same leading industry in the next - we have seen this with railroads, and it was the same with radio. The next Big Thing will be the Resource Wars - which have already started (see latest example).

Indonesia-Malaysia dispute over oil

thestandard.com.hk :

Indonesia has sent F-16 fighter jets to a disputed border region with Malaysia while President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono plans to visit the area that includes an offshore oil field both countries claim, officials said Sunday. The mix of saber rattling and diplomacy is the latest sign that tensions over the area in the Sulawesi Sea are rising between the two countries.

Indonesia complained Friday that four Malaysian military aircraft had violated its airspace in the area in the last 10 days, amid reports that Indonesia has deployed warships in the waters near the oil fields.

The International Court of Justice handed Malaysia sovereignty over the region's Sipadan and Ligitan islands in 2002. But Indonesia claims Malaysia's water territory only extends 19 kilometers from the islands. However, Malaysia has awarded oil production sharing contracts to Royal Dutch/Shell Group in deep waters near the islands - a move protested by Indonesia.

- Don't you think that both being Islamic countries, they'd have better things to do than to send fighter jets prowling along each other's borders? But, if it's about oil, then, that makes all the difference ...

(2005-03-07 10:24:54 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

The Long Road Down : Decline and the Deindustrial Future

energybulletin.net -> oilcrisis.com

For more than three decades now, the world has been on notice that the long afternoon of industrial society is drawing to a close. The Club of Rome's epochal report The Limits to Growth (1973), the first of many persuasive studies, warned that unrestricted economic growth would collide with hard planetary limits sometime in the early twenty-first century, unless expensive and politically unpopular steps were taken soon. Of course those steps weren't taken at all. A failure of vision and political will on the part of leaders and constituencies alike threw away the decades that could have made a difference. Today we live in the shadow of that failure ...

Yet an odd blindness affects attempts to make sense of our predicament. People on all sides of the debate talk as though the future has only two possible shapes: progress or apocalypse, either business as usual for the foreseeable future or a catastrophic slide into savagery and mass death. Whether the topic is global warming, renewable energy, fossil fuel depletion, or anything else, the same claims repeat like a broken record. One side insists that technology will inevitably solve our problems and yield a better life for all, while the other side brandishes worst case scenarios and talks of millions of corpses. It should be obvious that these aren't the only possibilities ...

- In the ongoing debate on the consequences of Peak Oil, we have seen all the extremes of views by now. On one side, the economic cornucopians and the technocracy / singularity advocates, and on the other side, the folks who tell us we'll become a Mad Max society. This article makes a good point, the reality may well be something in between - just muddling along. Actually, you're now living it. History in the making and all that.

(2005-03-07 10:13:04 SGT) [Energy] Permalink

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