“Losing the HP Way: Two years after Carly Fiorina pulled off a transforming merger, Hewlett-Packard looks huge, frail and confused.,” The Economist, http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3124290?f=related, 25 August 2004 (from BlogCritics).

After jumping on the cobuyitaphobe anti-Fiorina bandwagon

Carly Fiorina is stepping down as chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard after three years. She led the company through the challenging merger with Compaq, which has not gone quite as swimmingly as hoped for.

BlogCritics quotes from a 2004 Economist article on Fiorina’s (disasterous) immunity to cobuyitaphobia

[Carly Fiorina's] problem ever since has been to justify the beast she thereby created. HP’s shares are worth less today than on the day before the merger was announced or on the day it closed. A consensus has emerged in the industry that the new HP, the tech industry’s most sprawling conglomerate, has lost its focus and is being squeezed between two formidable rivals with much clearer business models, Dell and IBM. Where Dell stands for cheap, simple boxes in an industry that is commoditising, and IBM stands for patching together lots of fiddly subsystems in an industry that remains ridiculously complex, HP seems a lukewarm compromise.

…

Her problem, in a nutshell, is that HP is trying to be all things to all kinds of customers, and is leaving more and more of them plain confused.

The selection continues, criticizing Fiorina’s femininity

It is unlikely that Ms Fiorina, who in her previous career oversaw the spin-off of Lucent from AT&T, is a stranger to the theory of corporate clarity. Could it be that years of conflict in testosterone-filled rooms have left her afflicted with that psychology so common among bosses of the other gender: the compulsion to rule the roost?