Linked List: November 6, 2010

Saturday, 6 November 2010

It’s Been a Long Five Years 

I was flipping through old DF entries last night, and this one caught my eye. In July 2005, HP was still reselling an HP-co-branded iPod. Seems like a long time ago.

Update: John Nack, via Twitter: “5 years ago, Adobe had yet to own Flash.” Exactly. It’s been a long five years.

Fortune on the Hurd/HP Saga 

Not sure what’s going on, but Fortune published its own lengthy, well-sourced report on the Mark Hurd/Jodie Fisher/HP saga, on the same day as the WSJ. Both reports are interesting, and contain different information. The timing seems beyond coincidence, though, so I’m guessing some of the sources (presumably from the HP board) are the same.

Here’s Fortune on how HP came to hire Jodie Fisher in the first place:

When Hurd was displeased, he let people around him know, and one person who was always around was Caprice Fimbres. A former public relations account executive, Fimbres was Hurd’s “program manager,” an aide with broad sway over the CEO’s schedule.

Fimbres took on the challenge of allaying Hurd’s concerns. At some point, she began thinking about a television show she’d been watching. Fimbres was hooked on reality TV, and that summer she’d been following a particularly bad NBC series called “Age of Love.” Its gimmick was inane, even for an inane genre: “Age of Love” pitted a group of female twentysomethings — the “kittens” — against a group of fortysomethings — the “cougars” — vying for the affections of a real-life tennis star.

Apparently Fimbres concluded that experience in a made-for-TV cat fight was the ideal preparation for playing gatekeeper to one of the most important corporate CEOs in the world.

WSJ Investigation on the Mark Hurd/HP Saga 

Lots of new details on the Hurd/HP saga in this report from the WSJ:

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal into Mr. Hurd’s sudden ouster reveals that the letter contained an explosive allegation: that in early 2008, Mr. Hurd told Ms. Fisher of a still-secret H-P plan to buy Electronic Data Systems Corp.