Time to leave

I just read that Hamid Karsai the president of Afghanistan stated in a interview for a local TV station that Afghanistan would back Pakistan if the US were to start a war with Pakistan.


It is clear, or at least I hope, that our government is not even close to considering such an action.


I do understand the need of Hamid to play up to his constituency but not at our expense specially if you understand that brave American gave their lives to get the bastard safely to Kabul. ("The only thing dying for" by Eric Blehm).


President Obama needs to take the same stance as he took with Iraq.  Negotiations with cretins such as Hamid are destined to yield unwanted results.


I repeat the refrain from Bruce Springsteen song - Last to die:

Who'll be the last to die for a mistake
The last to die for a mistake
Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break
Who'll be the last to die for a mistake

The time has come to re-build America.

A note to Meg Whitman

As a board member you do bear responsibility for the current debacle at HP. 

Over the last decade, the selection of CEO and board members at HP has left a lot to be desired. Each of the last 3 CEOs have besmirched the HP brand making fundamental business or ethical blunders. Don’t become another name on that list.

You do not have much time to turn the HP ship around.

As long as the stock price remains so depressed, HP will be a target of take over.  It wont  be by a friendly party. Rumors or speculation that Oracle may make a play will give rise to others. The others may be from overseas.

Here is an unsolicited tactical plan for you which will give you some breathing room to find the “HP way”.

1. It will be less costly for you in the long run to walk away from the Autonomy acquisition than to wring out ROI from this outlandish purchase. The cost of walking away is far less than the years and organizational energies required to integrate Autonomy. Aurasma may be a neat a product but a company that does not have a tablet or smart phone will find it difficult to extract revenues from it…
2. Write off the Palm purchase and embrace Android. Re-enter the tablet market using Andoid while pushing your development team to create some new functionality which will make people re-consider your tablet.
3. Re-state your commitment to the PC and hardware platform – so that the core of HP remains intact.
4. Cut cost and price on both laptops and printers to be a good source of income this Christmas season and be able to end the year on a positive note.
5. Aggressively focus the sales force to sell services to the major corporate organizations – specifically, address the healthcare vertical.

Remember Lou Gerstner’s admonition when he took over IBM. You do not need to spend time developing a strategy. You need to get your team and the organization to execute and deliver results.

If you can stabilize the stock price over the next few months, and re-focus the organization on the ‘HP way’, you will have gained the time to build a vision and long term strategy for HP while also building a ‘can do’ culture.

YAHOO - NOT

I was amazed to read that Microsoft is again considering purchasing Yahoo… They were rejected once before. Instead of considering themselves lucky in 2008 when MS offered Yahoo $33 a share. Today, Yahoo is selling at less than $16 a share.  A fifty percent loss in value is not a great selling point at stockholder’s meeting.

We do hear that they there two camps within Microsoft: One that supports the purchase; and a second who opposes it. I hope that both Mr. Ballmer and any prospective Private Equity firm pass on the Kool Aid and begin to look at more promising acquisitions.

There have been recent rumblings in the press suggesting that Mr. Ballmer needs to go. It would behoove Steve to take to heart lessons from a recent series of event at another storied Silicon Valley company (HP)…. Mr. Apotheker did not survive the mistake of buying Autonomy for 10B. In the process of committing that mistake the value of HP dropped 40%.

If Mr. Ballmer wants acquire something BIG, Mr. Ballmer should beat Oracle to the punch and purchase HP. It is clear that this purchase will be costly and will require a great deal of careful integration of HP into Microsoft.

There quite a number of synergies to be derived from such a merger. The service and software side of HP should be a relative easy integration. The hardware side may not be as difficult as one would think. From the PC side, they may be able to optimize the operating system in ways that they did not consider before.

Let Jack Ma and the Alibaba Group acquire the rest of Yahoo. The killing of AOL does not merit a HP like 40% plunge in the stock price.

If Mr. Ballmer can avoid making the Yahoo mistake and wants to acquire some valuable and more modest in size, let me point him to a more sensible acquisition - WebMD… It certainly allows them to extend their health care presence and enhances their existing products such as Vault.

Mr. Ballmer take a pass on the Kool Aid (Yahoo).