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Amid last night's (Thursday) Republican presidential debates, all eyes were on the likes of Donald Trump and Jeb Bush in what has become a crowded Republican presidential nominee race.
But another candidate that flourished in last night's Republican debates was a name not often mentioned by the mainstream media.
Fiorina wasn't part of the "headline" event, as her polling numbers didn't qualify her for FOX News' 9 p.m. debate. She instead participated in an "undercard" event for the candidates who didn't reach FOX News' polling threshold.
She joined former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-PA, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, former New York Gov. George Pataki, and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore.
Despite being a participant in the lesser of the two debates, Fiorina shined. So much so that even the Democratic National Committee considered her a target.
A tweet last night read:
But was this a fair assessment of Fiorina as CEO of HP?
Fiorina became CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) on July 17, 1999, and was forced out on February 10, 2005. The day before she stepped in, HPQ stock closed at $35.64. When she left, it closed the day at $18.54. That makes for a 48% drop. Not quite the 53% that the DNC cited, but certainly not a stock performance to be proud of.
Here's how some other tech stocks performed in that same time period:
There are few names that did well in that stretch, so at least some of the slide in the HPQ stock price can be attributed to market forces outside of Fiorina's control. Though the HPQ stock price, or the stock price of any of these companies, falls far short of telling the story of any of these companies or their CEOs.
"Fiorina served as the captain of a global tech enterprise that was struggling to navigate through the troubled waters of the early 2000s," Money Morning Defense & Tech Specialist Michael A. Robinson said. "And let's be honest here. HP was a tough ship to steer."
Robinson added that Fiorina's tenure had its ups and downs.
"Fiorina instigated the merger between HP and Compaq Computer Corp. in 2002, which ultimately strengthened HP's market position and enabled the Silicon Valley pioneer to become a major player in desktops, laptops, and servers," Robinson said. "On the other hand, Fiorina laid off 30,000 people as a result of the merger."
"Technology is the engine of the U.S. economy," Robinson said. "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a president who understood the Internet of Everything, Big Data, cloud computing, and all the other paradigm-altering advances coming out of Silicon Valley at an incredibly rapid pace?"
Stay informed on what's going on in the markets by following us on Twitter @moneymorning.
Don't forget to check out all of our 2016 presidential election coverage here…
Nice ad for Fiorina. If you want to shill for her, you might want to stay away from the merger that is being undone right now. She was a terrible leader and it is fair to criticize her.time at HP.
Creating separate divisions is not the same thing as undoing the merger.
They aren't going to be separate divisions. They will be separate companies.
The HP split isn't anything at all like undoing the merger. The split will create HP (a PC, laptop, tablet, mobile, printers, etc) company for individuals and education and small business, and HP Enterprise (a server, networking, storage, services, etc) company for cloud and high performance computing and so forth. At the time of the merger neither HP nor Compaq fit either of those descriptions. This is an appropriate split of the improved (but still flawed) company that resulted from the merger (albeit, after over a decade of muddling from the board and multiple CEOs.) What it definitely is not is a return to the pre-merger state of affairs. Prior to the merger, both companies were on the wrong path for the future of IT and were each on the brink of virtual failure. As much as HP would have liked to have copied IBM and become a services company, HP did (and still does) not have the service infrastructure that IBM did (and does) have and would have failed. It would have fallen back to being a purveyor of printers and business desktop and consumer grade computers. Compaq made good consumer and business desktop PCs and laptops – once upon a time, but by 2002 had become somewhat irrelevant in the larger scheme of IT. It's products were good, but waning. How bad were they? As both an enterprise and desktop IT manager during that time (mid 90s to mid 00s), it had reached the point where I would disqualify every proposal or bid that mentioned either HP or Compaq. Neither was doing particularly impressive work at the time. So, figuring out new tech and enterprise IT (primarily hardware and infrastructure) and getting the consumer/business desktop/laptop right was just about the only option left for both HP and Compaq. I don't think either would have succeeded without the merger. The merger had negative consequences, but I think they were less than had the merger not occurred. Compaq would have eventually been absorbed, and HP would be a much smaller and less relevant company than it is today. As bad as the current HP is, it would have been even worse without the merger. Compaq would have simply disappeared into some other company, perhaps Dell or Lenovo or who knows, but any way you slice it Compaq was doomed.