back to article HP wag has last laugh at US prez wannabe with carlyfiorina.org snatch

Carly Fiorina, once the boss of HP and today a US Presidential candidate, just learned the hard way that you can never be too thorough when it comes to hoarding domains, particularly when you're planning to run for public office. An unknown wag was able to snap up the carlyfiorina.org domain and use it to host a rather …

  1. Nate Amsden

    why

    does anyone care about carly? Makes no sense to me. She was(maybe still is) a contributor on CNBC too. I just fast forwarded through anything she had to say. I could understand if she was still CEO of some big company(well maybe she is I haven't checked).

    Maybe if everyone ignores her she will just go away.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: why

      "Why" "does anyone care about carly?"

      Because she's running for president of the United States in 2016, and some might consider this is representative of the sort of person she is and her attitudes in that area in general?

    2. Hud Dunlap
      Mushroom

      Re: why @Nate Amsden

      Yes I wish she would go away too. Unfortunately a lot of the Conservativs( and I use that term loosely) think she is great. If you try to expose how bad she was you are denounced as a leftist clown.

      Just see the comments from this article.

      http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/05/04/unlike-hillary-clinton-carly-fiorina-welcomes-tough-questions-from-media-public/

      No one seems to ask the tough question. " You were fired after two years because you destroyed the company you were in charge of. Why is that a qualification for any elected office."

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Meh

        Re: why @Nate Amsden

        Keep in mind also that Carly might be running for President, but her actual goal may not be the presidency. She might want to push the Republican debate towards more traditional corporate-friendly Republican policies, and away from the Tea Party or Evangelical/social conservative wings of the party. Or she might be campaigning to get enough delegates/support that she can set herself up as a VP candidate, especially considering that as a woman she would help balance the Republican ticket vs. Hillary Clinton as the assumed Democratic standard-bearer. Or she might be gunning to get enough delegates and influence the debate enough that she can get a cabinet post like Secretary of Commerce or Treasury or U.S. Trade Representative should the Republicans win.

        Personally, I don't think she's going to get very far towards actually being the Republican candidate. She's well-spoken and intelligent and a woman, which all help, but she doesn't have a real following within the Republican party, and her track record at HP is not great. One of the things that killed Mitt Romney was his association with corporate downsizing. Given the mood of the electorate, there's not going to be a lot of excitement about electing someone who laid off 30K Americans during the so-called apex of her career prior to politics.

        1. Flubb

          Re: why @Nate Amsden

          On the occasions I have heard her speak, she seemed to have made up her own idioms and buzzwords so that I had no idea what she was talking about, a fine American tradition, I grant you. Intelligent or not, she is completely unfit for any important position unless you have something that needs to be collapsed from the inside. Unfortunately that skill is in no short supply but it's still worth trying to get her on the next ballot for president of Iran. You never know.

        2. Someone Else Silver badge

          @ Marketing Hack -- Re: why @Nate Amsden

          Or...She might be gunning for a slot on Fox Noise...like the rest of the Republican candidate-wannabees. She may just be (marginally) qualified for that job, too; God knows she ain't qualified for anything else.

      2. oiseau
        Flame

        Carly

        Looks like a blxxdy bxtch ...

        Talks like a blxxdy bxtch ...

        Does as a blxxdy bxtch ...

        Hmmm ...

        Must be a blxxdy bxtch.

        A leftist clown's $0,02

      3. Someone Else Silver badge

        @ Hud Dunlap -- Re: why @Nate Amsden

        You pay attention to Breitbart? My GOD, Man! Sheesh!!

      4. Josh Cain

        Re: why @Nate Amsden

        Well, if fucking over those you are responsible for is the definition of politician, then she's more than qualified. Let's also talk about what a great idea it is to put someone who was embroiled in a spying scandal surrounding the company they led in charge of an intelligence community...embroiled in a spying scandal.

    3. JeffyPoooh
      Pint

      Nice snatch

      That is all.

  2. Six_Degrees

    He needs to add some zombie goats to the page, borrowed from Fiorian's bizarre Senate campaign ad.

    1. keithpeter Silver badge
      Windows

      sheep

      View the html of the main page for the address of the easter egg

    2. Paul 151

      Bonus page

      Quick look at the source gives a reference to this page...

      http://www.carlyfiorina.org/bonus-page.html

  3. Evil Auditor Silver badge

    At least, Carly's not afraid of taking unpopular decisions.

    But I really liked the part where she said that what she did to HP, she can do with the USA. Fuck it all over, minding her own pocket?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      You, that website's author, and everyone else have missed the point entirely

      I think having a president who will, unflinchingly, lay off 30,000 government employees would be fucking awesome.

      1. rjmx
        FAIL

        Re: You, that website's author, and everyone else have missed the point entirely

        And then you'll complain that your tax refund is a day late. Or that the FDA missed a major salmonella outbreak because there wasn't enough staff to inspect everything.

        Sheesh.

      2. ItsNotMe
        FAIL

        Re: You, that website's author, and everyone else have missed the point entirely

        "I think having a president who will, unflinchingly, lay off 30,000 government employees would be fucking awesome."

        Unless YOU were one of those 30,000 people who got canned.

      3. skeptical i
        Meh

        Re: You, that website's author, and everyone else have missed the point entirely

        Hi, Theodore: Why would sacking 30,000 civil servants be "awesome"?

        If she would, unflinchingly, tell the pharmaceutical, insurance, defense, oil, automobile, financial, and other industry lobbyists to take a flying f#ck at a rolling donut so Congress can get down to doing the people's business (i.e., stuff that improves education, health, and employment for ALL Americans, not just those on the campaign donor lists), THAT would be awesome. But what are the chances of that happening?

    2. The Dude

      On the other hand, if she will lay off 30,000 civil servants - starting at the top, of course - then that just might be a reasonable argument in favor of her particular business experience. That might not have been the best course of action at HP, but I think it would be bloody miraculous for government.

      1. Mark 85

        Laying off any Federal worker is damn near impossible in the States. Firing isn't damn near impossible, it is impossible.

  4. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Trollface

    "Fiorina announced her intent to run for President of the US"

    China must be bankrolling her millions to give her a fighting chance of getting into office and running the US like she did HP.

    1. skeptical i
      Devil

      Re: "Fiorina announced her intent to run for President of the US"

      Maybe Al Qaeda, ISIS, ISIL, and those other fundy-mental groups are also contributing, to sink "the Great Satan" from the inside.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    On the other hand

    She could have left those 30k staff members employed, then HP would have gone bust and all its employees would be out of work. Nothing is permanent. Not even your job. And yes, I have also been a victim of lay offs. Yeah it sucks. Yeah there's resentment. But you move one and adapt.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: On the other hand

      Her "HP rightsizing" axe was swung on at least one department that had a full order books and were very profitable.

      It was all just a numbers game to them.

      The result of that axe was that the team who were chopped setup their own company and took their customers with them. They have made very decent profits ever since. HP's stupidiy has made at least six people into multi-millionaires.

      I have no doubt that if by some chance she was elected then the outlook for the US will be pretty grim.

      Just my $0.02 worth though.

  6. Peter Simpson 1
    Happy

    If ever you are working for a company, and the CEO starts rambling on at a staff meeting and includes the phrase "maximizing shareholder value"...RUN!, don't walk, and start looking for another job.

    // Buzzword bingo

  7. Swarthy
    Facepalm

    Stuffing up the rank-and-file for Corporate benefit?

    I think this site may be helping her garner the Republican Nomination.

    1. Arthur the cat Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Stuffing up the rank-and-file for Corporate benefit?

      From what my friends in HP told me, more stuffing up the profits and pissing on those who made them while trying to create a cult of personality that made the average North Korean dictator look like a shy woodland creature.

      1. Swarthy

        Re: Stuffing up the rank-and-file for Corporate benefit?

        Ah. In that case, she should be running as a Democrat.

    2. Mark 85

      Re: Stuffing up the rank-and-file for Corporate benefit?

      Or maybe another CEO gig somewhere? More likely that...

  8. luis river

    The real matter

    I believe that it is hypocritical to make stand out those 30.000 discharged workers, the big companies in some moment of their history made the same thing, it is necessary to read the book "Tough Choices" of C Fiorina to understand her in depth, there are important people in USA that fears that Carly arrives to the presidency, same people without scruples that looks for to get rich at the expense to the taxpayer's and that they don't want to lose their privileged situation

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The lowlifes abound

    Snatching website URLs is typical of bottom feeders.

    Carly doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of being elected president but this will position her for a lot of graft and future political power.

  10. Crazy Operations Guy

    After 2005, I noticed a dramatic change in quality of HP servers

    After 2005 I stopped buying HP boxes, the quality of the ProLiant series went right into the crapped after the lay-offs. They became a colossal pain in the ass to maintain and broke more often. My local Dell sales guy loved me afterwards (I much prefer a privately-traded company over publicly traded since they're focused on long-term growth than getting rich quickly like all these "activist investors" that are plaguing the stock market)

  11. Notas Badoff
    Unhappy

    Balls

    Wasn't Fiorina the one photographed at a company business meeting on-stage with an enormous pair of (nonfunctioning but strategically placed) balls? Somehow I think that she could win a large share of votes in America with just that picture. I despair I do.

  12. Dan Paul

    Carly Fiorina is a waste of time

    Carly Fiorina is a symptom of whats gone wrong with business and the Presidency today.

    She and her minions only know how to destroy a company to satisfy utterly retarded activist investors needs. They do not know how to BUILD anything, ever. That's no way to be President either.

    Look what her protoge Antonio Perez did to once proud Eastman Kodak. Now they may have legal recourse as below.

    http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/money/2014/12/18/judge-suits-kodaks-perez-others-go-ahead/20582743/

    The GOP has enough problems fielding a viable candidate without letting Carly cause more.

    Like another poster, I would love to see 30,000 government employees out of work but the problem is that the wrong 30,000 people would get let go.

    We need a President that can bring people together, not one that rips them apart. We have quite enough of that right now. The country is divided into two camps and there is no middle ground.

    The trouble is that we have been doing things the "Democrat" way for 40 years, (spend and tax) and nothing has changed. What we need are jobs, not more welfare or socialism. Those programs only make people dependent on them just like hard drugs, instead we need to make the individual able to independently support themselves and their families. Then teach them some viable skills that they can use to better themselves beyond what the government can ever provide.

    We need to put permanent tariffs on the products of any company that ships jobs overseas, so we can support the people that they left behind and keep what we have here. That money could pay for retraining, relocation etc.

    We need a way to manage immigration and visas for those immigrants that can be or are already contributing members of society over this willy nilly illegal immigration that only causes an additional drain on scarce resources.

    We need to foster some respect for our real public servants over the temper tantrums of disruptive, entitled thugs.

    No one seems to understand or care that thousands of our police and teachers are assaulted and hundreds killed every year. They only get upset when it happens to one of them. I say too bad.

    Where's the riots for the 3 dead cops recently killed in NYC? Where's the moral outrage over the beheading of hundreds of Coptic Christians overseas?

    I'll tell you where...everyone is too politcally correct and cowardly to say anything about it. Which brings me to other qualities any Presidential candidate needs, candor and honesty.

    Obama outright lied about what he stood for. He wasn't at all honest about anything because he knew he had to lie or no one would vote for him. He blames the cops and supports criminals when it should be the other way around. He supports and fosters ex-Weather Underground bombers and New Black Panther members, Islamic Fundementalists and military deserters over the rest of the population. He gives lip service and makes false promises to our Veterans.

    "Hillarity" Clinton thinks the laws of this country don't apply to her or Bill and they have been skirting the law for 40 years. No one has had more investigations than them. She made a mockery of the position of Secretary of State and violated any number of laws during her tenure.

    We need a Ben Carson or someone similar. Hopefully someone who won't be blackmailed by Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson types. Someone who can stand up to the lies and bluster of the Left.

  13. hEdly

    big deal. it was a merger of two huge companies and why would you keep people that have multiplicative roles.

    Now after that...the decline of the company...that may be different. But it probably declined similar to other firms like IBM. It takes more that just the pres. of the company to turn it around (or make it tank).

    How many people here have even come close to running something as large as HP. And the media thinks that she should have kept everyone. yeah right. The company would have tanked even quicker.

    As far as being potentially POTUS. She has some good ideas and some not so good. Folks in the USGOV want to try to run things like a business, and yet still use the same financial tricks as they used when it was merely a government. You can't have both. Maybe some of her policies would work. Probably can't do worse than the current Pres or any of the current folks in the Senate or House. But I don't expect folks in the UK to understand our politics any more than I understand theirs. So a lot of this is probably moot

  14. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Yeah I don't get it either

    I don't get it either... why are people impressed that someone was a CEO? Would I be impressed if someone was a CEO? Well, yeah, if they did a good job. And, that doesn't necessarily mean lead the company to more and more growth -- sometimes the market is bad and the best a CEO may be able to do is stem the losses.

    But, for some reason, many people are enamoured with CEOs even when they proved to be quite incompetent. I'm always amazed at the CEOs that will be shuffled from one failed company to another; the fact that these companies go from possibly stagnant but stable to failed after they are running it for a year or two doesn't seem to phase the next company, it's like "They've been CEO of 5 companies, that means they are EXPEREINCED!" Yeah.

  15. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Yes a big deal

    "big deal. it was a merger of two huge companies and why would you keep people that have multiplicative roles."

    But: a) Carly pushed the Compaq/HP merger to begin with -- it's not like it had already happened, was in progress, or was planned when she took over. Quite a few didn't consider it to be that good of a deal. And honestly, HP wasted the DEC Alpha (along with their own PA-RISC), so really I'm not sure they did gain that much from it.

    b) She didn't cut just duplicated jobs, she cut whatever. See the post somewhere above where she cut a division that was profitable, and had more profitable shipments booked up in the future.

    c) She seriously thought she could cut R&D (using entirely the same off-the-shelf hardware you could get from literally any vendor) and cut US-based phone support (UK-based for UK I assume) in favor of the same India call centers every other vendor are using, but if she marketed JUST RIGHT she could get customers (or "consumers" in CEO-speak) to view HP as somehow still above the other vendors even though at that point there would have been nothing to differentiate them.

    1. Stephen McLaughlin

      Re: Yes a big deal

      "But: a) Carly pushed the Compaq/HP merger to begin with -- it's not like it had already happened, was in progress, or was planned when she took over. Quite a few didn't consider it to be that good of a deal. And honestly, HP wasted the DEC Alpha (along with their own PA-RISC), so really I'm not sure they did gain that much from it."

      Lot of HP mistakes during that era but trying to force everyone from PA-RISC to Itanium was *huge* risk that backfired. The shop I was in at the time had a lot of HP-UX boxes running Oracle and HP was telling us the move was going to be seamless but no one believed. They ended up migrating that environment to Solaris servers. It's rare to see an HP-UX server anymore. Sad because I really liked the Operating System.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    There are a few people here who don't know the story...

    ...and are, quite understandably, talking out of their arses.

    I never was an HP employee but I happen to have knowledge of what went on before and during her time, through socialising with a number of Hewlett-Packard (for that's what the company was called back then) engineers.

    « [M]any bemoaned not only her ill-advised merger with Compaq but also what they perceived as her dismantling of a corporate culture that dated back to the days of Bill Hewlett and David Packard. »

    She did not dismantle it so much as blew it up with extreme prejudice. By the way, part of that corporate culture was that nobody ever got laid off during tough times, even if that meant working part time. It can be done, it was done, it is still done by lots of companies. It just doesn't work if you're playing for the day traders and speculators, but everyone else--including long-term stockholders--should and typically will support you.

    She has high-flying friends, as is publicly known--which I presume must be the reason her shenanigans haven't landed her in prison yet.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: There are a few people here who don't know the story...

      "She has high-flying friends"

      Would they be flying in HP's corporate jets (Gulfstream, iirc) by any chance?

      You know you want to look it up. Off you go.

  17. Youngone Silver badge

    Not a candidate

    I read a comment somewhere else that argued she is not running for president at all, but is selling books, as she has two in the market at the moment.

    She may be auditioning for a TV pundit role on Fox or similar also, as per Sarah Palin.

  18. Someone Else Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Qualifications?

    And this is the "person" who claims she should be President because she understands how economies work, and how bureaucracies work.

    To quote the Sundance Kid (in that movie featuring ol' Blue Eyes and Robert Redford): "You just keep thinkin', Butch. That's what you're good at." (Or is that "Bitch"?)

  19. EarthDog

    Laying off while buying jets

    And while she was laying people off she was buying Gulf Stream executive jets.

  20. redneck

    Demon Sheep

    Gotta love the source for carlyfiorina.org. In the comments at the top of the page is a Demon Sheep, and a bonus page.

  21. Jonathan Richards 1
    Coat

    29,971

    Does counting the :( items make me a bad person? Or just sad? Rhetorical question: no need to answer. Maybe the author of carlyfiorina.org is being extremely correct. Did HP publish the number of redundancies to five significant figures?

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: 29,971

      Does counting the :( items make me a bad person? Or just sad?

      Neither, as long as you used a program to count them, rather than doing so manually. Bonus points for doing it with a command-line pipeline of existing tools.

      I'll give half credit if you counted columns and rows, then multiplied them with an HP RPN calculator.

      Rhetorical question: no need to answer.

      Don't try to stop me. I am a Rhetoric Master.1

      1M.A. Digital Rhetoric & Professional Writing Michigan State, 2013. Man's gotta have a hobby.

  22. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hypocritical without the facts

    She accused Donald Trump of using her appearance - she did the same to Barbara Boxer - remember the 'God what is that hair?’ So yesterday! - very hypocritical.

    About the Planned Parenthood question - she got that so wrong - "Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain." No and No....if she is going to quote "facts" she needs to make certain they are correct.

    30,000 Americans lost their jobs under her watch as a HP CEO. The company has still not recovered. Lucent lost $65million in performance pay to Fiorina that was not. When she left in July 1999, the company's debt she caused helped the shares collapse to less than $1

    She talks well, but I would prefer a president that does not have such a bad proven track record. (and, to be fair, I won't get started on the others).

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like