Hurd's instinct

摘要

With reasonable speed for such matters-less than two months after firing its chief executive, Carly Fiorina-the board of Hewlett-Packard (HP), the world's second-largest computer maker after Dell, has found a new boss. His name, HP announced on March 29th, is Mark Hurd, and his most noticeable characteristic is that he is very unlike his predecessor. Ms Fiorina was photogenic, mixed with celebrities and behaved like one, and seemed to do bold things—above all, her controversial merger with Compaq, another computer maker-because they were bold, although bold did not always mean smart. All this won her magazine covers but went down badly within HP'S boffinish culture. It also turned off shareholders, who felt that they were funding Ms Fiorina's fantasies of empire. Under Ms Fiorina, HP appeared to lose out to both Dell, a leaner, meaner hardware maker, and IBM, a more sophisticated seller of computer services, as well as to consumer-electronics firms with more sex appeal.