HP Board Sued Over Hurd Departure

Stoobalou writes "A shareholding company launched a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard's board of directors earlier this week, claiming they bungled their fiduciary duties over the departure of CEO Mark Hurd. 'The HP board put shareholders' finances at risk by not telling them about the sexual harassment inquiry, and then later rewarded Hurd with an estimated $40 million severance package, the suit said. The board also failed to adequately police insider trading by HP executives, allowing Hurd and chief financial officer Cathie Lesjak to sell off HP stock in the midst of the inquiry, according to the suit, which was filed in California Superior Court.'" HP is also facing increased scrutiny from the unrelated bribery probe that began earlier this year when their Moscow offices were raided.

Re:You don't get it

[cosm]

Not necessarily. Retail PC's have some of the smallest profit margins [highbeam.com], much of the bloat you see is there because its one of the few ways they can still get money (through the bloat providers). HP is no different that the majority of mainstream manufacturers. If you go to your local Best Buy, and pull the side of the case of a random sampling of machines, you will find that the only difference between most of them is the case. Internals tend to come from the same Chinese manufacturers owned by the same Japanese companies filled with investors from the same globalist corporations. Singling out HP in your "sucks" rant is a bit unfair, because these practices tend to be SOP for the majority of PC manufacturers.

My advice. If you have any inkling of hardware knowledge, download the PC Gamer Building Bible [warez-files.com], get out your Phillips, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. And if your doing the "family support" thing, reformat their machine for them with a clean OS install, setup a back-up routine, and install some LogMeIn free. Your headaches will slowly go away.

A side anecdote, when I used to work at Circuit City, our managers would push us to sell an "Optimization Service" on brand new desktops and laptops, a service whose sole purpose was to remove the 3rd party bloat. I have never clicked uninstall more in my life (except for times I accidentally allowed an apple software update, sorry fanbois but dammit if they wont try to install their Bonjour, Itunes, and QuickTime on every machine on the planet to the grave.).

Re:You don't get it

[Gr33nNight]

You downloaded the wrong driver. You can download the entire printer driver suite which is 400 megs or just the plain vanilla driver which is around 5 megs. Not HP's fault you can't read.

Re:You don't get it

[retchdog]

I once downloaded a ton of drivers to prepare to install my HP printer on ubuntu. I plugged the device in and braced myself for an hour+ of tedium and headache. Within half a minute, ubuntu autodetected the printer and printed a flawless test page.

HP is clearly doing something wrong with software. You can play market-will-bear tricks with ink and supplies, without screwing the driver/interface.

Re:HOW much of a golden parachute?

[Bigjeff5]

You do realize Hurd saved HP billions of dollars, right? He turned that company around.

Frankly, $40mil is not a bad deal for what they got.

The only real downside is he acted like a dumbass and they had to fire him to save face. They still need his help over there.

Re:You don't get it

[Ephemeriis]

You downloaded the wrong driver. You can download the entire printer driver suite which is 400 megs or just the plain vanilla driver which is around 5 megs. Not HP's fault you can't read.

It honestly depends on the printer.

Some of them don't offer a "basic" driver download... And even some of the "basic" driver downloads are inordinately large.

Re:You don't get it

[MozeeToby]

Here [hp.com] is the driver for an entry level multifunction printer. Look under "HP Deskjet Basic Drivers"

Thinking more of business grade devices? Here [hp.com] is the driver for a business grade multifunction printer. Again, look under "HP Officejet Basic Print and Scan Driver"

I'm sorry to say it, but you are empirically wrong.

Re:HOW much of a golden parachute?

[stephanruby]

Of course, he was proud of the fact that as CEO he made less than five times the starting salary of an engineer, because he felt it was his duty to the company that employed him to put money back into the company rather than into his pocket.

Not to disagree with the rest of your post, but there is a reason very large shareholders (like founders, or family members of founders) pay themselves up to as little as $1 in salary. It's called tax-avoidance.

If you take Ross Perot for instance, I recall he was paying himself almost nothing in salary, but that's because he would have paid a much higher tax bill otherwise. Overall, I think the book "Millionaire Next Door" said that Ross Perot succeeded in paying only 6% of taxes from the money he was making himself each year. And I'm not just speaking of capital gains/dividend taxes, if I remember correctly Ross Perot was able to funnel a lot of his money out of EDS untaxed through: trust funds, selling equity, tax-deferred municipal bonds, and various other means.