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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up!
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To: Richard Karpel who wrote (6840)11/22/1999 9:54:00 AM
From: Mark Brophy  Read Replies (3) of 10309
 
You're buying the party line.

Ablemann wasn't fired for not being a forward thinker. He spent a lot of money creating I2O with an uncertain return far into the future, which is the opposite of what a pure manager would've done. And he refused to buy ISI, which is basically a management problem that a parade of CEOs couldn't solve. Turning that company around will be a big managerial task and if Ablemann were a manager, he would've relished the challenge to expand his empire.

And Ablemann was right. I2O will produce a lot more revenues than Internet appliances. He's not clueless abou the Internet, either. VxWorks is in a lot of routers, switches, and other devices of the Internet infrastructure.

I suspect that the real reason Ablemann was fired was that he gave out inside information to selected analysts and sullied the reputation of the company. Some people on this thread objected to H&Q's reaction to the subsequent temporary information blackout, but that should be expected when investors aren't treated equally. Ablemann is also older than most CEOs and probably wanted to retire.

The $1.3m expense for the CEO recruiting was quoted in the earnings release. It probably didn't actually cost that much, but they were looking for a way to hide the lack of earnings increase. They also wrote off $975K for an ERP implementation, which seems strange for a software company. ERP is generally used by enterprises such as Dell that buy a lot of resources from outsiders and package it for sale as an integrated product.
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