Mary,
Eckhard Pfeifer is a
ruthless business man without a clue as to what he is doing. Execution in the
business sense is not his strong suit.
What is his strong suit? To me, can't be mergers and acquisitions (DEC and Tandem), or keeping track of the company on a daily basis (announcing so late, CEO job is to keep up day to day, even if chairman's isn't), or diplomacy with peer companies as evidenced by trying to trash the whole PC industry. What can it be?
I saw the Titanic on HBO Saturday night. The captain went down with the ship, eschewing a lifeboat seat. The movie shows one drowning man trying to pull a [person (the heroine) down with him. I thought of 5fer.
As far as some saying you can't fault 5fer because he turned Compaq around back around 1990, Jack Akers, IBM was considered an excellent CEO until a lot of FUD landed on the mainframe scene around that time. He apparently didn't know how to handle it and was ultimately replaced by Gerstner. Things got much, much better at IBM. So, it's what have you done for me lately, and to me, 5fer hasn't.
Tony |
