So Carly Fiorina has left HP, all I can say is about time too.

Maybe i've got the rose-tinted specs on, but in pre-Carly days HP, Compaq, and DEC were industry giants. HP had the market lead in printers, they made great Unix workstations, and their instumentation kit was the best on the market. Compaq too, they had what appeared to be 80% of the office PC market, reliable, solid well-built computers. And DEC, ok the VAX and VMS products were long in the tooth (not that IBM aren't still happily (and profitably) selling dinosaurs from a similar era, but DEC's crown jewel was the Alpha, a 200+MHz 64bit processor in the days when Intel were struggling to make innumerate 66MHz Pentiums, 10 years later and Intel are just about shipping 64bit processors.

Maybe it wasn't Carly's fault, maybe the businesses were all too shaky, too poor, whatever, but in her tenure at the helm HP have dropped back to the middle of the pack on printers, the Unix workstation market has become near invisible, and the famous HP instruments are now named something surreal and non-memorable. Compaq, well when did you last see a Compaq in an office? Dell's taken them to the cleaners, and as for the Alpha, that's history too.

Imagine today if say Sun and Dell merged and turned into a shambling mess like HP in six years? Well, it'd seem odd, wouldn't it...