PreCentral: HP to possibly cut up to 30,000 jobs in restructuring plan
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By News Reporter
When Jon Rubinstein came out of retirement from Apple to join Palm way back in 2007, little did he know the odyssey upon which he and Palm were about to embark. From
link hidden, please login to view less than two years later, , guiding Palm into , launching the , and then watching as all the work he'd overseen Rubinstein's tenure at the lead of webOS was one of ups and downs, successes and utter chaos. So it was little surprise when, after watching webOS get a thin leash on life as , Rubinstein for his second retirement. Rubinstein returned to his Mexican beach villa and resumed the sipping of margaritas while browsing the web on . While he left the door open to returning someday to tech, if anybody needed some time off after the webOS debacle, it was Jon Rubinstein. His schedule of siestas and cervezas is about to be interrupted, though we can't imagine it'll be on an all to frequent basis: Rubinstein was today elected to the board of directors of chip manufacturer Qualcomm.
While Rubinstein joined Palm's board as a very active and hands-on Executive Chairman with the goal of dragging Palm into the future of mobile computing, he's coming to San Diego-based Qualcomm while it's at the top of its game and firing on all cylinders. Rubinstein's addition to the board brings a new heft and decades of computing and mobile experience to the table. Besides webOS, Rubinstein is credited as being the man who made Apple's iPod possible from an engineering standpoint, and was a key player at Steve Jobs's NeXT.
It's not quite Silicon Valley, but it's definitely silicon. Welcome back, Ruby.
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By News Reporter
The story of what happened to HP is a complicated and at times a depressing narrative. Things were going okay until 2010, when CEO Mark Hurd was forced out of his leadership position due to sexytime-driven accounting improprieties. That kicked off
link hidden, please login to view, a for HP . It's been known for a while that late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs was a fan of HP as a Silicon Valley institution, and today Businessweek published an extensive piece on HP's fall from grace that included a fascinating nugget: despite HP being a competitor on many fronts with Apple, Jobs personally urged Hurd to reconcile with HP. Jobs went so far as to personally email Hurd within a few days of his departure, asking if he "needed someone to talk to" (Jobs had gone through a similar ouster, though with less sexytimes, from Apple decades earlier).
"Hurd met Jobs at his home in Palo Alto, according to people who know both men but did not wish to be identified, compromising a personal confidence. The pair spent more than two hours together, Jobs taking Hurd on his customary walk around the tree-lined neighborhood. At numerous points during their conversation, Jobs pleaded with Hurd to do whatever it took to set things right with the board so that Hurd could return. Jobs even offered to write a letter to HP’s directors and to call them up one by one."
Of course, Jobs's motives in talking to Hurd and attempting to smooth the ruffled feathers of HP's board wasn't entirely personal. Jobs believed that a healthy HP was "essential to a healthy Silicon Valley," with HP essentially standing as the founding company of California's technology hotbed. Of course, Jobs was not able to bring Hurd and HP's board back together, and in with as HP's new chief executive. How different things would have been under Hurd is hard to say, but it's all but certain that and .
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By News Reporter
In HP's seemingly unending quest to quell the bleeding, the company's employees have been in the firing line since May. Back then, CEO Meg Whitman announced that HP was looking to cut its 300,000-man workforce by 27,000. Today brought the news that another 2,000 positions are on the chopping block, as per a 10-K filing HP sent to the SEC. The new 29,000 total reduction count will reduce HP's workforce by over eight percent.
HP hopes that a portion of those employees will leave HP as part of a "voluntary enhanced early retirement" program in the U.S. Given the current economic and jobs climate, getting enough workers to voluntarily depart HP (
link hidden, please login to view) and lose their benefits like healthcare coverage to make a dent in the expected layoff count has and will continue to be an ongoing hurdle. The restructuring plan and accompanying workforce reductions are expected to result in a total of $3.3 billion in accounting charges resulting from costs relating to the early retirement and severance packages from the layoffs. An additional $400 million in restructuring costs will come from consolidations in and data centers.
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