HP Board to Carly: You're Fired!

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based H-P named Chief Financial Officer Robert Wayman its interim CEO. Patricia
Dunn was named non-executive chairwoman. Dunn has served as a director
since 1998.

The action was a stunning blow to Fiorina, 50, one of the most
powerful women in the business world, and a repudiation of her
controversial 2002 acquisition of Compaq Computer.

Fiorina pushed through that $19 billion merger as part of a bold
plan to remake the plodding Silicon Valley icon into a computing and
services giant that could challenge IBM. Yet the merger never produced the promised results, and as Fiorina worked to integrate the two huge companies, Dell Inc.

leapfrogged past them to become the leading seller of PCs. 

H-P shares lost more than half their value during Fiorina's tenure,
underperforming Dell's by a wide margin and also lagging IBM's share
performance.

"We think it's a great move" to oust Fiorina, said Mark Hillman,
president and chief investment officer of Hillman Capital Management in
Annapolis, Md., which owns 190,000 shares of Hewlett-Packard. "She was
there more than five years and wasn't getting the job done," Hillman
said.

Investors sent H-P shares up as much as 10 percent initially and
they rose $1.05, or more than 5 percent, to $21.55 in midday trading.
The Dow industrials component was the most heavily traded issue on the
New York Stock Exchange, with volume of more than 65 million shares.