I'm not too sure about whether I want to promote viewing this or not. I suppose we're all adults. It's Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina trying to explain why the boards and management of HP and Compaq want to merge. What struck me about this video is that it pulls out every cliche and yet still managed to move me. Not move me in the direction she wanted, I'm sure, but it sickened me that she was cashing in on what two entrepreneurs did 60 years ago and trying to use it to get people to go along with some huge corporate merger. As if the two had anything in common!

Having worked in what I thought was a big computer company (3,000) that was headed by a female CEO, I can imagine what kind of shit storm this is stirring up. But I've never worked in one as big (80,000) as HP. This video is scary because I can imagine the hordes of tech workers lapping this shit up. Over and over again at every "All Hands" meeting. "Here's the new boss, gonna give us a pep talk." This is what keeps people going. This is the myth that they are sold. This is the reason that Americans dominate high tech when we really shouldn't. The stories are still powerful. This is the new religion. You think I'm being hyperbolic but don't you think every other big company summons the ghosts of their founders and gets people all fired up? This is the reason I'm writing and posting this link -- because so many people don't even know the myths that are being built into our culture. The myths we're using as fuel to build our culture. This is the one that sucks the best and brightest engineers out of Stanford. They don't believe in anything...except this "inexorable march of technology" shit.

I actually have a soft spot for HP. In case you were wondering who was responsible for all those quirky, loose "dotcom" corporate environments, with their dogs, drinks, daycares and dressdown; it's HP. These casual trends have spread to many other industries. Computer companies had always been big, old, male and stuffy but those two Californian engineers who were named H and P decided that their company was going to be different. HP is the reason Apple is so "cool". Apple copied HP's culture and so did every other new company in the Valley. I enjoyed that shit for 7 years so I'm kinda thankful to H and P. It's still fucked up and political to be in a big company but at least they tried to make it less dehumanizing on the surface.