"It was even more obscene than I had imagined it might be. I had held out hope that Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd would do the right thing and address the company’s leak-probe scandal directly and courageously during his opening keynote at last week’s HP Technology Forum in Houston. I knew it was a long shot. But I didn’t expect Hurd’s disdain for his users to be so blatant.
In fact, my hopes had risen a bit when I walked into the cavernous hall where the opening general session was being held, because there were microphones set up at several locations in the audience. If he’s bold enough to take questions from the crowd, I thought, maybe this is going to be handled the way it should be after all."
"When Hurd concluded his remarks, he said he was going to take some questions. But rather than giving the audience the opportunity to use those microphones, he welcomed Novia back onto the stage. Novia held several cards with questions that he claimed came “from our crowd.” That struck me as odd, because I had arrived at the session fairly early, and I never saw anyone passing out or collecting any question cards."
"As it turned out, none of the attendees I spoke with was aware of the opportunity to submit questions either. When I asked an HP PR rep where the questions had come from, she said that she thought they may have been submitted online by members of HP’s user groups and that she would confirm that and get back to me. Another PR rep said that she didn’t know where the questions came from but would ask Hurd’s speechwriter. I didn’t hear back from either one by deadline.
Regardless, Novia certainly presented them as questions submitted by the audience, which clearly wasn’t the case. And Hurd was integral to the deception."
<http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=265439>
_______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
