Fiorina Called Some Of Them Right

Her vision included the melding of HP and Compaq innovation with business and culture. HP would create the back-end and front -end systems needed to create and distribute media and content, and it would form partnerships with key content providers to extend its brand.

At CES, now the industry's largest trade show, thousands of attendees got a glimpse of the charisma that helped land Fiorina the top spot at HP in the first place.

Who did she bring on stage with her for her CES keynote speech? Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of Dreamworks Animation, who was talking up his then-upcoming movie, "Madagascar," and Gwen Stefani, the pop star who was showing off a new line of HP cameras with a Stefani-exclusive design and brand.

Stefani even gushed at one point, "I can't believe I'm on stage with this woman."

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Fast forward six months. "Madagascar," which producers developed using HP workstations, recently knocked "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" from the top of the box office charts, and Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" was recently No. 1 on the pop charts.

And Fiorina is out of work.

Folks who do business with HP or invested in the company have had a long list of complaints with Fiorina's leadership: the Compaq merger didn't go as smoothly as it should have, the stock didn't grow as planned, she provided a message to the channel that was less than the full partnership that many solution providers and resellers needed and she was stubborn when many believed HP's strategy needed rethinking.

Still, it's hard to imagine a pop superstar like Gwen Stefani gushing over Mark Hurd. (It's possible, but hard to imagine.) And it remains to be seen if HP will continue pushing its brand to the forefront of the digital convergence revolution.

Fiorina said this during her CES keynote:

When Hurd finishes deciding in which parts of the business HP will continue to invest, we'll see if he believes it, too.