Symantec president and CEO replaced by company’s chairman
Security software vendor Symantec said Wednesday that Enrique Salem, its president and CEO, had stepped down effective immediately, after the company reported that its revenue for the quarter ended June 29 grew just 1% year-over-year to $1.7 billion, while its profits sagged by 10%, falling to $172 million.
Symantec said its board of directors appointed Steve Bennett, the board chairman, to also hold the posts of president and CEO.
The board's decision to make a leadership change was not based on any particular event or impropriety but was instead made after ongoing consideration and a deliberative process, said Dan Schulman, Symantec's newly appointed lead director, in a statement.
Bennett said "Symantec's assets are strong and yet the company is underperforming against the opportunity."
Bennett will take three to four months to outline a new strategy for Symantec, he said during a conference call discussing the quarterly results on Wednesday. The first thing that Symantec needs to do is sort through the way the market is evolving and then place its chips, Bennett said. Read more...
Revolving door: Yahoo ushers out another CEO
Yahoo still has credibility issues, even after casting aside CEO Scott Thompson because his official biography included a college degree that he never received.
The troubled Internet company's next challenge will be convincing its restless shareholders and demoralized employees that the turnaround work started during Thompson's tumultuous four-month stint as CEO won't be wasted.
It won't be an easy task, given that Yahoo Inc. has now gone through four full-time CEOs in a five-year stretch marked by broken promises of better times ahead. Instead, Yahoo's revenue and stock price have sagged during a time when rivals such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. as advertisers spend more money online. Read more...
What will Whitman bring to HP?
Doubt may now be the default for assessing Hewlett-Packard's choice of CEOs.
After the ousting of Leo Apotheker, and before that Mark Hurd and Carly Fiorina, HP's board looks shaky when it comes to appointing its top executive.
It was no surprise then that financial analysts were tough on HP's board during a conference call Thursday to hear why Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, was picked as HP's new leader. They wanted details about the selection process and the timeline behind the decision to replace Apotheker.
Ray Lane, HP's executive chairman, was on the defensive about the board's decision-making and, at one point, his frustration showed. Read more...
With new CEO, AMD could fix missed opportunities
With a new CEO finally at the helm, AMD can begin to move forward in what has become an Intel world.
The chip maker announced on Thursday that its board of directors has appointed Rory P. Read, the former president and chief operating officer of Lenovo, as the president and CEO of AMD.
Read, who took the reins on Thursday, has also been appointed to AMD's board of directors.
The company took about seven months to find a new chief executive, and analysts say finally filling that post will give stability and new direction to AMD, which has been trailing rival Intel in the semiconductor industry. Read more...
Potential pitfalls in Apple CEO transition, say experts
Apple's new CEO faces a challenge putting his own imprint on the company as long as Steve Jobs sticks around, a management expert said today.
Jobs, who resigned from the CEO spot yesterday, was immediately given the title Chairman of the company's board.
On Thursday, Apple named Tim Cook, formerly the chief operating officer, as the new CEO.
"It's going to be extremely difficult for the new CEO to go his own way and succeed in a context like this," said Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School and the director of its Center for Human Resources. "It's going to be difficult [for Cook] to do anything different with Jobs as chairman." Read more...
Michael Dell: We’re a ‘solutions’ company
Few CEOs have witnessed more change from the same seat as Michael Dell. When he founded Dell in the 1980s, his Austin company was among the first to sell PCs by mail, often at a lower price and with better tech support than established competitors offered. The '90s saw Dell extend that lean and mean approach to become a pioneer in user-customized systems and just-in-time manufacturing. And in the 2000s, with the rise of Linux, Dell established itself as a leading supplier of hardware to the data center -- both x86 servers and enterprise storage systems. Read more...
Steve Jobs is a ‘Dictator’ CEO
LONDON: Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been deemed as a dictator.
According to an article on the inner workings of Apple it's boss, written by Adam Lashinsky and published in the current edition of Fortune, the author painted Jobs as something of a dictator - involved in every decision, right down to the design of shuttle buses ferrying employees to work and the food that is to be served in the cafeteria, reports the Daily Mail.
When the company released its iPhone 3G and MobileMe service in 2008, it suffered its most humiliating failure. Read more...