Ah yes that was the stupid moobag who burned "The HP Way". I remember back in 99 when she ended up top. We'd just bought about a million quid's worth of HP 9000 N-class Unix kit and got very worried. She burned the entire sales and support chain and the kit was gone in two years replaced with COTS Intel stuff running SQL Server
I spent most of the early 90s to the early 2000s implementing multi-million dollar systems based on HP 9000 kit. I cut my UNIX teeth on HP-UX. Even in a little country like Sweden, the HP support people were absolutely first class. They knew their kit and the operating system inside out. True professionals who very obviously enjoyed their jobs and were proud to work for HP. On the first system I worked with, we started experiencing kernel panics at seemingly random times - pretty scary when your system is trying to process bill payments for an entire country! Anyway, the local support guys got in touch with the HP-UX gurus back in the States and sent them our crash dumps. 24 hours later, they came back with a fixed kernel and a detailed description of what had happened. It turned out to be partly our fault and partly HP's. We had a problem in a subsystem which managed shared memory and ended up trying to free an already freed area of memory. HP's problem was that the kernel tried to honour our request instead of sending back an error.
I don't know many companies today which could analyse a crash dump and return a fixed kernel in 24 hours.
Within a year of Fiorina taking over, the great tech support guys were all gone, as was the competence, support and everything else which made the HP servers a no-brainer decision for our application. By 2003, all our systems had moved to Windoze and the company never implemented anything on any UNIX again.
That time also marked the beginning of a long and painful decline in the company I worked for then. They ended up being swallowed up by an Indian company who has no experience or competence in the old company's market. At the time this rot set in, the guy who was CTO had just started sending development work to India. I remember commenting to him at the time that outsourcing work to India when there were much more experienced and professional developers available locally was a mistake, both technically and from a social point of view, but he'd already caught the 'shareholders come first' disease.
Looking back on all this is rather sad.