A QUICK QUIZ. What does a company bleeding red ink in the cutthroat PC industry do with spare cash that it nets from laying off its employees and outsourcing the jobs to India?*
Answer: HP goes shopping! Yes, HP, that computing once-giant that appears to be busily shedding its staff as fast as the new 9500 series can print out pink slips in vividly color matched shades is on a shopping spree. And what's HP buying? Executoys of course.
Any busy executive can't be seen flying around on commercial airlines, heaven forbid. If coach was good enough for Bill Gates for a few decades, you have to one up Microsoft by having your own planes, and good ones at that. In this club, you can't be seen tooling around in a plane from last century, after all, that poor old Gulfstream that Carly flew to NYC for a rendezvous with Jerry Sanders in a swanky hotel is so 1999! No, we mean it, it was only a 1999 model.
So, in the spend your way out of a recession theory of trickle down economics, HP has decided to buy 2 $30 million Gulfstream V jets , and they were just registered in June and July. Don't believe me? Go here, click on make/model, and enter 'gulfstream' and 'G-V' in the boxes. When the next box comes up, click the 'California' link, and scroll down past Steve Jobs, to just below the company that brought you the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and you will see the two HP entries.
Just think. When Jobs calls Carly, she can retort "but we have 2, you only have one!" When Mikey Dell calls and says in a snide way "we are actually making money on our PCs", she can snappily reply "But I have a better plane than you!" Oooh, those whacky multi-millionaire corporate tycoon types and their games.
The planes do however beg the question of how many $10/hour workers need to be laid off to cover the cost of these extravagances. You would think that in a down year, or possibly a down century so far for HP, that the top echelon could make do with a mere four year old plane. I would wager about 2500-3000 jobs need to go on semi-permanent Indian vacation per plane.
Those jobs should be covered by the first round of post merger layoffs, but there are still dark clouds on the horizon. Our moles claims that there are three more of these babies on order for HP, which means another 10K jobs will need to be flushed to pay for them. If you work for HP, brace yourself. Use both sides of every piece of paper, and feel good that your executives can wing overhead in such a nice plane. Would you have it any other way?
Answer: HP goes shopping! Yes, HP, that computing once-giant that appears to be busily shedding its staff as fast as the new 9500 series can print out pink slips in vividly color matched shades is on a shopping spree. And what's HP buying? Executoys of course.
Any busy executive can't be seen flying around on commercial airlines, heaven forbid. If coach was good enough for Bill Gates for a few decades, you have to one up Microsoft by having your own planes, and good ones at that. In this club, you can't be seen tooling around in a plane from last century, after all, that poor old Gulfstream that Carly flew to NYC for a rendezvous with Jerry Sanders in a swanky hotel is so 1999! No, we mean it, it was only a 1999 model.
So, in the spend your way out of a recession theory of trickle down economics, HP has decided to buy 2 $30 million Gulfstream V jets , and they were just registered in June and July. Don't believe me? Go here, click on make/model, and enter 'gulfstream' and 'G-V' in the boxes. When the next box comes up, click the 'California' link, and scroll down past Steve Jobs, to just below the company that brought you the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and you will see the two HP entries.
Just think. When Jobs calls Carly, she can retort "but we have 2, you only have one!" When Mikey Dell calls and says in a snide way "we are actually making money on our PCs", she can snappily reply "But I have a better plane than you!" Oooh, those whacky multi-millionaire corporate tycoon types and their games.
The planes do however beg the question of how many $10/hour workers need to be laid off to cover the cost of these extravagances. You would think that in a down year, or possibly a down century so far for HP, that the top echelon could make do with a mere four year old plane. I would wager about 2500-3000 jobs need to go on semi-permanent Indian vacation per plane.
Those jobs should be covered by the first round of post merger layoffs, but there are still dark clouds on the horizon. Our moles claims that there are three more of these babies on order for HP, which means another 10K jobs will need to be flushed to pay for them. If you work for HP, brace yourself. Use both sides of every piece of paper, and feel good that your executives can wing overhead in such a nice plane. Would you have it any other way?
