HP

During the late 1990s, HP, the second largest computer manufacturer in the world, faced major challenges in an increasingly competitive market. In 1998, while HP's revenues grew by just 3%, competitor Dell's rose by 38%. HP's share price remained more or less stagnant, while competitor IBM's share price increased by 65% during 1998. Analysts said HP's culture, which emphasized teamwork and respect for co-workers, had over the years translated into a consensus-style culture that was proving to be a sharp disadvantage in the fast-growing Internet business era. Analysts felt that instead of Lewis Platt, HP needed a new leader to cope with rapidly changing industry trends Responding to these concerns, in July 1999, the HP board appointed Carleton S. Fiorina (Fiorina) as the company's CEO. Fiorina implemented several cost-cutting measures to streamline the company's operations. Some of the measures included forced five-day vacation for the workers and the postponement of wage hikes for three months in December 2000. In January 2001, HP laid off 1,700 marketing employees. In April 2001, Fiorina announced that HP's revenues would decrease by 2% to 4% for the quarter ending April 30, 2001 due to the decrease in consumer spending. In yet another move to cut costs, in June 2001, employees were forcibly asked to take pay-cuts. More than 80,000 employees volunteered saving the company $130 million. Things became worse when the HP management announced that it would lay off another 6,000 workers in July 2001, the biggest reduction in the company's 64-year history. The management also sent memos saying that the layoffs would continue and that the volunteering for pay-cuts would not guarantee continued employment. In September 2001, HP and Compaq Computer Corporation announced their merger. According to company insiders, once the merger was implemented, Fiorina was likely to lay off another 15,000 to 30,000 employees as a part of a major cost saving drive. The merger was expected to yield cost savings upto $2.5 billion primarily because of layoffs. The steps taken by Fiorina surprised analysts. They said that these steps were a major departure from HP's organizational culture - 'The HP Way' of promising lifelong employment and employee satisfaction. According to the company insiders, though change was necessary, employees' morale had suffered badly. Many employees had lost faith in Fiorina's ability to execute her plans. They also felt that her changes were destroying much of the company's cherished culture. HP Vice-President for Human Resources Susan Bowick admitted, "Morale statistics are lower than we've ever seen them." They also explicitly communicated their beliefs and values to the employees

Capitalism

Now let us turn back to inquire whether sending our capital abroad, and consenting to be taxed to pay emigration fares to get rid of the women and men who are left without employment in consequence, is all that capitalism can do when our employers, who act for our capitalists in industrial affairs, and are more or less capitalists themselves in the earlier stages of capitalistic development, find that they can sell no more of their goods at a profit, or indeed at all, in their own country. Clearly they cannot send abroad the capital they have already invested, because it has all been eaten up by the workers, leaving in its place factories and railways and mines and the like; and these cannot be packed into a ship's hold and sent to Africa. It is only the freshly saved capital that can be sent out of the country. This, as we have seen, does go abroad in heaps of finished products. But the British land held by him on long lease, must, when once he has sold all the goods at home that his British customers can afford to buy, either shut up his works until the customers have worn out their stock of what they have bought, which would bankrupt him (for the landlord will not wait), or else sell his superfluous goods somewhere else; that is, he must send them abroad. Now it is not easy to send them to civilized countries, because they practise Protection, which means that they impose heavy taxes (customs duties) on foreign goods. Uncivilized countries, without Protection, and inhabited by natives to whom gaudy calicoes and cheap showy brassware are dazzling and delightful novelties, are the best places to make for at first. But trade requires a settled government to put down the habit of plundering strangers. This is not a habit of simple tribes, who are often friendly and honest. It is what civilized men do where there is no law to restrain them. Until quite recent times it was extremely dangerous to be wrecked on our own coasts, as wrecking, which meant plundering wrecked ships and refraining from any officious efforts to save the lives of their crews, was a well-established business in many places on our shores. The Chinese still remember some astonishing outbursts of looting perpetrated by English ladies of high position, at moments when law was suspended and priceless works of art were to be had for the grabbing. When trading with aborigines begins with the visit of a single ship, the cannons and cutlasses carried may be quite sufficient to overawe the natives if they are troublesome. The real difficulty begins when so many ships come that a little trading station of white men grows up and attracts the white ne'er-do-wells and violent roughs who are always being squeezed out of civilization by the pressure of law and order. It is these riff-raff who turn the place into a sort of hell in which sooner or later missionaries are murdered and traders plundered. Their home governments are appealed to put a stop to this. A gunboat is sent out and inquiry made. The report after the inquiry is that there is nothing to be done but set up a civilized government, with a post office, police, troops and the navy in the offing. In short, the place is added to some civilized Empire. And the civilized taxpayer pays the bill without getting a farthing of the profits. Of course the business does not stop there. The riff-raff who have created the emergency move out just beyond the boundary of the annexed territory, and are as great a nuisance as ever to the traders when they have exhausted the purchasing power of the included natives and push on after fresh customers. Again they call on their home government to civilize a further area; and so bit by bit the civilized Empire grows at the expense of the home taxpayers, without any intention or approval on their part, until at last although all their real patriotism is centred on their own people and confined to their own country, their own rulers, and their own religious faith; they find that the centre of their beloved realm has shifted to the other hemisphere. That is how we in the British Islands have found our centre moved from London to the Suez Canal, and are now in the position that out of every hundred of our fellow-subjects, in whose defence we are expected to shed the last drop of our blood, only 11 are whites or even Christians. In our bewilderment some of us declare that the Empire is a burden and a blunder, whilst others glory in it as a triumph. You and I need not argue with them just now, our point for the moment being that, whether blunder or glory, the British Empire was quite unintentional. What should have been undertaken only as a most carefully considered political development has been a series of commercial adventures thrust on us by capitalists forced by their own system to cater to foreign customers before their own country's needs were one-tenth satisfied.

Astrophysics

Late in the millennium, astrophysicists perfected the Grand Unified Field Theory, found the last scraps of "missing matter" in the universe, and proved, quite by accident that God does not exist. Or, at best, God was not a very awesome particle, one billion-billion-billionth the size of a pea, with the static electricity charge of an infinitely small sock stuck to a tiny sweater. The media reported this story with the same breathless style they used in "Salt is a Killer" in 1991 and "Salt is a Miracle Cure" in 1998. And the public reacted to the reports of God's non-existence as it had to such shocking stories as Darwin's theory of evolution or Michael Jackson's pederasty: Day 1: That can't possibly be true. Day 2: I kind of knew it all along.  The jig was up for religious leaders all over the world, and many decided to come clean. From Britain, the long-suppressed introduction to the King James Bible was released: "This is a book of instructional tales for children and the weakness of mind, and not to be taken too seriously." Israeli archaeologists confessed that the Dead Sea Scrolls were a rather crude forgery which contained such glaring anachronisms as "toothpaste," "steam engine," and "Phil Silvers." And Chinese scholars admitted that the chubby smiling Buddha began life as a corporate logo for pickled eel in the third century; he was, in effect, the Bob's Big Boy of his time.  And so the world began to accept life without God. Christians who had been searching for an excuse to skip church now had a humdinger. Jews could finally eat pork without guilt, and found it didn't taste nearly as good that way. Contrarily, millions of starving Hindus were quite happy to eat the sacred cows which had sauntered through their streets for centuries. By year's end, India's leading killer had gone from hunger to hypertension, and the cliché of the portly, red-faced Hindu was born.  All but the most fun religious holidays soon passed into obscurity. Easter: in. Lent: out. Hanukkah stayed, while Yom Kippur was replaced with Hanukkah II. Ramadan, the Moslem period of fasting, sobriety, and sexual abstinence, was shortened from twenty-eight days to twenty-eight seconds. Christmas, which had long ago been stripped of any religious meaning, was virtually unchanged.  All over the world, houses of worship lost their tax-exempt status and were forced to shut down. Mosques became banks, cathedrals were converted into multiplexes. Dozens of small churches were turned into a chain of coffee shops called "St. Arbucks." They were wildly successful in 2003, and bankrupt a year later.  In 2008, the Catholic Church had a massive going out of business sale, auctioning off all its religious art. The Last Supper now graces the lobby of Mitsubishi International in Osaka. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was moved intact to Trump's Vaticasino in Atlantic City; cigarette smoke has undone all the restoration work and it now looks worse than ever. Larry Flynt bought the Pieta, and what he's done with it is too gruesome to speculate on.  The Vatican, now stripped of its treasures, installed a water slide to attract tourists. It didn't work. As for the Pope, he became just another celebrity, famous for being famous. He had a talk show on the USA Network, he did a brandy ad, he cut a country and western album. His infomercial for a vibrating massage chair can be seen on many cable channels at three a.m. He married Linda Evans.  One thing did not happen in the post-Godworld: there was not a total moral collapse. People who didn't have sex because they were too religious, now didn't have sex because they were too ugly. A Dallas man who didn't kill his hated wife out of fear of God, now didn't kill her out of fear of the Texas Department of Corrections. In fact, he never killed her-they remained married for fifty-eight years. In the last six years of his life, the man grew demented and began to think his wife was his mother; he died more in love with her than he could possibly imagine.  And so the Godless world plugged along people who were lustier, greedier, prouder, angrier, more envious, gluttonous, and slothful-but not so much you'd notice. They were also a little happier, until July 18, 2036, when geologists taking deep core samples discovered there really was a Hell and we were all going there.