Promising, controversial woman proved she could take centre stage

ANALYSIS: As a woman who took a top position in the male-dominated technology sector, Carly Fiorina showed she was able to bring change, writes Karlin Lillington.

Five years after her arrival at the helm of one of the largest and oldest digital technology companies in the world, chairman and chief executive Carleton "Carly" Fiorina has resigned from HP.

Often referred to as the most powerful woman in corporate America, Ms Fiorina arrived surrounded by promise and controversy. The latter because she had left her previous company, Lucent, in 1999 in what turned out to be poor shape - but then, Lucent was a quintessential dot-com hotshot, suffering severely when that particular bubble burst.

Promise, because she was recognised for strong, charismatic leadership while also bringing a freshness to lumbering HP, a pioneering company that was suffering from sprawl and incoherence - many management and product sections and divisions, and weak overall vision.

Then, too, she was in a male-dominated industry that is criticised for paying much lip service to equal opportunity but in which women consistently say they find it hard to rise within management, much less into the number one executive role.

But she quickly showed she could also command centre stage in the tech world, becoming one of the few technology industry CEOs widely recognised by the public.

She had stepped into an HP that badly needed change and she showed she was ready to create it. A first bold move was to scrap the multitudinous departments and streamline the company into a handful of divisions.

The general consensus was that this was a needed move, in a company that did everything from engineering equipment to printers to consumer laptops to business servers and services.

Her most controversial decision, and one which many analysts feel still dogs the company, was to buy computer giant Compaq in 2002 - which itself had only recently bought Digital.

As the consumer market tightened into a take-no-prisoners battle where profits had to be eked out from mass volume sales rather than healthy margins, many wondered at the wisdom of taking on the computer maker in the first place, and secondly, at trying to force a marriage of two big corporate cultures so soon after HP's had undergone such a radical makeover.

Meanwhile, key competitor IBM has gone the other way, selling off its consumer computer division to focus on its core business market.

Many feel HP should itself be broken up, to spin out its profitable printer business.

On the other side, HP has to battle the extremely-focused manufacturer, Dell. Time will tell whether a new CEO can brighten the company's prospects.