The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Murray is rethinking the conventional wisdom with regard to Hewlett-Packard’s much-criticized 2002 acquisition of Houston-based Compaq Computer Company that many believe cost former HP CEO Carly Fiorina her job:

At a meeting of H-P’s board not long ago, Chief Financial Officer Robert Wayman did a retrospective look at the merger. The results were so compelling that even some board members were stunned, some attendees say.
At the time of the merger in 2001, the company set three broad goals: to strengthen its market position, to improve its competitiveness and to increase shareholder value.
H-P was in third place in the personal-computer market in 2001 and posting losses. Today, it is a strong second, breathing down Dell’s neck for the lead and posting profits — though still not as much as it would like. In the industry standard computer-server business, H-P was then in fourth place and bleeding red. Today it is No. 1 and nicely profitable.
On competitiveness, the company’s total operating expenses came to 21.5% of revenue back in 2001. Today, that is down to about 16% — and all but one percentage point of the decline happened before [current H-P CEO] Mark Hurd’s cost-cutting campaign took hold.
As for shareholder value — well, at the time Ms. Fiorina left office, there was little to boast about. But recently, H-P has surpassed all of its rivals. Total return to shareholders since the merger has been almost 50%. Dell has been almost flat in the same period, while IBM shareholders have lost substantial sums of money.

So, did the H-P Board unjustly can Carly now that her vision is being vindicated? Murray notes that the story is more complicated than that:

The truth is that H-P’s board members never completely lost faith in the merger — after all, many of them had been a party to it. They just lost faith in Carly. She created a matrix-management structure they couldn’t understand and muddled lines of reporting that made it difficult to hold anyone responsible. She concentrated too much power in her own office, and then took to the road making speeches and wasn’t there when decisions needed to be made. Perhaps most importantly, she was disdainful of the board’s efforts to change her ways.
It is difficult to find anyone involved with H-P today — board member, shareholder, employee, customer, analyst — who isn’t happy that Ms. Fiorina is gone and that Mr. Hurd has taken her place. He is everything she wasn’t. He dives deep into operations, is in love with the metrics and out of love with the media. He disdains vision; he is all about execution. [. . .]
H-P’s directors went through hell together. In the end, they got the best of both worlds — a charismatic CEO who brought about a hotly contested but transformational merger, and a no-nonsense, operations-oriented CEO determined to make the combined company work.

Read the entire column.