Some critics have said that this deal was the beginning of the end for the old HP, and indeed, Fiorina had to fight off a proxy challenge from shareholders — and from the company’s own board of directors, which opposed it. It has been nine years and change since that deal closed, and Fiorina lasted less than three years from that date.

A lot has gone on at HP since then. Mark Hurd has come and gone as CEO, and HP acquired EDS to bolster its IT services business. It has endured a boardroom spying scandal. It acquired Palm, and now plans to shut down its webOS business, after dismal sales of the TouchPad at Best Buy. Fiorina went on to get involved in politics, working for John McCain’s presidential campaign; then ran for, but did not win, a seat in the U.S. Senate.

And now HP’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) — the $40 billion (2010 sales) unit that combined HP and Compaq into a business that was big enough to eclipse Dell — is on its way out of the tent. HP said it is exploring “strategic options” for that business, which could include a sale to another company or maybe a spinoff to a buyer like Samsung. In a way, you might say that by spinning off the PSG, HP is undoing a big piece of Fiorina’s legacy.

Naturally someone thought to put Fiorina in front of a TV camera and ask her what she thought about all this. The video below is from Fiorina’s appearance yesterday on Bloomberg West, the new West Coast tech-heavy afternoon show produced at Bloomberg’s studio in San Francisco.

In the clip, Fiorina shows some sympathy for CEO Léo Apotheker and the need to drastically remake HP into something different from what it is now. She would know. She talks about another change that occurred on her watch: The 1999 spinoff of Agilent Technologies, the former HP Test and Measurement unit, the legacy of which went all the way back to the company’s 1939 founding in a Palo Alto garage, and as such was controversial among the rank and file. Agilent is still around, and reported a $684 million profit on $5.4 billion in sales last year.

No matter. CEOs have to think about the future, not the past, Fiorina says during the interview. In 2001, when the Compaq takeover was first proposed, the PC market was on the rise, and Dell seemed an unstoppable juggernaut. Now that HP is the world’s biggest PC maker, and Apple’s iPad has done permanent damage to the prospects for long-term growth in that marketplace, it’s time to look to the future once again. “Every CEO and board has to make a judgement about the future, not the past,” she says.

VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron told Bloomberg that his company anticipates acquiring one company a year at roughly $500 million to $700 million, along with several smaller transactions. In all, its purchases could add up to as much as $1 billion annually.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company is eyeing emerging markets. such as Turkey and Brazil, and is seeing investment opportunities by teaming up with Google and other players. Google Wallet enables Android phone users to link their bank accounts to their phones and use them to pay for items in a store, using near field communications.

The move to mobile payments may still be in its infancy, but as a major maker of credit card terminals, VeriFone must consider new entrants — such as Google –very disruptive. Earlier today, I wrote about how Apple products are becoming fairly mainstream at retail locations, and may increasingly reduce the need for registers.

In March, VeriFone lashed out against Square, the San Francisco start-up that has been getting a lot of press for offering a mobile-phone-based payments solution to small merchants. VeriFone claimed that the devices Square was handing out to anyone looking to accept credit card payments were not secure, but many considered the attack a sign of VeriFone’s insecurity in the market.

Since then, Square has started adding an additional level of encryption, and VeriFone has unveiled its own copycat product, which will allow retailers to use an iPad or Android tablet for in-store checkout. It also has other handheld devices for sale, along with iPhone-based swiping solutions.

VeriFone did not provide any hints as to what it may be interested in acquiring. However, Bloomberg suggested that VeriFone could be looking into adding distribution in Asia through an acquisition of a major terminal maker. Likewise, it could also be interested in a payment processor in countries where credit card penetration remains low but is growing. A payment processor would get VeriFone closer to merchants in those markets, and could enable it to offer additional services, such as coupons, daily deals and other loyalty programs.

As reverse termination fees go, this one is massive. According to Bloomberg, it’s about 26 percent of the transaction’s enterprise value and more than six times the typical termination fee, which tends to be about 3.8 percent of the value of the deal to which it will be applied.

Why such a large fee? Presumably, Motorola Mobility demanded it out of concern that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission — which is already investigating several aspects of Google’s business — will hold up the deal or refuse to approve it.

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• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
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Don’t worry about it, Forbes chairman Steve Forbes tells his staff, via an internal memo which you can read below.

Before we go further: I worked at Forbes for 10 years; I still know lots of folks who work there. Now: The Fortune piece is useful because it details, via internal documents from banker J.P. Morgan, just how badly the bet that Elevation Partners placed on the magazine in 2006 has worked out.

The fact that Elevation (better known as either Roger McNamee’s private equity fund, or Bono’s private equity fund) bought a minority stake in the publisher at close to the market peak has been well known.

But the Fortune piece spells out just how badly timed it was: Elevation’s projections had Forbes generating close to $90 million in EBITDA in 2009; instead, the company had operating losses of $19.7 million. Last year the company went into default on a $90 million credit line.

Fortune also argues that the deal has been a disaster for the Forbes family, but I’m not sure that this is the case. After all, it allowed them to take more than $100 million out of the company while holding on to a majority stake. If they hadn’t done that five years ago, they certainly couldn’t do so today.

Regardless, Fortune does a good job of showing just how precarious life has been at Forbes for the past couple years — as it has been at every business magazine (just ask Portfolio and BusinessWeek) — and the publisher’s uncertain future. Elevation and Forbes have interlocking put and call options that kick in next month, and it will be interesting to see how long Elevation remains a minority owner.

—

Fortune Story on Forbes
Steve Forbes [XXX@forbes.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 28, 2011 9:43 AM
Today Fortune magazine published a story on Forbes with the clear intention of disrupting the business of its most formidable competitor.

Fortune was aware that this was highly confidential, private information and of no value to release to the public. Though the intention is to harm our business, it will not adversely impact Forbes because it highlights a very difficult time in the past when all the media industry was going through unprecedented upheaval.

Forbes has the finest team – you – in the media world today. Forbes is profitable and is successfully navigating these extraordinarily turbulent seas. The company continues to grow and thrive with powerful new strategies and talent.

We are attaching (below) a statement that will be sent later today to the media responding to this article.

Media Statement
Contact: Monie Begley Feurey
SVP Corporate Communications, Forbes Media
XXX@forbes.com

Forbes Media is profitable and in full compliance with all bank loan covenants.

In 2010, as part of a newly formulated strategy, Forbes sold Investopedia for cash realizing a profit on the sale of this investment. The decision to sell this non-core investment was taken
by the board of Forbes Media upon the recommendation of management.

In 2008, Steve Forbes and Tim Forbes, CEO and COO repectively, initiated a reorganization of the company, including the integration of its independent operating units, Forbes magazine and Forbes.com.

They also decided to expand the company management team, which led to the successful recruitment first of Lewis D’Vorkin as Chief Product Officer and then Mike Perlis as CEO of the integrated business.

The last decade has seen unprecedented upheaval across the media industry.Within that decade Forbes magazine, uniquely among its largest competitors, Fortune and Business Week, grew its total readership to record levels – 5.4 million in 2010 – and grew its share of advertising from 33% to 40%. The company also launched 16 local language editions, giving it the largest worldwide brand footprint among business publishers. At the same time, Forbes.com grew to one of the largest and most profitable business websites in the world, with, on average, 20 million monthly unique visitors.

Since 2010, the company has pursued its strategy of putting journalism at the center of social media. This strategy is at the cutting edge of media today, which is why it is garnering support from audiences and advertisers alike.

Elevation Partners are enthusiastic supporters of the direction of the company and have been full participants as these strategies have been developed.

Steve Forbes remains Editor in Chief and Chairman of Forbes Media. Tim Forbes is Chairman of Forbes Digital. The Forbes family remains the controlling shareholder of Forbes Media.

LinkedIn’s U.S. user base jumped 6.7 percent in May, following a 2.5 percent decline in April, says Bloomberg, citing Comscore data.

Does that have anything to do with the fact that LinkedIn had a widely publicized public debut in May, which saw shares jump to dizzying heights on the first day of trading?*

Could be! And that kind of bump brings back hazy memories of “the IPO as branding event,” when Bubble 1.0 companies tried to use public offerings as marketing campaigns to announce their existence.

To be fair, we need to point out that LinkedIn spent years building a dedicated user base of millions, some of whom actually pay for the service, in advance of its IPO.

And there’s nothing wrong with leveraging the publicity that an IPO can generate, anyway: If traffic didn’t increase following last month’s hype, it would be a bit odd.

Speaking of hype, it should be reasonable to expect a similar bump for Pandora, which prices today and starts trading on the NYSE tomorrow. In tech/media/investmentland, we’re all very familiar with the service and its story, but the wider world has just the fuzziest notion of what it is. I can vouch for this myself, as I’ve spent the last few days explaining Pandora basics to (very nice) TV and radio journalists working on IPO pieces.

*They’ve since come down and are trading below their first-day close.

It has only just announced its IPO plans, but Groupon is already getting a bitter taste of the brutality of being more public in an increasing series of negative reports aimed at its business prospects and execs.

That has included a spate of posts after it filed to go public last week about the unusual accounting treatment in an S-1 regulatory filing for the offering, which also showed a large outflow of its venture funding to the pockets of the Chicago-based social buying site’s founders.

Since then, though, the gloves seem to be off for Groupon, just as it starts to market itself to Wall Street investors.

Perhaps the toughest so far has been one written by Fortune’s Kevin Kelleher, painting a very sketchy investing portrait of the company’s Chairman and co-founder Eric Lefkofsky.

Wrote Kelleher in a piece titled “The Checkered Past of Groupon’s Chairman”:

But Groupon’s IPO has brought an uncomfortable spotlight onto Lefkofsky. While some attention focuses on his ambitions as an investor in tech start-ups, others see a “spotty history” and draw parallels between the past and the present. Lefkofsky’s track record, reflecting failures and successes, bears certain hallmarks: Rapid revenue growth accompanied by big losses, a penchant to sell stock early on, and lawsuits filed by investors, lenders or customers who feel they have been wronged.

Ouch.

While one of the lawsuits mentioned in the piece was dismissed with prejudice, it did not help that the piece included an early email used in the case, written by Lefkofsky in the Web 1.0 era, that read in part:

“Lets start having fun…lets get funky…let’s announce everything…let’s be WILDLY positive in our forecasts…lets take this thing to the extreme…if we get wacked [sic] on the ride down-who gives a shit…THE TIME TO GET RADICAL IS NOW…WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE…”

Double ouch, even if it is probably a bit unfair to use such rookie remarks from a young entrepreneur back then to reflect on him today.

Still, Lefkofsky — whom I met with recently at Groupon’s HQ and found as whip-smart and savvy as any Silicon Valley sharpie — does seem to need to be more circumspect in his utterances today.

Most specifically, the day after its IPO filing, he told Bloomberg in an interview that Groupon will be “wildly profitable,” referencing worries about losses unveiled in its financial statements and his past record of start-ups.

Said Lefkofsky on June 3:

“I’m going to be in technology for a long time. I’m going to start a lot of companies. These are not sham companies. These are great businesses. InnerWorkings is profitable. Echo is profitable. Groupon is going to be wildly profitable.”

While sources said it is unlikely that Groupon will be forced by the Securities and Exchange Commission to make a new filing due to the remarks, it’s just the kind of mistake the typically voluble company needs to avoid going forward.

In other words, no more words from Groupon.

Straightforward stuff, but still enough to cause a minor stir among the Bloomberg ranks. That’s because Winkler, who enforces the news service’s spartan style, seems like the kind of newsman least likely to take to Twitter’s anything-goes ethos.

The opposite, in fact: Just a year ago, Winkler was sending out staff memos chiding Bloomberg reporters who used the service to write about stories they were covering.

But now even Bloomberg has a social media director, and a social media policy: reporters are encouraged to use Twitter, but not to break news on it. And Winkler seems to be trying it out as a show of good faith.

Top dogs at other very serious news organizations have found a way to use Twitter to both inform and entertain, even if there’s still some evident disdain. Last week the New York Times executive editor Bill Keller used Twitter to debate whether using Twitter made you stupid.

Don’t expect any of that from Winkler, though. He’s tweeted three times to date, and each one has been a sober note about accolades earned by Bloomberg reporters. Expect more of the same, he says, via email:

Peter Kafka: Why did you get on Twitter? What do you hope to accomplish?

Matthew Winkler: I want to share the most immediate and direct appreciation of Bloomberg’s reporting, and Twitter is ideal for that purpose.

What was your opinion of Twitter before you started using the service? Has it changed now that you’re tweeting?

I have always admired technology that makes the delivery of news more efficient and Twitter is a good example.

Your tweets to date have been links to stories about Bloomberg and a Bloomberg story. Should we expect more of the same, or do you expect you’ll venture outside Bloomberg?

Bloomberg News will always be the focus. It won’t be about me, it will be about us and helping people appreciate the quality and impact of our work at Bloomberg. That’s why my handle is @BloombergWay.

The financial wire says that a white iPhone 4 will be arriving for both AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the coming weeks. Apple has repeatedly delayed the white iPhone, most recently saying it would arrive this spring, a position reiterated in a tweet last month from Apple exec Phil Schiller.

Bloomberg said that the delays stemmed from issues with, among other things, peeling paint.

An Apple representative was not immediately available for comment on the report.

The arrival of a new iPhone 4 model in the coming weeks could add further substantiation to reports that an update to the iPhone is not coming in time for Apple’s developer conference in June. At the same time, a new color might tempt some that have been holding out for a new model.

PREVIOUSLY

• Apple: No White iPhones ‘Til Spring
• Steve Specifically Asked for Snowfall White and They Came Back Navajo White
• What Happened to the White iPhone 4?

Stuff you need to know:

• The pricing makes sense: $2.99 for a four-issue digital subscription, versus $4.99 at newsstands–and, just as important, close to the $0.77 an issue price for an introductory print subscription. Also sensible: Print subscribers get the digital version free.
• Unlike other magazine apps, Bloomberg isn’t straining hard to add multimedia bells and whistles: There’s an introductory video with editor Josh Tyrangiel, and an audio interview featuring Charlie Rose, but the rest of the design is as utilitarian as the print version–no 3-D animation here.
• That stripped-down design means the app will only run a modest 30 megabytes per issue.
• Unlike other publishers, Bloomberg isn’t making a point of reaching out to Apple’s competitors: It’s not promising to launch on Google’s Android or any other platform soon. Instead, it notes that 17 percent of the print magazine’s subscribers already own iPads.

As a result, the handheld gaming device, which goes by the name NGP for next-generation portable, may be introduced in only one region in time for the holiday shopping season — instead of launching simultaneously in Asia, Europe and the U.S., said Jack Tretton, president of Sony Computer Entertainment of America.

Tretton told Bloomberg that the delay would also give developers more time to complete their software.

Last month, Nintendo broke sales records after introducing its new portable game unit.

The big feature of the new Nintendo 3DS is the ability to view 3-D images without wearing special glasses. Sony’s NGP doesn’t really have one huge selling point, but rather the company has been meticulous in overhauling the entire device. The game player will have front-and rear-facing cameras, a gyroscope, accelerometer, Wi-Fi and 3G support and built-in GPS. It also boasts a five-inch, touchscreen display and a corresponding touch panel on the rear of the unit.

But that may not matter if it’s not available for sale in time for the holidays.

Edward Woo, a video-games analyst with Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles, told Bloomberg that if the NGP gets pushed out until 2012 for some markets, it threatens to put Sony further behind Nintendo.

“It raises the bar on the competitive issues that Sony is going to have to hurdle,” he said. “As it is now, it’s already going to be almost eight months behind Nintendo, and a delay could push that to a year.”

Nintendo, which is based in Kyoto, Japan, said production of the 3DS was not affected by the quake, but it still had to work hard to meet robust demand for pre-sales.