Salon: Whitman & Fiorina "Silicon Valley's shabby side, tech industry's less-admirable values"

2010 Elections
Whitman and Fiorina: Silicon Valley's shabby side
The top California Republican candidates are a reminder of the tech industry's less-admirable values
Dan Gillmor

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/2010_elections/index.html?story=/tech/dan_gillmor/2010/06/09/fiorina_whitman_valley_culture

Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, who won their primary races to become California's Republican candidates for governor and U.S. senator, came to great public visibility -- and wealth -- in the technology world. They represent elements of a Silicon Valley culture that was most evident during the bubble years of the late 1990s.

The culture had evolved by then. Getting rich was always a motivation for people in the tech industry, but so was innovation and competition that could be fierce yet fair.

Whitman, at least, knew how to run a company. She was a strong leader at eBay, a company that innovated in many areas as it became by far the largest service of its kind.

Like some other big tech companies of the era, however, eBay also resorted to over-the-top tactics to stifle competition. In 2000, it persuaded a federal judge in California that Bidder's Edge, a company that offered price comparisons across multiple auction sites, was "trespassing" on its servers -- a ruling that threatened "the very foundations of the Web," according to some of America's top cyber-law experts. (An appeal was dropped in a settlement, and a California Supreme Court decision in a different case appeared to contradict the district judge's ruling.)

But my chief recollection of Whitman was her participation in the culture of greed that overcame Silicon Valley. While she was CEO of eBay, her company sent lots of business to Goldman Sachs. Goldman put her on its board of directors, "paying her an estimated $475,000 for little more than a year of part-time service" and -- in a practice known as "spinning" -- it gave her "insider access to the initial public offerings of hot stocks worth millions," according to California Watch's recent round-up of the Whitman-Goldman ties. (Whitman has denied any connection between her eBay role and Goldman's offering her IPO stocks at insider prices.)