gift the best sleep of your life to your whole family. only at a sleep number store. right now save $500 on the veteran's day special edition mattress with sleepiq technology. know better sleep with sleep number. announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: tom wheeler is here. chairman of the federal communications commission. the new regulations treat internet service as a public utility. the commission has been active in reviewing media and telecommunications mergers. it approved at&t's takeover of directv. next year they were holding auction to coordinate the sale of television airwaves. it seems like i have known him

for 100 years. pleasure to have you. we have had your favorite ohio state coach here the other day. "the" ohio state university. my impression was they have no bigger or stronger fan than you. tom: that is a true statement. charlie: used to work with woody hayes. tom: in graduate school i had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with the coach. charlie: and talk about military history and all the things he taught there. and three yards and a cloud of dust. tom: three things can happen in two of them are bad. charlie: so, what can happen to the fcc? tom: we are sitting at an exciting time in history. if you stop and think about it, the most important external force in our daily lives are the networks that connect us.

and we at the fcc get the privilege to be involved in the evolution of those networks into the digital era, whether it is broadcasting, cable, satellite, telephone, or the internet. 1/6 of the economy that we get a chance to participate with as they are evolving from the old analog world to the new digital world. charlie: but what do you do? you obviously hear important arguments and make rulings on them. tom: the really interesting about this job is that the statute was written in 1934. it was updated in 1996. and even from 1996, a lot has changed. so, the challenge that we have is to say, ok, let's look at the basic four corners, that congress has laid down and said, this is what we think is in the public interest.

and then make interpretations as to how that statutory responsibility works in the new digital world. and so, we are dealing with everything from mergers to competitive issues and how do you make sure that there is competition in these markets? how do you make sure there is consumer protection? how do you make sure that national security is protected? so, it is a very broad ballot we have to work with. charlie: this is what your predecessor, president of the national cable and television communication chairman said "the commission has breathed new life into the decayed telephone regulatory model and applied it to the most dynamic freewheeling and innovative platform in history." tom: i agree totally. the internet is the most powerful and pervasive platform

in history. i disagree entirely with him on his other part because basically what the cable industry and the telephone industry and those who provide internet service, last mile service, have been saying that leave us alone. and what we did is said wait a minute. there is a basic responsibility that people who are providing internet service have to make sure that consumers have unfettered access to the content they want to go to on the web. and those who are creating content have unfettered access to consumers. and that is some basic things. there should be no blocking. you should not be able to say, we can get through when you can't. there should be no throttling. your service i'm going to not allow to go as fast as another service.

there should be no pay prioritization. you are fast lane because your are paying me more. and then what you need to have in place, is i think the thing they are most concerned about, and that is you need to have a referee on the field or at we were talking about woody hayes. you need to have a set of rules that say, is this just and reasonable? and you need to have somebody that can throw the flag if it isn't. we don't know what the internet is going to become five years from now. think back five years -- where we are today. what we do not want to have happen is a regulatory agency is to thwart innovation. at the same point in time -- but the other part is we do not want people who are running the networks to have to be the ones who provide permission for innovators and entrepreneurs to provide new services.

it is the concept of making sure there is somebody to say does this make sense? charlie: the argument is you inhibit innovation. tom: that is easily refuted. you look at the tremendous growth in investment that has taken place in entrepreneurial activity since we put the rule in place. look at how the cable industry, the telephone industry, the wireless industry have unprecedented levels of investment since we put the rules in place. i mean, the network is growing and those that serve the network is growing. charlie: you make a huge capital investment to provide the fastest internet service somewhere, you now simply have to make that available to

everybody, correct? john oliver was on this program. he talked about the story of someone with your experience becoming the fcc chairman. you said that experience provided you with all that was necessary to do a good job for he said, why would we let someone who has been trying to lobby the fcc become the person who chairs the fcc? is that some inherent conflict? tom: i think if you go back and you look, and charlie, i ran the cable television association when it was an up and coming industry, being and fighting for its survival. i ran the cellular industry a dozen years ago when it was an entirely different business. i've started my own businesses. i have been a partner to capital firms helping start businesses. so i come to this job with an understanding of both business and policy and how it works with the people that we regulate. so, i actually think i come with a leg up. charlie: what do you hope you

accomplish while you are chairman of the fcc? you addressed that neutrality or have you got some mergers. tom: at the core, it is competition. the consumer's best friend is a competitive market. our broadband market is not as competitive as it could be. so, one of the reasons you have an open internet role is to increase competition. one of the reason we turned down the comcast merger was to increase competition. one of the reasons that we have encouraged, we preempted states -- one of the things that the big providers were doing was going to state legislatures and getting them to pass laws that prohibited cities from building a competitive products if the people wanted them to. we said, no. that is anticompetitive. we preempted that. and we have a whole series of actions that are saying, how do we increase competition? the joke around the commission is that my mantra is competition, competition.

and that's the goal that we are working on. charlie: so, let me jump ahead to some mergers. so the comcast merger you said does not increase competition. those two giants get together -- time warner and comcast. tom: we turned that down. charlie: when at&t came along buying directv, satellite company, you said that is fine. tom: because we put in the terms and conditions of that agreement specific pro-competitive activities. for instance, at&t is required to bring fiber service, high-speed fiber service to 12.5 million new american homes. that is a 40% increase in the number of homes reached by fiber. and guess -- they'll get faster service. guess who they are competing with for that? cable companies. we put in there some other rules to make sure that there was pro-competition.

here is the key statistic. 83% of americans can access high-speed broadband services. 83%. but 2/3 of those can get it from only one company. so the goal is how do you facilitate competition, because competition drives prices down. competition incentivizes better service. repetition is the consumer's friend. charlie: speaking of mergers, trying to understand how you approach these and how you make a judgment about competition, there was a merger between sprint and t-mobile. tom: we actively discouraged that. that four wireless carriers is a good and vibrant market. if you were to take number three and number four and allow them

to merge to go to three, that would have heard -- charlie: it would have made them stronger and therefore be more competitive. because there is a difference. the difference between those four. if three and four could combine and be more competitive with one and two, why isn't that a good idea? tom: look at what t-mobile has done since we did not allow them to merge. and they have become the most innovative, the most price competitive and they're forcing the market to respond to them. including sprint respond to them with good old american competition. that is what we were trying to stand for. charlie: let me talk about something else you wrote. we need to continue looking to the future and act now to facilitate the fifth generation of mobile technology. what is that? tom: so, we are now going to the fourth generation that you have seen in the ads called lte. we're now, we're heading towards

the fifth generation. it is going to be a new level of service. it will be different from what you are used to right now. it will, it will be the enabler of what they call the internet of things. by 2020, there are going to be 50 billion connected things, everything from your washing machine to your trash can. charlie: from your cell phone, from your smartphone you can run everything. tom: and they will talk to each other. you will not even know it. but you need to have an infrastructure that has what the technologists call low latency, which means they interact quickly. you need to have spectrum. i leave from this to go to geneva where we're engaged in international negotiations to make sure we have spectrum that

is harmonized around the world for the next generation. charlie: we have not had that. we have not had harmonization with the rest of the world, have we? tom: for the most part, it is harmonized. that is how you drag down the cost of infrastructure. ♪ charlie: if you go to korea, go

to japan, everybody says they are so far ahead of us in terms of broadband and its

possibilities and its speed and what it is doing. is that true? tom: they have really big innovators but we are the world leader in 4g technology. 98% of the american population now has access to an lte wireless signal and a competitive lte wireless signal. you look at europe, you look at asia, nobody has those kind of statistics like we do. charlie: is the television business as we know it healthy? tom: i think the television business is in the process of evolving. charlie: to what? tom: so, it used to be that there were special networks for special kinds of video. you had the movie networks, the theaters, ok for movies. then you had the television networks. and really they never really meshed. now you have the digital world in which everything is the same

in terms of being digitized and can be distributed over a common network. and that challenges everybody to evolve. and i think the television industry is evolving just like everybody else. charlie: to what? tom: to a broadband video business is one. charlie: content. tom: but i also think there is going to be a fine future for broadcast, traditional broadcast television. but i think it will also be redefined. charlie: what is that future? tom: i think continuing to provide local service. continuing to be a way that in a local market you can reach all the people at one time. but that content continues to sector markets and slice them down and that ends up being over on the internet. charlie: you call next year's auction of wireless airwaves "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

define what once-in-a-lifetime opportunity is. tom: there is going to be one auction. but let's talk about what that auction is. so, we were talking a minute ago about wireless. there is huge demand for the spectrum, the airwaves that wireless rides on. and we have to look at the limited amount of spectrum that is available and say, is it put to its best purpose? so, what we are doing is we're going to run an auction next year, starts march of next year, that's a two-sided market where we will turn to broadcasters and say, if you want to sell us your airwaves, we will buy them, then we repackage them so that they are in a format that works for wireless and we turn around to

the mobile companies and say, ok, now you buy them. nobody has ever tried -- you bet on them and pay the government. nobody has ever tried that. but it is letting the market work to put spectrum to its highest and best use. it is going to be groundbreaking. and i think it will be the future -- charlie: how will you mark success? tom: we will mark success by whether new spectrum gets opened. i mean, there will be multiple tens of billions of dollars that will change hands here, but i think the key is is there new spectrum that is going to be able to be repurposed for 21st century applications in the mobile world? charlie: back to my question about south korea and japan, and europe, you know, what can we

learn about -- about what is going on around the world? tom: that is a great question because the world is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. one of the things the internet has done is to make us all share common experiences. charlie: it changed time and distance. tom: totally. it is the death of distance. there is no such thing as distance. i think that we have been the world leaders in innovation, in digital activity because we had the home field advantage of the internet starting here. and we want to make sure that that continues. and that's both for wired and for wireless. there are some great things that are happening in japan and that are happening in korea and in china and elsewhere. but i think that we need to make sure that we are tending to our knitting, making sure we have the environment. charlie: i assume your argument is that we have to create an

environment for innovation so whatever lead we got from being a founder and initiator will continue. tom: and that is what we mean by permissionalist innovation. that is why open internet is so important. we have to create an environment where the internet allows everybody to reach the world overnight. where there are not gatekeepers there. because of there is somebody saying, no, i'm not sure. you pay me to get on. then we inhibit innovation. an innovation is the driver of this economy. charlie: can china innovate? tom: um, i think they clearly are making efforts to do that. i think they are what you might call fast followers. but they are looking to say how can we take this this generation and make it to our advantage? one of the things we have done

at the fcc is we have said we want to be out front in allocating spectrum so that first in the world spectrum that can be used for fifth generation is here in united states. and we want to be allowing flexible use of that spectrum so it is not some bureaucrat in washington like me making a decision how it gets used. it is the people who are innovating. it is the people who are going to try the new ideas we are making -- making those decisions. and that is exactly the formula that made us the world leader in fourth-generation and i think it will work for fifth-generation . charlie: one risk people see is the possibility of sabotage of undersea cables. is that an issue to? tom: it is the new style of wiretapping. but i think we have to understand that networks have always been attack paths.

i don't care whether it is a road network or a sea network. it is the way people have mounted attacks. we have a new network in the 21st century. it would be naive to say -- charlie: that someone was not going to figure out how they can do that. then we have the possibility, my friend ted koppel has a book called "lights out," about the capacity to do huge damage to the american and its economy by attacking the internet. electric grid. tom: we have taken that real seriously. if we have responsibility for public safety and the functioning of our networks, then we need to make sure that we are doing the right kind of cyber hygiene, if you will. so, what we did was we brought the experts, including the network companies, together and

said, let's agree on a common set of standards for hygiene that you will have in your network. then let's have a regular visit to your network to find out if you did it. a, are you doing it and b, is it working? because the thing we can guarantee is that what works today is going to have to change to work tomorrow. so, we want to put in place a structure that evolves so that, as technology, as different ways of hacking things evolve, that our networks can evolve, too. but cyber security is an essential component of what we do in a very important thing. and it is also something that you and i as citizens, everybody watching this, needs to think

about, because the way in which it starts is that normally it comes in through somebody doing something and that gives somebody access. so we have to have good hygiene. charlie: the problem with that kind of attack is you do not know where it is coming from. it is not like a nationstate. if an attack comes through the internet. you cannot necessarily just because they are so ingenious about where they go from a to z. finally there's this. there is this debate that goes on between security and privacy. where are you on that? and where is the balance? tom: clearly the two relate. clearly we are existing in a world where the capital asset of the 21st century is information. and it ends up being information about you and me. and you and i.

charlie: some people call that as a matter of business -- and sell it. tom: correct. you and i ought to have a voice in the collection of information about us. nothing about me without me is the expression. and so, this is a very important thing, and this is something on our agenda as well. charlie: because that is about the future. it is on your agenda, meeting what? tom: so, you will see us -- i've told the congress and others that you will see us within the next several months addressing the question of privacy of those who provide the networks. the privacy practices of those who provide the network services and how it affects you and me. in other words, do i know what information is being collected?

do i have a voice in whether or not that is going to be used in one way or another? those are two very important baseline rights that individuals ought to have. charlie: the other thing that is interesting to me is that these companies are all mostly out in silicon valley, many of them. the founding ones, microsoft and apple, amazon -- in seattle or silicon valley. and for a long time, they said to the government, leave us alone. they were almost libertarian, right? tom: right. charlie: now it is said that they have as intense lobbying effort in washington is anybody. tom: there is nothing in the corporate culture that argues

against eventually saying how does policy affect what i do in my business? and so, what we at the fcc do is, do we lobbied by google? yep. so what our challenge is is how do you find the common good? you said a minute ago, you talked about earlier in my career i had been an advocate for various businesses. the way things tend to work, you come in and say, unless you do this my way, it is going to be the end of western civilization. in the other side says the same thing. and the job of people like me and my colleagues at the commission is to say, ok, i understand why this position is good for them. where is the solution that has the common good? how can you structure things so

that, again, you come back,. basic principles like competition how do you make sure that which serves the common good survives? charlie: also the common good is to stimulate innovation -- tom: that is why we want to the open internet. we did not want to the internet to get choked down so somebody else was deciding what two guys and a dog came up with. charlie: is this the best job of your life? tom: yes. i am having a great time. i am a really fortunate person. charlie: thanks for coming. tom wheeler, chairman of the federal communications commission. back in a moment. stay with us. ♪

charlie: meg whitman is here. he has been ceo of hewlett-packard since 2011. it was created 75 years ago. for decades that lead in the business of selling computers and printers. the growth of enterprise services has forced hp to evolve. the company has reinvented itself with aspirations to capitalize in the pc and networking solutions arena.

on sunday hp split into two pieces. hewlett-packard enterprise will sell computer service, data storage and consulting. hp ink will consist of computers and printer. welcome. this is the ad that was in yesterday's paper. "the company that started silicon valley is making history again." so i want to talk about how you plan to make history. tell me what happened to hewlett-packard. how did the company that bill hewlett and david packard create, that was the admiration of the world, the company in terms of values, in terms of culture, in terms of success was looked on with huge admiration. meg: the last decade was a tough decade. i would actually chalk it up to too much turnover at the ceo level. when you have different strategies, it is hard on the company, particularly one as large as hp.

so i can see as we are turning a corner with people who been three or four years, you're starting to see it gel again. the root of the challenge was too many ceo's. charlie: did it therefore miss huge opportunities that others saw? meg: absolutely it did. mobile phones was an opportunity that hp missed. charlie: so did microsoft. meg: so did many others. but you know the technology business is incredibly dynamic. it is hard to catch every wave. the bigger you are the more challenging it is. part of this separation is about being more nimble, more focused on two entirely different market so that hp cannot miss the trends and can invent the trends. charlie: now you come along. how did they get you to do this? because you have had a remarkable career. you've even made a venture into

politics, which you said was a great learning experience, even though you lost. you learned how to communicate, you learned the demands of the modern world in terms of what we expect from people in the public eye, whether it is a ceo or the governor of california. you were on the board at hp. that is a board that has often been rancorous. meg: yeah. charlie: and they convince you to take over at ceo. meg: i will type out it happened because i had no intention of being the ceo. i lost the governor's race in the fall of 2010. i was working on her family foundation. i was searching for the next thing. and it is difficult when you lose elections. as an aside, we should be grateful for people who run because it is really tough when you lose. because it is like a person referendum, right? charlie: was it depressing to you? meg: it was veryt hard, when think about it, when you are part of a company, it is you and

a company. when you run for public office, it is a vote on you. you feel rejected. it is very challenging. charlie: did you question your own abilities? meg: sure. coulda, woulda shoulda, that kind of thing. so, it's february and i am at home one afternoon watching an afternoon daytime talk show at 4:00, and my husband comes home early from work. he walks in and he sees me in the family room at 4:00 watching an afternoon talk show and he goes, this is not good. this is not good. you have got to pull your socks up. just as if on cue that afternoon i got a call from an hp board member. who said we are looking for new board members. you would be perfect. it will be so much fun. we will sit on the tech committee. it is just in the neighborhood. it is the chance to reinvent a silicon valley icon. i said, what could go wrong? 12 minutes from my house. i'm thinking, what could go wrong? it will be fun. and it became quite apparent soon that the company had a lot of challenges. and we as a board had to do the most difficult thing that a board does which is remove the ceo.

that was in some ways the easy thing. the next is who is going to run hp? the board looked at me and i said, oh, no. we are definitely not doing this. charlie: been there, done that. meg: but over time, i began to feel, it matters what happens to hp. hp is important to california and to the tech industry and important globally. we are often the largest private employer in many countries. ultimately, i decided, ok, i will do the best i can and i will see if i can be helpful. charlie: you made the argument to you on a plane ride back from somewhere. meg: we had a board meeting on the east coast. on the way back, a number of them were persuasive and said, we need you to do this. it is an opportunity to make a big change to a company that is struggling. in the scale was interesting to me. charlie: the challenge was interesting. the scale at which they existed was interesting. meg: you know me well enough to know i love a challenge. so they hooked me on the challenge.

charlie: there are a lot of people getting into the enterprise business from ibm to amazon to hewlett-packard at different levels. why did you think you could win it that business? meg: first of all, hp inc. and hewlett-packard enterprises are quite different businesses. different customers, different competitors, different cost structure. charlie: the same with amazon in terms of retail -- meg: yes, but we had a company that needed to reinvent itself again and we just thought, let's separate these into two different company so we can focus on these two markets because hp inc. has 1/3 of their businesses to consumers. so, we thought let's get the really focused on the enterprise

and what we can do for the i.t. professionals and help them do a number of things that are top of mind to it every cio is thinking i have a legacy ip infrastructure be i have got to get to the new world order. i have to get to the new style of i.t. the cloud. i have got to be more agile. we are unique suited to help companies on that transformation journey, because those big companies, they have got to keep running their legacy ip systems. charlie: who are your customers? meg: cio's and vp of app, operations for anywhere from small to very large companies. remember, we have a very robust channel that helps serve our customers and we call them value added resellers. they will serve the small to medium-size customers with our services and software. then we sell direct to the biggest customers. charlie: why did you decide to be the ceo of enterprise? meg: in some ways it would have been more natural for me to go to the part with the consumer because i am a consumer technologist. i had a great executive who knew the pc business. he had run pc's and printers and

asia-pacific. we brought him back. he was doing a great job running pc's and printers at corporate. i said, you are fantastic for this job. he is a young man. and i said, i will take the enterprise side. there is more work. i have become quite enamored with the enterprise side. i have to learn a lot about the enterprise side. charlie: why did you become enamored? meg: i love disruption. i love the opportunity that creates. think about what the business has been through -- from mainframe to client servers, pc's. to web 1.0, where i had a front seat at the revolution at ebay. from the first generation of the internet to web services. now we are on the cusp of another huge change about what's possible for i.t. at a large company. charlie: and that is because of the cloud? meg: because of the cloud. charlie: when you were at princeton, did you imagine that you were a corporate manager? meg: no.

i went to princeton as premed. [laughter] charlie: is that where you met your husband? meg: no, he was at harvard medical school when i was at harvard business school. i took a lot of science courses at princeton for which i'm grateful, but decided there was a better fit for me in business. i sold advertising for a magazine at princeton. and i thought selling, advertising -- business, that is a like. then i applied to harvard. charlie: was it -- you walked into the office of the ceo and said, let me tell you what is wrong with the way you are running your business. you have no idea of how the employees think about you. meg: yes, i did. can you imagine? i don't know what i was thinking. i was young and enthusiastic. the managing director -- he did. and he was an incredible mentor. he came on the board of ebay and was a big -- he might be one of

the best strategists in america today. business strategists. he was a huge help to me. charlie: what is the philosophy? people come to the door and say this is what you are not doing. this is what you do not perceive. this is an intervention. meg: i think sometimes, and i think all of us are guilty of this is you begin to drink your own kool-aid. and don't see yourself and your leadership style as it really is. and sometimes you need a friend or someone who works for you or a colleague to say, do you see what you are doing here? do you see what you are doing? charlie: was it the right idea to run for governor? was that a mistake? did somebody not come into you and say, this is a different game, a political game? meg: they did say that. charlie: why did you ignore that? meg: for a couple of reasons. i saw the state i love -- the state that had been my home -- was in real trouble.

you might recall we had a huge budget deficit. we had a massive unfunded pension liability which the state still has. our education system had gone from number one in the country in the 1950's to number 48 or 49 in 2000. yeah. yes, and you had all kinds of challenges. and i said, maybe i can apply some of what i have learned for my career at ebay and other places to help solve some of these problems. and so i dove in with 100% of my effort and i worked at it very hard for almost 2.5 years. charlie: were you prepared to spend your own money, as donald trump is spending his money? meg: i was prepared to do that. i also raised a lot of money. and so, i had a lot of support from people around the state. but i did spend some of my own money because it was important. i had to learn water policy,

education policy. it was an experience of a lifetime. charlie: how is governor brown doing? meg: listen, he raised taxes on a number of folks. the budget deficit is more in-line than it was. it is much smaller than it was and silicon valley has been a big help. silicon valley is the economic engine of california. charlie: it is the place that every foreign head of state wants to go. because they want to create their own silicon valley. xijing went to seattle. before he went to washington, d.c. meg: everybody loves his notion of how you can create silicon valley in china. charlie: does that have to do with americans' culture? meg: it's alchemy almost. you have got to have a great

company like hewlett-packard, which was the founder of silicon valley. a fantastic university or universities. stanford, berkeley, santa clara. uc santa cruz. and you have to have that venture capital where risk is rewarded. and so it is, the more entrepreneurs you have the more great companies that start. and you start a positive, it is almost an ecosystem. and it is very hard to create. charlie: do you worry that somehow there is the seed within the tech world today for overheating and a bubble that would burst? meg: i do. we lived through at ebay, we lived through the 2001 bubble that burst. ebay was fine because we had real profits and our market cap went down a bit. we kept on going. you see a lot of very high multiples on young companies today. so, i worry about it. and you have seen a pullback in the last 6-8 weeks. a pullback in the valuation of some of these younger companies. so, the multiples have gone down.

we will see. i think the good news is there are enough people who lived through 2001 who know what can happen. but there is a whole generation that did not live to 2001. and sometimes you have to have -- your question about running for governor -- you have to be a product of your experiences. i think i am a better ceo because i ran. i understand the public dimension. but i learned a lot about communicating with large groups of people. when i came to hp, it happened to be the same size as the government of california. and what i learned about communicating in politics is, and i bet you know this, it is not always about the left brain -- the facts and the figures. it is about the emotions, the stories you tell and how you connect. charlie: absolutely. it is the emotional level that you connect. if you connect on the emotional level, then they are open to your argument. meg: exactly. i do not think i completely understood that.

because when you grow up in business you are trained to be very analytical. can you imagine being the ceo of a public company going in front of your investors and telling them stories? you'd be thrown out on your ear. they want to know the number, the return on investment. charlie: my narrative. they would say -- meg: and so, i was a very left brained, trained individual. we all are. and so i had to learn a lot about communication. when i came to hp, i learned about that and i did quite a different style of communication when i was trying to rally the whole company. and the importance of symbolic value. i will type a story about jerry brown. this is a story i admire. when the state was in tremendous financial difficulty he said, you know what? we are going to take the cell phones away from civil servants in the state. i remember thinking, ok. that is all very interesting but it is .01% of the budget. it was not about the money.

it was about the simple and the -- symbol and the symbolism and the story he was telling, which was he was going to be tough on the budget. charlie: you touch on demand and sacrifice. meg: if you asked the man on the street, how do you think jerry brown is doing with the budget, he would've said, doing great, taking away cell phones from civil servants. when i came to hp, i said, what is a symbolic acts that i can do to communicate to the company about why this is different. the first thing we did is we tore down the executive parking lot in the barbed wire that surroundedery the executive parking lot and i moved the entire leadership team to cubicles out of their wooden offices. charlie: no longer behind closed doors. meg: we were out in the open just like everybody else. we did not write about that. we did not make a publicity statement. 300,000 hp people knew that within 24 hours. and that made a statement. charlie: breaking down the barriers. meg: i learnt that.

charlie: you are supporting governor christie. meg: i am. charlie: why? meg: i know governor christie very well. and i have admired what he has been able to do as a republican governor in a blue state with the democratically controlled legislature. my view is we have to have people who have learned to reach across the aisle and get things done. he hasn't gotten -- charlie: that is what is needed in washington. meg: because i think there is likely that the next president will be of one party and the congress will be of another. and so he did not get everything he wanted in new jersey. but sometimes in politics, perfect is the enemy of pretty good. charlie: how do you ascertain how he is doing? meg: he is working very hard. and i think he is a fantastic retail politician. you know how we were talking about how you connect? no one is better at chris christie at connecting with people. when people interact with him, they feel like they know him. they understand his heart.

he has been putting in a lot of shoe leather into iowa come into nevada, into new hampshire. i think he is making progress. you can see him begin to inch up in the polls. so, i'm optimistic, but it is a tough slog. but i think he is doing everything he knows how. i admire him a lot for doing it. charlie: look at where we are in terms of technology. what is next? meg: we are still at the beginning of the mobile revolution. and that sounds crazy because we have all had mobile phones for a long time. but he soon almost everyone on the planet may have a mobile phone and it is changing every element of life. i think we are at the beginning of that impact not at the end. and you think about how people use their phone in developing countries to trade commodities, to sell their goods on the internet to companies around the world. it is phenomenal. charlie: it gives people in far replaces access to all kinds of information. meg: it has the political undercurrent as well. so, i think we're at the beginning of that revolution.

charlie: which includes social media. meg: social media is, it's home. it is first home, really, in many ways today on your mobile. yes, facebook was invented for the desktop. but now there are more people that access facebook on their mobile than on their desktop. so, i think you are at the beginning of a tremendous revolution. and when you think about a pc per se, think about it, what you have in your head is more powerful than a pc 10 years ago. think about what you can do on your mobile. what you can do on your tablet. when you have got a lot to do, you really do want a full fledged pc. but it's, i think we are at the beginning of that revolution. charlie: can we learn from what -- he did at ibm? meg: i read his book. "who says elephants can't dance?" he said, when i came to a ibm, i thought culture was important. when i left, i felt culture was the only thing that was important.

charlie: why does it take people so long to learn it? meg: because you think other things can make a difference, but in the end when you run these big scale operations, people on the front lines, the salesperson in new york for the server business has to know what to do, has to know what the ethics and the value and the ethos of a company is. it cannot be a command and control environment. people have to know what to do on the front lines. it's through the culture. charlie: what did you learn from steve jobs at apple? meg: so, steve jobs may well be the genius in business of my generation. this guy was amazing creative. and the ability to invent categories. charlie: near bankrupt and now the largest company in the world. meg: it is amazing. it is the biggest turnaround i have ever seen in my career.

and they continue to amaze. kudos to tim cook to continue that legacy. stevenot easy to follow jobs. charlie: why was it a mistake for them to buy emc? it gave you guys an opportunity. they figure out how to put cultures together. meg: exactly. it is a fascinating time in history. because two companies were similar in many ways. hp was larger company then dell. we have taken two diametrically opposed strategies with the same set of facts. well, the industry, an incredibly tectonic plate shift. at one of these inflection points for our industry where a lot of the old, proud companies were under pressure. our strategy was delever the balance sheet so you have no debt on the operating company. you have cash on the operating

company. lean in to new technology like cloud. make sure we give in to solution selling. and really focus on revenue growth. their strategy was lever up the balance sheet, put old technology together, take out the cost. and then try to make your way that way. two diametrically opposed strategies. and listen, i'm going to vote for hewlett-packard enterprise all day long because i think fast is important, speed is important where we live. i'll say, they have got a year to close the deal and another year to integrate. and we have an opportunity to explain to customers our solutions and why we are a stable, great company to do business with. and it is pretty funny because you think back in that 2011, we looked unstable. now we are looking like the paragon of stability.

charlie: when did carly fiorina leave? meg: much earlier, 2005. so, i think carly left in 2005-2006. charlie: has she taken an unfair hit? or is it a product of she was not right person at the right time for hewlett-packard? meg: politics is tough. you have got to have a rhinoceros skin. and people will try to take you on. i would like to say no good deed goes unpunished. and i said before in public i think the compaq acquisition was the right thing. we have the position that we have today in pc's thanks to the compaq acquisition. and she drove that. i think it was the right thing with 20/20 hindsight looking back. i am glad we have the position we have in those two businesses because they are the bedrock of hp inc. charlie: when you buy a business

and you see people buy a company just to get the ceo, to get the talent. meg: it's an acqua-hire. an acquisition hire. usually there is a challenge before the sun rises again. so, listen, i think we are super well-prepared in these two companies to go innovate, deliver customers in a changing world while we are not trying to integrate another company, we are not trying to fundamentally remake the sales force and take up hundreds of millions of dollars in cost. charlie: thank you for coming. meg: great to see you again. charlie: meg whitman. thank you for joining us. see you next time. ♪

emily: facebook shares surging after hours. ♪ i am emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." expedia books a multibillion-dollar merger. i sit down with nest ceo, the godfather of the ipod. we talk about steve jobs and his