The word is: conversation.

What’s wrong with that rather innocent word? Scoble and his commenters seem to love it. The topic under consideration is the ongoing privacy scandal at HP, where chairwoman Patricia Dunn apparently authorized the highly unethical and possibly illegal practice of pretexting to determine which board members were leaking information to the press.

From the comments…

The best thing you could be doing with this woman is having a CONVERSATION with her, finding out why she did what she did and whether she would do things differently in the light of the repercussions.

I disagree. I think the best thing you could be doing with this woman is to fire her and let the attorney general decide if criminal charges should be brought against her. No conversation is necessary. What could she possibly have to say to justify such a gross ethical violation?

Look, we aren’t going to have “conversations” with companies. They are publicly traded entities, and their responsibility is to their stockholders. Their stockholders are happy when they maximize their profits, which means that they charge their customers as much as they can while delivering as little as they can. When that forms the basis of your relationship, just what kind of “conversation” do you think you are going to have?

From the previous day…:

Yes the news does seem to be getting worse, and yes it is a PR nightmare, and yes, if HP had established a stronger voice on the net then it might be having a two way conversation now instead of getting unilaterally bludgeoned.

There is only one thing that could have prevented HP from getting unilaterally bludgeoned: they shouldn’t have committed such a gross ethical violation. Once they did that, no conversation is going to patch it over. There is no explanation for hiring private investigators to misrepresent their identity to obtain phone records that they are not privileged to see. HP can’t have a meaningful conversation about that. They can either admit what they did and take appropriate steps to fix the issue, or they can ignore it and hope that it all blows away. But “conversation” simply isn’t meaningful.