So, HP, What Exactly Are You Trying To Sell Us?

billtom writes "There's an article over at c|net news where the normally fawning technology business press actually takes an HP VP to task for the extremely vague statements that usually surround enterprise software 'products.' With some gems like 'That could be boilerplate applying to any company,' and 'But again, how does that differ from what's been around?' and 'But hasn't that always been the goal?'" I'd like to see Charles Cooper interview whoever came up with .Net, too.

Comments

Marketsp'aek

[dolo666]

I think the companies that bought into the Internet era blitz in the 90's, all thought there was a magic bullet that could rocket them to the future. The problem is, that they, like everyone else, were duped into buying hype that was based around nothing more than shallow promises of a better today.

The jargon coming from HP, is to try and market to company types with buying power, to give them a new slogan or saying that could be used to grab onto and use in the office, so that they don't have to do any work.

Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoon captures the reality of what's going on today. Executives would rather appear to be working, than actually working, so they invent new descriptions of what they are doing that sound really busy!

I think the best slogan is hard work, but nobody likes hard work, unless someone else is doing it.

From the article: "I define AE as a business strategy for customers who want to respond in real time to changes affecting their business."

Translation: We know your business operates in something called time. Time is money. We want money, so therefore we will trade you your own time for money. We accomplish this by selling you your own time back, but we change it to something called real-time. Or ideally I have no idea what those geeks in research have come up with and it's not my job to know, so I'll just make something up and hope you bite. Besides, none of the marketing based people will understand what they came up with anyway, so who cares?

Re:Marketsp'aek

[sosegumu]

Charles: ''There still seems to be confusion surrounding the topic. At the Gartner conference last month, some IT attendees said they still say they didn't understand what Carly Fiorina wanted to convey with HP's Adaptive Enterprise. Do you feel the message is unclear or needs rethinking?''

Nora: ''I disagree that it was unclear...''

This is the height of corporate arrogance. If someone doesn't understand an idea that has been presented to them, then it is by definition unclear . I would think that it would be the responsibility of the entity selling something to be able to clearly communicate what the product actually is and what it's benefits are.

As far as I can tell, AE is the same thing that independent consultants have been offering for years. It's a classic case of ''The Emperor Has No Clothes,'' and the whole point of this asinine jargon that HP is using is to bully the prospective buyer into thinking that it must be far more complicated than their simple minds can handle. I almost spewed my diet cola through my nose when Nora (presumably with a straight face) said that ''you can't buy an Adaptive Enterprise.'' If you can't buy it, then how can they sell it? Whoops--better call HP and buy a 55-gallon drum of their HP Special Snake Oil to straighten it all out for us!

Much of what I do is helping the average business owner/manager with 8 workstations understand that they don't actually need the $18,000 server that was pitched to them by some IT Barnum with a handful of glossy brochures touting ''industry-leading scalability and resource utilization.'' When they find out that their old P3 workstation with an extra hard drive, TRAVAN drive and SAMBA is up to the task of tossing 4MB data files across their peer-to-peer network, they're quite surprised.

I quit my Fortune 500 job two years ago when I just couldn't take the idiocy anymore. True, I make half of what I used to, I work 50% more hours, and my medical benefits suck, but at least I don't have to talk to people who can't finish a sentence without using the words ''dynamic,'' ''deploy,'' ''real-time,'' or ''paradigm,'' and that makes it all worth it.

Kudos to Charles Cooper for taking this Carly Fiorina sycophant to task. Unfortunately, if this writer keeps it up, he either won't have a job or nobody in the IT business will give him interviews.

Re:Another example of HP confusion

[Zocalo]

HP can be confusing sometimes

So can most big companies with thier fingers in lots of pies. Take Sony - it sells music and complains about P2P and copyright issues, yet it also makes hardware that makes is very easy to infringe those same copyrights. They were also threatened with legislation by Philips, their partners in designing the CD, about selling non standard CDs with the official logo on them.

All part of the fun and games that is big business.

Utility computing by another name...

[TopShelf]

All credit to this interviewer, who refused to swallow the crap this VP kept spewing (if she said "link to business process" one more time...) and focused on what HP is trying to do that's any different from Sun or IBM. Bottom line - not much!

That said, I think utility computing is applicable only to a narrow market so far. You need compatability between various applications to host them within a single environment that shares data center resources. When I look around my company (a $1.5 billion worldwide manufacturer), for example, I see dozens of applications on several different operating systems at various versions. How does utility computing address such a heterogeneous environment?

About the only time she made sense was at the very end:

"The lines between business and IT are blurring. One CIO told me they don't have IT projects anymore. It's a business project with IT ramifications in it as well as others. "

How true...