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HP to Layoff 15,000 Employees
William Robinson writes "ZDNet reports that HP is planning to layoff 15000 employees. IT, sales and services will be among the areas particularly hit, although the sweeping cuts will be felt throughout the company, according to a close source to the company." From the article: "HP is expected to announce the layoffs as early as Monday, but employees are not expected to be immediately notified of their status, the source said, noting such a practice is common in corporate America. More high-level discussions on the layoffs will occur late next week and employees may get a greater sense of their specific status sometime thereafter."
"Starting this year, HP will strive to build every one of our consumer devices to respect digital rights."
I guess the market has spoken, where's Carly now?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I guess this averages out with management's planned $10 million per executive along with the $1000 normal employee package.
Remember folks, outsourcing is good for the economy!
Bob: "We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday."
Bob: "Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week."
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
HP is getting rid of anything that might distinguish it from a box-mover like Dell. Just look what it did with the technology assets it got from DEC and Compaq.
In the short term it should improve profitability. I'm not so sure about the long term, though.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The "indispensible" ones usually have the attribute of time urgency to get things done... and getting another job is now on their list.
The "useless" ones lounge around.
When the managers get around to announcing exactly who is gonna be affected, they get to choose among the useless ones, as the "indispensable" ones by that time already have jobs... working for their competitors.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Yes, they still employ 150,000 folks. However, the company is fundamentally addicted to H-1b/L-1 visas and has a lackluster recent record at serious technical innovation. For a company like HP to seriously thrive, they _must_ innovate. At this point, HP is more the preserve of bean counters than inventors.
Thy are no planning, its already been started month ago, my team got laid off couple weeks ago. and before us, atleast 15-20 people got laid off out of around 200 people at Dearborn, MI location. and thy are planning to reduce atleast 30% of work force, and off shoring to Toronto, Malasiya and India, and replacing with cheap contract.
People had good jobs (that is jobs that paid well relative to the wealth of their countries) before the rise of the modern corporation. Further economic theory indicates that wages will tend to stabilize at roughly the added value that employees bring to an economic enterprise, again this is independent of the existence of corporations or not. Oh and considering that jobs are created by CEOs and shareholders is like arguing that wars are won by kings.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So now you have 15,000 less people to lead/manage but you still have the same number of executives and managers. That seems to create a very top heavy structure and those tend to fall over both in the management world and the engineering world.
The more cynical side of me tells me that the execs and managers have more pull so would put up more of a fight if laid off. I'm sure the top level execs know the middle level ones at personal level so found it harder to laid them off. Instead, the little peons on the bottom who they barely know or care about can fend for themselves.
HP Services has roughly 65,000 employees, but analysts are predicting HP will lop off only about 8 percent here because the company is working on edging out IBM Global Services, EDS and Accenture for corporate contracts. "We estimate that HP has roughly 20,000 salespeople, with the majority in (enterprise server group) and Services, and that CEO Hurd is likely to look to streamline the organization, moving away from HP's current 'matrixed' selling organization to focus on more direct accountability," Sacconaghi said.
I really hate the word "accountability" when used in isolation. From my experience, if accountability is the only method being used to solve problems, people start playing politics and the blame game. Bueraucracy goes through the roof and everything has to be documented in case the problem doesn't get solved. You end up spending more time covering your ass than solving the problem. You also end up taking a toll on teamwork.
It seems to me that their current strategy is to lower costs so they can lower their margins to compete. Not a bad plan but there are other avenues. I know at my company, we're more than willing to pay more for better service and reliability. The initial contract cost isn't the only factor. We have to think about the cost of downtime.
Noncritical research and development (R&D) could also be impacted, analysts suggest. HP's R&D spending is nearly $1 billion higher than all of its relevant competitors combined, according to an independent benchmarking analysis done by Sacconaghi's firm. The comparison was designed to mirror the one that Hurd has professed as his method for bringing costs back into line. "We suspect that Hurd might be able to lower HP's annual $3.5 billion in R&D by $250 (million)-$500 million through the elimination of non-core projects, Sacconaghi said. So they're going to gut the thing that made HP great in the first place. I don't know what they consider non-critical R&D but a lot of innovations aren't obviously useful at first. Didn't a division of HP invent the optical mouse? I wonder if that was considered critical at the time.
Again, I'm not a CEO. I'm all for making an organization more efficient but I wonder if they're making the right cuts. It's sad to see the "Grey Lady of the Silicon Valley", the engineers' corporation get hacked to pieces.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
It does seem to be as the parent post suggests.
Just making a search using the term 'Service' at HP India produces 192 new positions.
Job Search HP India
(Scroll down if you don't have a vertical monitor / insane resolution)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Good business plans dont require sacrifice, bad ones do. HP isnt in the shitter because 15,000 employees decided to slack off - management FUCKED UP. But they are in charge, so there is no way they're going to be held responsible.
A four month CEO is cutting R&D at a TECH company, firing IT workers, and hiring more managers - this is good?? I guess those 120 days on the job does give him the right to slash the pensions on engineers who have been their for 20+ years. After all, those idiots were trying to invent things to make the world better, when they should have been in business school....eck.
And I love this:
And they certainly won't celebrate the 150,000 people who still *do* have jobs created by the likes of HP.
Absolutely, and I'm sure if someone raped your daughter you wouldn't complain - you'd be celebrating that they didnt do it to your wife too!
Apologist.
This all started with Bush Sr, and his NAFTA, to export jobs to Mexico. I remember the lies, how it would stregnthen the American workforce.
Now the current Bush is exporting jobs to India.
Anyone see a pattern of what the republicans are doing? They got the idea, they no longer need American workers. So they started transfering jobs outside of the USA.
How many more decades do we have before the USA is on par with Mexico in terms of wealth. We will have the likes of Ted Turner owning 2 million acres of land. We will become a nation where 4% of the population lives in gated and gaurded communities, and everyone else will live in an apartment, in places filled with violence, and we will be called sub-human.
Remember, it was not that long ago when families only needed one person to work, to pay the bills, to feed the family. The past 10 years, most families have both parents working. And in the next 10 years, we will see both parents working multiple jobs. But it is okay, I am sure Sony will have the next generation playstation by then.
How can any country justify having CEO's that make $10,000,000+ a year, and having janitors who make $5.75 an hour? It is like what happened with the World Trade Center, when the government was cutting checks to families of survivors. The valuable lives got checks in the millions of dollars, the janitors families got 1/10th of that. It is like Baseball, I remember being a kid when it was a big deal for a player to sign a 1 million dollar deal. Tickets were cheap. Hot dogs were cheap. Heck, the ballpark was a cheap evening, and you would get fed. Now players demand $100 million contracts, and there is advertising in every corner of the ballpark and hot dogs cost $4.50, parking is $15, tickets are over $40. Normal blue collar families no longer go to the ballpark, but that does not matter because teams found they can make more money selling the best seats to corporations. I guess it is a nice benifit for salespeople and executives, to go somewhere they believe is popular, even though they know little about the game or players.
I hope my kids don't have the future I think they will. A small studio, with advertising inside the apartment that can't be turned off. Working 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, and still not having enough to eat good food. And having a police that exists not to protect people, but to keep the poor out of the rich neighborhoods.
Money is evil. It makes people do horrible things.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Hewlett-Packard (HP) was once known for how much they cared about their employees.
It just goes the show that short-term, bottom-line only thinking really isn't good business sense.
I don't know what happened to HP the past 15 years. When I was a kid, there was only one King of laser printers, and that was HP. Nobody made better laser printers in the world.
3 or 4 years ago, a friend purchased a HP computer, it had windows ME on it. She was in college, and she called me a few times while she was writing papers and got the blue screen of death. There was nothing that could be done to save the paper. Hours of work went down the drain. I know... I told her "save your work more often". But that computer was a horrific peice of crap. I did a clean install with the CD's thinking that might help things, but it took me a while to realize that Windows ME did not work well with that HP computer.
It is too bad HP merged with Compaq, at least Compaq made good computers.
It seems like there is a pattern. Merge two large companies into a super large company, then fire people and give managers bonuses.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
It's been my experience that people who do the non-specialized business work tend to think that their "leadership" is invaluable to the company, when in reality it is easily reproduced. An engineer can rise to the occassion and be a good leader, but a person whose formal training is just "business" or a MBA and a liberal arts background cannot just rise to the occassion and be a replacement engineer. Leadership is something that is half nature, half nurture. Most people I've ever known, myself included, who are good at leading have a very strong natural knack for leading and organizing.
Personally, I would want efficiency-minded former engineers to head an engineering company I was the CEO of. I'd want these former engineers because they'd know what's bullshit and what's not and that'd keep my company's ass farther away from the fire. We're sentient beings, not hive workers. To paraphrase Heinlein, specialization is for insects, there is no reason why someone who spent most of their career as an engineer cannot have a good sense for business and be a good business leader.
Since the buck clearly doesn't stop at the CEO's desk in most situations, I don't see why stockholders waste tens of millions of dollars of their company's money on them. At a company like HP, the CEO is naturally going to be detatched from most of the company's operations and excuse me, but I just don't see why any company would sacrifice anyone who could contribute to R&D of new products when cuts in middle and upper management employment and salaries would yield decent results.
Which is more likely to bring a higher ROI: firing many of the people capable of making new products and keeping many of the middle managers and their upper management ilk, or trimming top down? Maybe if HP put many of those people on some good projects, they'd do a lot of good for the company. It'd be ironic if several groups from the 15,000 who get laid off end up founding companies that make the next iPod, Tivo or something like that.
I'm not saying that many of them shouldn't have been laid off, just that it is incredibly stupid to fire people who can make products if assigned properly, but not cut back severely on upper management's pay and the ranks of the middle managers. When Sun laid off a number of its Solaris and Java developers, but didn't fire McNealey, that loud mouth imbecile, I just shook my head. In order to save money and face, our shiny suit wearing business elite would rather fire people with very hard to find engineering skills that could make or break the success of their products than cull the ranks of their own.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
HP is firing 15,000 employees on top of the 3,000 jobs they already have cut since November.
IBM announced cutting 10,000 to 13,000 jobs in Europe just last month.
Ford and General Motors can't sell cars and are at risk of defaulting on their debt -- their credit rating has been cut down the minimum by ratings agencies.
So is this the freight train of a bull economy everyone is raving about? I'm an amateur financial enthusiast but I strongly suggest anyone thinks twice before buying any mutual funds in this climate. Stocks are at 4 year highs and future prospects don't look positive at all
HP isnt in the shitter because 15,000 employees decided to slack off - management FUCKED UP.
Do you consider perhaps that management fucked up by creating a bloated personnel heavy organization? Big companies grow out of control during good times by hiring tons and tons of people they may not really NEED. When times get tough expendible employees are just as fair game as other belt tightening measures IMO.
I don't want to get in the way of your tear, but I think NAFTA was very much a bipartisan effort.
The idea had been talked about long before Bush I was in office, he had some discussions about it. President Clinton signed the NAFTA deal on Dec 8, 1993. And I believe it was ratified by a Senate and House, both with Democratic majorities. (57-43 Dems in the Senate, and 258-176 Dems in the House) You can check which party was in government in recent history at this link.
Cheers.
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
That's the brutal logic of capitalism and capitalists for you. I'd bet that 50% of the people on Slashdot see corporations/employers not as social institutions that are a component of the community, but rather as functional institutions that are part of a capital economy. The survival of "the economy" (i.e. capital flows) is seen as important; the survival of people is not.
Just watch any story about failing companies on Slashdot and you'll see just how many posters argue that a company that isn't profitable right now absolutely should go out of business because it "can't compete" in the "free market." Nevermind whether the company was competitive in the past or could be competitive again in the future with proper (i.e. less greedy and short-sighted) management, or the fact that in that "should go out of business" trope, hundreds or even thousands of lives may be ruined--when the improvement of lives is, ostensibly, the reason for commerce in the first place...
Capitalism is always short-sighted because the capitalists (in the orthodox sense--those people who have capital) will always see their holdings increase, regardless of the longevity of any particular enterprise. That's where this attitude of "bad business should fail" comes from--it's cultural brainwashing from those who control the economies through their wealth. It is their vested interest that unprofitable ventures should fail immediately, so that capital can be transferred to other ventures, in order to minimize losses and maximize profitability on an ongoing basis. If and investment in B will yield a 50% higher/faster return than an investment in A, capital will shift to B to maximize the profits of those who control, even if A was still nominally profitable, and even if thousands of non-capital-holding lives utterly depend on A. Capitalism is fundamentally anti-humanist that way.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Are these workers entitled to those jobs? They took those jobs knowing fully well what the rules of the game were - that the shareholders and management can fire them if they think that is in the interest of the corporation.
If those workers didn't like that, they could've:
a)taken different jobs or
b) started their own businesses or
b) write to their representatives to change the political system - a workers revolution and to each according to their needs.
It really ought to be a matter of common sense that employees won't know their status immediately. Someone decides at a high level that they're going to change their priorities, and each division needs to cut their spending by a certain percentage. That percolates down, with managers at each level deciding which portions of their organization are most valuable and efficient. Sometimes whole divisions will be cut or merged (with cuts delegated down) and often the cuts will go down to the individual employee level. As much as it sucks to be uncertain about this, employees now have some warning and time to prepare their resumes and ask their contacts in the industry about positions while management carefully weighs how to do this in a manner that will best serve the company, so that they won't have to do anything else of the sort in the foreseeable future.
If you think about it, having the CEO and VPs make check marks on a list of people they've never even met and announce that without warning would be far, far more evil.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Being one of the resident curmudgeonly grammar freaks, I feel inclined to point out that "layoff" is a noun, and "lay off" is a verb (phrase). Therefore, it isn't possible to "layoff" someone; instead, you must lay them off.
As for the layoffs... well... I really believe in free, borderless markets. I really really do. But I think we can take a lesson from the EU, and require an adherence to a minimum set of criteria before granting full trade privileges. Giving other markets power without responsibility is a bad thing; without some sort of market synchronization we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.
What if we could say "Okay, India, we'll have completely free trade with you if you become a member of WEFTA (World-Encompassing Free Trade Agreement) and have your economy up to minimum standards within five years."
Maybe a four-tiered system could be made:
This is a bit more complicated than the current EU system, but the idea is the same: Don't let our jobs, our money, our very economy go to those who aren't gonna play by the rules. Small economic variations in WEFTA would exist and would be allowed (it's cheaper to live in a small town in Ithaca, NY than it is in Beverly Hills, CA) for free-trade regions but this $1-an-hour-factory-in-Mexico phenomenon wouldn't exist to pull jobs from the lower rungs of the U.S. (or any full WEFTA member) economy.
If only we could get our Congress to get their charbon and acier together.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Coaching it in terms of wealth "relative to the wealth of their countries" is about the least useful comparison you could make. The second highest quarter in any nation without a US style economy are worse off than our bottom quarter.
Nonsense. Germany has worker protection and their 3rd quarter is better than our 3rd quarter. Their 2nd quarter is pretty close and their 4th quarter is far far better. Oh and the US hasn't had its major cities destroyed and a good chunk of the male working population killed within the last 100 years; so our economy should be far far healthier than theirs.
If you're going to compare any two periods, look at people's quality of life, not their wage compared to their neighbors'.
That's silly, technological improvements overwhelm differences in distribution of wealth. You need to subtract technology off and to do that you need to look at their wealth relative to the wealth of their society.
Regarding wages stabilizing relative to employees' worth, what you say would only be true without external interference.
Well yes.
And comparing CEOs and shareholders to kings? Precious few kings ever brought the seed capital to create their kingdoms or funded quarterly losses in anticipation of future payback.
And the CEOs and shareholders of HP did do that?
"I guess those 120 days on the job does give him the right to slash the pensions on engineers who have been their for 20+ years."
And I guess you have the right to comment on the management of an giant international corporation.
You just sound naive when you boil complex policies down to a few sentences on a web board.
I love the logic. "If you don't like it, quit. Nobody forced you to take the job. You knew the rules."
Only the rules are the same anywhere, because we're all a part of the same "free market" capitalist economy.
So then the idiots say "Well then, don't take a job. Nobody's forcing you to work."
Only then how is one to eat?
People like you are effectively arguing that this is utopia. And it's not an uncommon argument, I hear it all the time and see it on Slashdot as well: the free market is perfect. If you don't like it, tough shit, it's because you must suck and not be able to compete.
So--what's the solution for those who can't compete? Kill them? Let them starve? If you're born IQ 90 and simple, you deserve to be "outcompeted" by everyone else and end up jobless, homeless, and dead (because we don't believe in social welfare in the free market)? How is this different, morally, from the Nazis, eugenics, and the termination of "defective" humans?
It's 2005. We should be past all of this. People should simply fucking CARE ENOUGH TO BE WILLING TO SACRIFICE SOME OF THEIR OWN WEALTH FOR THEIR FELLOW HUMANS.
Especially CEOs making more in one year than anyone needs to live comfortably for an entire LIFETIME, in a nation based on a Judeo-Christian faith that claims to believe in sacrifice and brotherhood, that claims to support individual "freedom." Freedom for who? Only the wealthy? Only the perfect? Everyone who isn't defective? Freedom to do what? Be "out-competed" into unemployment, homelessness, the grave, and then to be blamed for it because you just "couldn't compete?"
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Board of directors: "That's the first time and the last time we ever let a woman run our company."
This instance does not speak for all women, but this definitely will not help them either. Thanks, Carly.
I'd like to inject a little bit of concrete food for though into the argument. I just took a look over at HP's Job Application Page. It would seem the Indian facilities are constantly in a hiring phase (it's been like this for months, if you check regularly).
How many people of the lowest here - the sales and support employees could be saved by dumping say the top 3 wage earners at HP.
Having had to call the support line at HP for a faulty bit of hardware recently I have to say they need more phone agents.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
the price of ink cartridges will skyrocket...
just a hunch
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I don't work for, near, or against NCR in any market, I just live here. My perception has been that Hurd took NCR and focused them on ATM machines, their core business. Lots and lots of other unrelated things were shed, including long-term employees and facilities. Most recently, NCR has turned over maintenance of their world-class headquarters to a local office-real estate company (Miller Valentine). Their ATM sales, by the way, are in competition with the infamous Diebold, Inc. And in that market, Diebold is innovating with ways to keep banks coming back to them. NCR just never seemed to get the hang of it.
Now back to HP and the recent high speed printing invention , and I would have to say we can all expect HP to shed all the unprofitable businesses and focus heavy on the printing. Well, heavier than they already do.
I expect that if HP is in some select-contract, highly-profitable, niche market that they will stay there. NCR has their TeraData database. HP had, during the merger claimed that Compaq's worldwide sales and services forces would allow them to dominate global industries, but I don't think that really every took foot they way they wanted to. So, unless they drum up something other than calculators and home PCs, those segments are likely to get hit hard. Hurd likely won't wait for the home PC market to do something unique because they've had a couple of dozen years to find a niche and haven't. I'd better say goodbye to the calculator segment too before Cringely goes around saying something stupid like "you saw it here first."
So that leaves the saturated inkjet market. Since the DMCA cannot be used, and since we're already paying $3,800US per gallon of ink, increasing profitability will be difficult to do without large customer outbursts. Of course, NCR was so full of waste, those of us in Dayton didn't think they could ever shed all of it and yet they did.
Have you ever considered that maybe they had 15,000 more employees than they needed? I think HP should be congratulated for keeping people in jobs for so long even though they didn't need them.
If a company hires a thousand workers that they don't really need, then lays them off a year later, should they be condemned for laying off a thousand people or commended for giving a thousand people a year's wages?
As for your talk about pensions and being there for twenty years, no-one's entitled to a company pension or even a job. In a capitalist society, no company owes you a living, a job is a two-way agreement that either party can end at any time. I'm sure that if you found a better job you wouldn't keep working at your old company out of a sense of loyalty, you'd move to the better arrangement. That's what HP is doing, moving to a better arrangement of fewer employees and thus fewer costs.
Absolutely, and I'm sure if someone raped your daughter you wouldn't complain - you'd be celebrating that they didnt do it to your wife too!
That's a terrible analogy, as bad as I'd expect on this site. A company is employing 150,000 people, that's a hell of a lot. Yet you're complaining because you want them to employ 165,000. That's terrible. The company I work for employs about 900 people, should I criticise them for not employing 990? But what would they need the other 90 for? That doesn't matter, it's evil not to hire 10% more people than you need!
Western Europe has done an excellent job of achieving a healthy balance between the two extremes.
Which is why they have double digit unemployment.
I'm not sure how it works in every company, but in the huge tech corporation that employs me, your manager has nothing to do with your laying off other than telling you about it. Human Resources decideds who is going to be laid off, tells the manager what names are on the list and he relays it to his employees on the morning that the layoffs occur.
First of all, I want to say that you are right about many things, especially hiring former engineers to managers in engineering company.
...But then again, why should I care that other people ruin many companies. Just more opportunies for those who do know what they are doing ;-)
The thing that needs to be discussed here is, if HP is or is not an engineering company. They do work with technology, but I would argue that their fields of technology are mature and don't involve as much engineering and innovation than they did before. That's why I categorize them more as marketing and assembly company. If you look at their products: Workstations, Laptops, Servers, Printers, Scanners & Cameras, one can argue that they are all commodized. The technology needed is allmost the same from manufacturer to manufacturer. Only way to add value to these offerings is to use branding and design to create added value in customers mind, the other way is to offer services.
I think that the problem with HP is that they were first engineering company and were on the edge of the technology cycle. As the times went by, they loosed technology battles and had to retreat from many fields. They had create success with imaging products, but what they did forget todo was to invent new things. As the result of innovating hard, and inventing lazy, they became marketing and assembly company. In away one can say that HP and Compaq merger was the last knot that transformed HP from engineering to marketing. The problem with HP now is that thought they have transformed, they have still lot's engineering. Bigger problem is that all places in the market have been taken by others. Dell is the king of assembly companies and they really can't beat them. Same goes with IBM in the entreprise arena. Most of the real engineering is done by other companies ie. Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, Redhat, Oracle etc.. So the big question is what is HP going to do? I hope that their answer isn't just to trim down, that wouldn't in the long run give them reason to be alive.
It's a good question how HP could have avoided all this and what went wrong. A good place to put blame is Carly and other MBA's, but that is insufficient. In my view HP just got too big, they lost their concentration times ago. They should have spinned imaging and customer sides of HP away, or transfered the enterprise and engineering sides to a new company. It's very hard to be a company with many faces, and there isn't so many companies in the end product field that have done this with success.
Maybe all this and other fallen angels of technology industry could have been avoided by better education. As a soon to be graduating economics student (from computer science, don't ask) I have to say that the blame lies in business education. Many people start business studies with idea of doing something cool with customer products (think of likes L'oreal, Coca-cola, Tivo etc..) and they end up in some industrial company with no idea what is going on. The worst thing is that many people that do work industrial area treat these industries as the same as your regular consumer industries. When you have people saying "it's just technology" or "I don't have to know the details" or "just say which one is better" then you know there is much wrong in the picture.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
for HP.
What is needed now in PCs/servers AFAIC is someone to drive down the costs of thin-clients, clustering, and modular computing. Given HP's history, this will likely be missed by a full light-year as they retrench in more of the same that got them where they are now.
What exactly is the cost of HP-UX compared to Linux and what are the comparitive support prices compared to say, Red Hat or SuSE? Or BSD for that matter if you want to put it closer to the System V side? What exactly do they have to offer there?
What are they going to give me that I can't get cheaper by leaps and bounds from Dell or for that matter Systemax?
What are they going to offer me for my ongoing needs and is their (*gag*) "vision" going to fit with what I'm doing? Or are they going to follow Redmond's lead not to mention the various hardware standards groups rather than innovating?
I don't see HP (*cough*) "getting it".
My wish list is simple, btw. Given I can get fully packed desktops for under $500, I want a blade server where the backplane and hot swap power supplies with one master board costs no more than a standard whitebox server and each blade is under $500 given that it is stripped of unneeded sound, graphics, and other tchotchkes as well as case and power supply. Why should I be paying over $1000 for a blade when I can get a whitebox with a comparable processor for under $750 and that comes with all sorts of things left out of the blade?
One of the few areas you pay a premium for them to leave something out that you don't need. You're bribing them not to put it in.
I want a *nix to do load-balancing, failover and load-sharing clustering with remote network boot thin client serving much like I could get for free with a few spare days of recompiling various distributions and project sources. I'm willing to pay but if it is going to cost an arm and a leg and get me less support than asking a couple questions on various web forums does, no dice.
Given what I am looking for and knowing what I do of HP, I am not holding my breath. This is just one of many many areas HP could have tried to get into where no one else is bothering. Instead we got the Compaq merger, we got Carly Fiorina and the saga of her removal, anything but a forward looking company doing anything to compete. We got craptastic personal PCs that Dell or even the average local whitebox maker could beat. We got Vectras that weren't offering anything that other business box builders couldn't offer and for less. We got a company living on their printer division's glory days while a host of competitors ate away at them, nibbling like carpenter ants.
We got the HP name and that was it, but we also got the decline in value of the HP name at the same time. So... what was the point? I'm sure that's on the minds of those being laid off as they recount their time at HP. What was the point?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
"Hewlett and Packard would be astonished at what their company is doing today."
The company Hewlett and Packard founded is now called Agilent. What HP does now has nothing to do with what they did originally.
Vote for Pedro
If you don't understand what you're doing, then you can't successfully manage it.
This isn't always true, but it's true such a large percentage of the time that only a fool would bet against it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I found it interesting that the article noted, "additional cuts may lower morale.." uh...morale was already in the pit. It can't get much lower, even in the divisions that are money makers.
Part of the reason I ended my eleven-year career in May was layoffs. I simply hated waiting for the other shoe to drop. People would just disappear, and you'd find out later that they'd been laid off. (WFR'd in HP speak.) Being told by my manager that, "We're pretty safe (from lay offs) but NO GUARANTEES..." about drove me NUTS. Also, when the CEO comes to town and makes a specific point that HP has more IT people than sales people, it's time for an IT guy to take serious stock of the situation.
In the long term I think Hurd will be good for the company, and I wish my former compatriots the best of success. A lot of fat needs to be trimmed, but the question is, "Can he tell the difference between fat, muscle, and bone?" There's a whole lot of fat in middle management right now.
"That's no moon"... Obi-Wan Kenobi
You can mutter about Germany's unemployment rate and all of this all you want, but you have to realize that NOBODY defines unemployment the same. Here in the US, anyone that hasn't found any kind of job, regardless of their education in 6 months is considered willfully unemployed, and just plain is not counted!
Half the working population could up and lose their jobs, and assuming they haven't found jobs in 6 months, they're as good as forgotten. That's almost how bad it was during the great depression, where it was about one in three without a job.
Of course, they do this so they can put a positive spin on the bullshit that they plan to happen. i.e. the massive re-distrubution of wealth that's set to occour in the world. Instead of some of us doing well, and the the rest just getting by, we'll all be middle class slobs, and the place to put your hands on the money will where the money travels through... i.e. the international banks.
I don't know how they define it in Germany, do you? So, it's like comparing oranges and grapes.
I guess I may be burning karma and grousing, but I'm willing to forfeit ALL my remaining karma, and any Meta Mod points to say the following:
/. gave me the benefit of the doubt and tried to pull teeth at HP and failed, or gave up with one, "We don't discuss layoff policy before the PR department has seen a designated newspaper publish it, and even after then, we refer inquiries to the published paper or our website after we've made it official on our website..."
I reported this FRIDAY, 15 July at 1207 (and I am sure the paper was printed before 6AM Friday, which means ), and even put it in my journal, and even bought the Friday paper to have a hard copy. I think it would have made better excitement than to wait for SUNDAY just to see ZDNet's blurb. I guess ZDN *could* have had a writeup on it first, but I
"googled" keywords and Google turned up junk from 2 years prior, but not a single word for Friday. I guess nobody reads the papers fast enough to stir things up so Google caches things before the ZDN's word gets priority over Google.
TFA header/byline as timestamped on ZDN is:
"HP to slash approximately 15,000 jobs
By Dawn Kawamoto, and Michael Singer, CNET News.com Published on ZDNet News: July 16, 2005, 8:00 PM PT"
Saturday NIGHT, no less...
I suppose it *is* possible someone at
To get a submission posted before the regulars, is it necessary to add more redundant verbiage and speculation than the FA itself? Or wait for ZDN and on-site papers to display the content?
Karma Purged/forsaken....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
HP seems hellbent on self destruction.
First the utterly pointless merger with Compaq.
Then the abandonment of developing HP-PA in favor of developing Itanium.
Then dissolving the Itanium partnership.
Now, inflicting DRM on all their consumer products. Woo hoo, because it worked so fucking well for Sony that Apple ground them to dust.
If I were an HP shareholder, I'd be demanding executives heads on platters about now...
Here's a chance to talk about a leftist crackpot idea ;). Let us assume that is it my responsibility - and yours, everyone's - to build and maintain a society where the basic needs of every individual is met. How then do corporations fit into this picture?
;)
One theory goes that corporations are simply the complications of this "inhumanity" where wealth naturally collects and distribution is thwarted in the name of the great distributive system itself: capitalism.
Consider, corporations are proxies which have the power of ownership - private property. Corporations have an advantage of efficiency when we consider large resources and complex tasks. This makes them akin to machines. As a body, any task is broken into smaller tasks and responsibility is spread into a chain. The weakest link defines the chain and thus the entire responsibility of this great machine can easily fail. As humans - remember our axiom - we place a huge amount of resources in corporations and therefore a large amount of our ability to fulfill our responsibility in these machines.
I think of Assimov's 3 laws of robotics - so well interwined and seemingly effective. By breaking one law, the illusion fails and all the laws are broken. But we would love to believe the illusion can be held up, so we repeat the laws to ourselves. We even have the machines repeat the laws. Ultimately, the machines, our proxy workers designed for efficiency, fail to assume our responsibility.
With a corporation, the general effect is that responsbility is far more difficult to handle than with a more direct ownership model. If you think about it, it's a ridiculous notion to believe that a corporation will have responsibility. Groups have jobs, incentive structures, and rules, but the central responsibility - which we assumed at the beginning - is not delegated evenly. It is not delegated at all, for the most part. How can you regulate humanity to humans? It certainly can't be "cost-effective".
We are thus back to punishing individuals, only this time we have made the task more complicated. Now corporations get in our way of responsibility, because they allow people to amass great wealth and power, all while hiding behind a corporate curtain. What's more, they allow us all to participate as consumers, share-holders, etc.
If the machine breaks the laws, are it's part's responsible? No, we attach responsibility to people. But people will always blame the machine - those who stand to gain from the machine's product will always place responsibility on the machine. Ironically, since we all own pieces of this great machine, these individuals are essentially blaming all of us. While citing the virtues of private property, a CEO may very well place the blame of some action on the organization as a whole - "inefficiences" or "the markets" or "competition". In effect, the CEO - a the model of centralized wealth in a capitalist system - is distributing the blame (responsibility-wise) while keeping the money. Thus the machine - and the hive of poorly coordinated machines that make an economy - really is a proxy, but for who's interests?
Honestly, if we actually take up the responsibility as outlined, I am not sure the answer to that question. Do we get a good trade for owning stock in a corporation? All I know is I'm not quiting my job just yet
Yes, you're right. And there are arguments that bridge the two, like the one that I usually make, though I didn't this time: in an economic marketplace designed to encourage, reward, and sustain only certain types of behavior (willing all others to be eliminated), we risk ending up in a social and behavioral universe populated by very successful people whom we envy or respect materially but would utterly hate to know personally, left to choosing among a realistically limited selection of very productive tasks that we're tired of doing yet will have to do (as ruthlessly as everyone else) for the duration of essentially meaningless, übercompetitive lives.
Wealth is only meaningful as the means to an end (comfortable survival, whose end in turn is the ability to carry on a meaningful social existence and interaction, as we are social beings). The moment we turn wealth into an end in and of itself and decide to use the ability to create wealth as our criteria in a darwinistic selection mechanism, we risk creating a world populated with such ruthless, single-minded, or backward characters that it's not worth living in or surviving for in the first place.
It's the critical theorists' view, essentially: before one adopts methods and positions that are unassailably rational, one should consider carefully the ends that the given type of rationality so successfully produces and whether they are as desirable for society at large and for the individual as a complete, multifaceted being as they are for a single "successful" individual when considered only in the single context of said rationality.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW