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HP is Tech's New Top Dog?
bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek argues that HP is the new Big Blue: 'Now, tech is about to get a new biggest behemoth. It's HP. The Palo Alto, Calif., PC and printer giant had higher sales than IBM last quarter, and analysts project it will finish 2006 with greater annual sales than Big Blue for the first time ever: $91 billion for HP vs. $90.5 billion for IBM. The reason HP pulled ahead is simple: IBM last year sold off its $11 billion PC business to Lenovo Group Ltd. But, because the companies have chosen fundamentally different paths, with HP aggressively going after consumers while IBM focuses on corporations, HP is expected to grow faster than IBM in coming years. Since both use blue in their logos, you might say there's a new Big Blue in the house.'"
If this is true, you think Carly Fiorina will feel vindicated?
She was certainly vilified when they ran her out of the corner office. If it turns out that her years were the ones that built the foundation on which a renewed greatness was built, will anybody remember?
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
HP makes great corporate-grade stuff.
Their consumer stuff is crap. But I guess Dell's is even worse.
Self-igniting batteries are the path to success in business. Who would have guessed?
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I hope HP doesn't become a big name in computers, because it is my experience that their computers are of poor quality. For example see here. If HP becomes as big as IBM was it is a sign that flashy marketing is triumphing over substance again.
Philosophy.
not everyone can be the best all the time.
time will tell if there's a new big blue.
the key word is consistantcy.
It's amazing what you can do when bad management gets out of the way.
Good riddance Carly! You destroyed a good engineering house almost single-handedly!
Compaq is to HP what Etch-A-Sketch is to art...
Does that make Dell the new HP? And, wouldn't that lead IBM to become the new Apple, leaving Apple as the new Microsoft and Microsoft as the new Atari? Where does that leave Google?
I was a corporate lawyer for years and I did deals with IBM. Corporate is where it's at, man! One deal, millions of bucks, strict negotiations over service level agreements that require priorizing and funneling of calls. Consumer-oriented business can't compete... all those millions of dorks out there struggling with their PC/printer/scanner/whatever which they paid a grand for in one small transaction... one support call wipes out the profit for several sales! Hell, look at Logitech... I had problems with speakers. Just the cost of shipping me replacements was as much as the customs-declared value of the speakers themselves. Consumers are leeches! ;-)
look at the Big Apple instead... Big Blue is just so out.
You seem to have a long term view of things. That isn't compatible with Slashdot or the market. :-)
I see someone is just comparing numbers instead of fundamental business goals and practices to get it in peoples' heads that we should think of IBM when we think of HP now. Because I sure don't as it is.
That what this demonstrates is that as soon as Carly Fiona stopped holding the company back, it sprung forward to greatness?
Anyway this is interesting but isn't such a big deal to me perfectly. Nearly all the HP products I care about went to Agilent...
I don't see a lot of "new era for HP" in this story, nor do I see a lot of strategy for success. What I do see is that HP, which was once one of the leaders in technology R&D, has settled into a role where it's fundamentally a printer company.
Am I missing something?
Breakfast served all day!
There will only ever be one Big Blue. If IBM wants to solve a problem, IBM finds a way to solve the problem. When HP builds a computer can beat a Grand Master at chess, then they can be the Big P.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
HP the top dog? I'll return to attempting to make OpenView work now.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
IBM Market Cap: $120.5B
HP Market Cap: $84.3B
IBM has refocused itself to a large degree as a service company, whereas HP still relies on shipping units.
In any event, neither company holds a candle to MSFT or GOOG in terms of market cap, and those are really the "top dogs of tech" if you want to use a clumsy phrase. HP is certainly more of a "top dog" in hardware, but who cares about that?
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn't IBM transformed themselves into a services company (with high profit margins), while HP sells printers (with razor thin profit margins)?
HP feels corporate needs rather well - wasn't Compaq right about that, when acquired? IBM is respectable coloss - but does every body is in need for colosses? No. For something solid, and yet accessible. Period. This is what HP delivers - bigger corporate needs, I am serving, are rather happy with HP/Cisco - THAT's right! But, boy, so they become irresponsible! You couldn't get trough the walls - no response back, no noticeable interest in END-USER. Disaster ahead.
And then, not to forget, there still remains DIGITAL behind, this widely admired techno-legend. Romantics and idealists of technically concerned crowd. Fiorina, be proud - you were right, fine woman. We here are proud for your bravety turning right.
Servant of karma
HP or IBM?
Personally, IBM research and development puts me in a constant state of awe. I believe they have some of the most brilliant minds in the world pushing the boundries of science. Maybe thier end products don't always reflect the level of R&D invested, but don't kid yourself... the last thing HP wants is IBM's full, undivided attention at it's market share.
IBM's strength is in it's diversity. Just because they cut PC's to Lenovo doesn't mean anything about the future of the companies presence in the future technology market.
Remember this little gem?..... http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportat ion/index.html
People are also starting to catch on to the fact that HP's newer printers are crap.
Yes, once upon a time HP made great printers. Plenty of LaserJets still in use today. But nowadays you're more likely to find out that your HP printer is slow, noisy, requires a 30MB driver download that's buggy as all hell, and breaks in under a year.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
It's moderately interesting that HP has managed to sell more things than IBM has. But selling a whole lot of low-margin low-end systems doesn't really make for a bigger company overall. IBM still seems to have a better focus (despite its huge size), as well as better margins. Of course, no one has the huge margins than a monopoly gets you; but IBM is one of those companies that actually earns its money relatively honestly.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Compaq surprisingly made the best laptop of the 20th century though (IMHO).
Cant beat my Armada M300. Runs linux, runs winXP, its 7 years old and the battery lasts for 4 hours (not original battery).
I work in a datacenter at a billion-dollar software company with many HP and IBM big iron servers. I don't work at IBM or HP. We like HPs **way** better, as they are far easier to manage:
-HP's boot way faster
-HP's have sane BIOS's. IBM's have text-based, very slow BIOS's.
-HP's break down less often. IBM's have more fragile hardware.
-When HP's do break down, the fix is always way faster and straightforward.
-IBM tech support guys need to visit us so often that there is a desk dedicated to them!
-HP's report hardware errors in plain english, IBM error codes always are obscure, like 20EE000B (which means "no bootable disk found")
-HP's website is better when you're searching for updates and such
I've been in the workforce for 20 years as contractor and employee, and HP's future may look bright, but there must be at least a hundred other companies that come to mind first for short term and certainly longterm prospects for work.
I've asked other people about HP who've been in this business since the early 90s, and the consensus is that they had better be able to attract more than just bare entry-level talent.
The difference is this: IBM actually does research and development of new technology. HP sells printers.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
OK, so MS and Google have pretty much monopolized two small segments of the tech industry.
BFD. They're both one-trick ponies. Until either one shows any ability to do other tricks, all it would take to knock either one off is for someone else to duplicate their trick. The ability for investors to recover short-term profits from that monopolization doesn't remove that threat.
That duplication has already begun for MS. Any mass market will eventually become commoditized, with individual units selling for pretty much the marginal price to produce another copy. Do you know what the marginal price to produce another copy of a computer program is? Zero. Linux is the commodization of the mass OS market - that will happen someday. And MS will be out of business if they can't shift to other markets, something that they've been singularly unable to do even with billions in the bank.
That's why MS is scared shitless of Linux. It threatens their very existence.
The top three are IBM, half of the top 10 are IBM you have to go to 18th to find a hp. 49 of the top 100 are IBM, while only 7 are HP.
How much of this revenue comes from consumers and how much comes from business customers? IBM no longer serves the consumer market, so these new numbers might just be a result of a sizable chunk of IBM's revenues becoming property of Lenovo.
/Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist that starts up an app at every login that places an HP icon in the Dock. You can't remove this item through System Preferences, you have to go in and delete the entry from the plist. Most users would have no idea how to do this. Poor consumers...
I cringe to think that HP is pulling ahead due to some kind of brand loyalty among consumers. Their consumer line of products is probably the worst you can buy at major retailers. I replaced my PSC 1310 quickly after I found that HP's OS X drivers put a line in
HP is now 'Bear in the Big Blue House'?
Heheheheheh Nice plug business week. But I dont think I will buying any HPs for awhile. It takes longer than that to clean up the mess Carley, or whatever her name is, made there. Good Luck.
The original poster is aparently unaware of the meaning of "Big Blue". It isn't because of IBM's color choice that it got that name. It is because it is the most famous and largest business in the world. ( Even if that's not still literally true, it certainly was when it got the name ) "Big Blue" derives from it being a "Blue Chip" stock, which is a Wall Street nickname for companies that are (usually) large stable company that seem to always do well. IBM is/was the strongest company the market had ever seen, and earned the nickname that way.
....a failing $80M PC business by buying Compaq. What a bad move for HP that was.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Only some of their products are good, and that number grows smaller every passing year.
Their new low-end laser products - especially the color lasers - are garbage not deserving of the HP name. They are also toner-pigs, and I'm beginning to believe that is on purpose. Their mid- and high-range laser printers are still good, but the prices keep going up, the internal NICs are outrageously overpriced.
All their low- and mid-range inkjets are junk. I realize this puts them in the same category as Epson and Canon, but HP is still more expensive. HP is also hell-bent on gouging you for ink. I have to research carefully, because two cartridges can be the same price, with one that holds 15mL, and another that has 42mL. Vendors also do their best to not inform you about the supply costs or specs. In the case I'm thinking of, the 15mL cartridge is attached to a high-res printhead, so the ink is gone in a week. What's more is that with the new ink formula, the cyan and yellow dries out in three years, so bulk buy and storage are out of the question. I still have old 500 and 600 series cartridges that are twice as old, and functional.
We have a stable of 500/69x series inkjets that are going on ten years old. The pickup rollers are going, so there is nothing I can do to keep them running. The drivers worked with everything from Windows 3.1 to XP SP2. The only problem is that they're slow. The new 5000 series are plagued with mechanical problems, and have driver issues. HP has not addressed the driver issues, so we had to fall back on the DJ500 driver that comes with XP. The 6000 series drivers don't work properly with W2K or XP unless I open up file permissions in parts of the program files and windows directories. User directory registry settings have been in Windows since 98. There's no excuse for such a poorly-written driver, much less the ridiculous size of those driver files.
The HP-Compaq servers are chintzy toys compared to the old ProLiant "tanks" I've worked with. They're overpriced, and the low-end ones are full of high-failure-rate, consumer-level junk parts. Maybe their high-end stuff is better? I don't know, and I'm certainly not going to gamble on it with my budget. As for the Pavilion, well, we've all seen how awful those are. The Vectra? The demand speaks for those, since they go for so little on the secondhand market. Vectras were never really all that great to begin with. Yeah, I remember the first PCI models with bus noise problems. Lost the terminator by accident? Oops, it's now a bookend.
What happened to HP imaging? They don't make a decent scanner anymore.
We'll be taking a chance with the K550 printer. If those don't work out for us, it's bye-bye to HP products.
Sure they jumped past IBM, but I'd hardly call it a trend. IBM didn't get where they were by selling junk, or by extras/gotcha! sales techniques. I'm also glad IBM broke away from Lenovo, because the Lenovo PCs are junk, and consequently, selling for very cheap in the secondhand market.
FTA: Both have had their ups and downs but persevere because they have a knack for getting out of stagnating businesses and finding the next big thing. Size may not guarantee the market power it once did. But it does imply a certain staying power.
What is the next big thing in computing and technology? Would either HP or IBM or even Intel recognize it if they saw it? I doubt it. There is something about becoming a behemoth that prevents a company from seeing fast moving trends or foresee future ones. Or, if they do see it, they are too slow to respond in a timely manner. It has something to do with bureaucracy and the inevitable proliferation of internal operating rules. IMO, IBM and HP should create small quasi-independent research labs and give them the task of finding the next big thing. And I would tell them to look for solutions to current insolvable huge problems in the industry, such as the software reliability crisis. Indeed, the first company to come up with a solution to this problem (and obtain the lion share of the IP) is guaranteed to dictate the course of the computing industry for decades to come. One man's opinion.
Actually bringing Compaq in would have been a good move, until they axed the Compaq products which mattered. I think Carly did it in order to extinguish competition.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
She transformed HP from a technology company into an ink company, which apparently is a more profitable business.
It is just that Business Week (as usual) does not know what it is talking about when they refer to HP as Tech's top dog, when in fact thay are not even a technology company.
HP technology leading things? How much more bad news can we have today?
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Proliant turned a mediocre x86 server business into a huge success. HP would have been screwed if they hadn't aquired Compaq.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Big hand clap to Al Zollar ibm exec..... Tivloi client/users - it's going to get sold, or ruined ...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
On the other hand, my experience with IBM has also been crappy. I had bought their much touted Deathstar harddrive that blew up, and instead of them owning up to the matter, they settled a class action lawsuit ($100, but only in the US so doesn't apply to me) and sold it off. I'm sure their non-consumer equipment is much nicer, and I still have fond memories of their clicky-clicky keyboards.
The vast majority of the products that got axed were the existing HP lines. The lines currently turning a profit for HP are the Proliant servers and Compaq laptops that were acquired as part of the deal. The vast majority of the products that overlapped between HP and Compaq have gone the Compaq direction.
That's a lot of ink. Do they sell anything else any more?
And to think HP used to make damn fine electronic test equipment once..
-=[ place
They make a great printer but I question some of their moves.
What did acquiring DEC do for them?
I understand the Compaq acquisition but why kill off their Netserver line!? I loved those boxes. Of the dozens that I installed and years of service that I got out of them, I had >>2 a bad fan and a dead hard drive. As a SysAdmin, I like hardware that doesn't give me a lot of trouble. I learned to love HP Netservers.
Oh sure- HP is a big fish. I liked them better when they were less button downed MBA and geeky engineers.
BTW- whatever happened to the venerable HP calculators!? Not geeky enough for the new yuppie-fied HP?
OB
Is that a SCSI connector or are you just glad to see me?
you must be joking, it's been two years and still no new Itanium2 chip, the integrity line is stagnant and future looking bleak. There's rumors of Intel selling off the whole Itanium fiasco to jap consortium since they can't get dual-core to work
Take a look at hpshopping.com. HP's quickplay feature on Laptops is the first new feature to tempt me to buy a new one.
On the other side of the coin, it's IBM that inflicts the seeping wound known as Lotus Notes/Domino into the IT world. If IBM re-write that application to not utterly suck ass, I might be able to give them a little credit, but for now... no. When your email product is worse than Outlook/Exchange, just give up and do something else.
Comment of the year
He actually made the company profitable and focused on emerging markets and retailers.
Fiona focused on screwing the engineers and developers and rewarding the sales department whenever something good or innovative happened. Alot of good people left and were undervalued. What a shame?
Hurd at NCR was used to having multiple products unrelating and knowing how to make money off them. HP refocused their strategy with selling computers to neophites and including software for pictures and video editing and reducing the sales price of the items at the retailers. Dell just kept reselling the same stuff only online and newbies want to be able to be told what the computers can do rather than buy something online without testing it out.
So far Hurd created supply chains as good as Dells and with the revamped marketing it was a kill to Dell.
So I think Hurd is to reward for their success.
http://saveie6.com/
Parent can't be serious.. Must be a joke, like HP support.
That's a pretty simplistic view for someone who frequents a website with at least a partial focus on IT.
Even if HP are not the innovative powerhouse that they were 30 years ago they have ongoing contributions to IT which cannot be denied:
Blade servers -HP had Blades before any of the majors and I believe were the first to put opterons on their Blades
Support of Linux on their hardware -plus they hired Bruce Perens -plus they like debian even if they only sell RH and SUSE
Server virtualiation with VPARS -slice and dice your Superdome into 64 separate servers if you want
OpenView -a comprehensive suite of network, server and storage management tools -against this IBM has -Tivoli?
HP is also one of the few places selling off-the shelf HPTC gear and their gear is regularly at the top of the TPC benchmarks.
HP is the last of the onestops where you can buy a complete datacenter with servers, storage, infrastructure (SAN AND LAN) and even client machines and even get them to help you with deployment (Sun, IBM and Dell being partnered with EMC isn't quite the same)
(disclaimer: I contracted at HP for 4 years in sales configuration support during the Compaq merger and did IT/QA during the HP/Agilent split before that)
-What's the speed of dark?
When looking for my most recent inkjet, I *specifically looked for* a good deal on an HP model. Why? Because they fund and develop Linux/CUPS drivers for almost *all* their printers, and they're *all* open source, and they all work flawlessly.
Much more than can be said of Canon, or Lexmark, or many other inkjet vendors.
Have been perfectly happy with my all-in-one inkjet / copier / scanner since day one, and I never had any problems whatsoever getting ever piece of functionality to run under Ubuntu, Fedora Core, or even Gentoo. Try saying that about the latest all-in-one from Lexmark or Canon.
I'm in safe-mode here, my options for screen resolution are 640x480 and 800x600. Neither of those modes were acceptable to the HP uninstall software. Quelle foresight.
OK, I'll report the issue to HP. Spent fifteen minutes recounted the sequence of events in an HP web support form. Press submit. What comes up?
Click the "back" button. Nope, my entire problem report has funneled down the Mariana trench. Another fifteen minutes of my life hopelessly extinguished.
At that point, I did what all good techies do in that situation. I decided to hold a grudge. For a long, long, long time. The perfect storm: incompetence (in the printer driver itself), stupidity (an uninstaller that refused to run in safe-mode), and insolence (a web support form that vaporises my problem report into the Mariana trench).
What's not to like about the new HP? Utterly, utterly, utterly despicable. I couldn't have said it better myself.
There's more to a company that it's market cap. For example - IBM employes 330,000 people. Over 5 times MSFT's 61,000. Their annual revenue of 91 billion dollars (about 2.5 times MSFTs) is greater than the GDP of every country in the world save the top 53. IBM's "real world" assets - the property, factories, and equipment they own - boggle the mind. While MSFT has a simmilar value placed on it's "assets", much of those are not real-world assets - they are arbitrary values placed on things like trademarks and mindshare. IBM is a gigantic company. In terms of sheer scale, MSFT cannot "hold a candle" to them. Sure, MSFT is more profitable, and has a higher market cap. But just to put it in perspective - both of these companies are dwarfs on a global scale. Compare them to GM or Toyota - 188/192 billion in revenues - that's more than the GDP of Portugal. What's my point? A "Top Dog" should not be measured on market cap. alone.
I hate Websphere and DB2...ick
The HP laptop I'm using to type this has an AMD Turion 64. Although HP still won't allow the good video cards (256MB GeForce 7800 vs. 128MB ATI) with AMD Turions, the processor was the major reason I bought this one. AMD is just plainly ahead of Intel STILL, because the 32-bit translator built into their CPUs is far better than the software-based one Intel uses. 64-bit is just the way to go, and Intel took forever to realize that and is still realizing as far as I know. I think HP realized this when they made their agreement with AMD. I personally love being able to use 64-bit (it DOES increase video encoding speeds with the AMD64 build of VDub by about 40%).
I find it quite offensive still that only Intel CPUs get the best video cards on HP laptops, but I think soon people will want to stop getting bombarded with that Intel sound and the logo, and stickers etc. With AMD there as an option again (Compaq used AMDs in their systems back in '99), and if it's cheaper, I think people will make the switch to AMD (similar to the Windows -> Mac switch).
Right now, HP and Alienware are some of the few computer companies offering AMD. Dell (the most known for quality for anybody who knows nothing about computers) still praises Intel (probably a contractual agreement).
I am sure she will feel vindicated. And she will be completely wrong in feeling that way, just like she was wrong in completely gutting HP. She destroyed the company, getting rid of all the R&D and trying to be Dell. She wasted millions buying Compaq just so she could scrap everything of any value that Compaq had. Gee, lets hop on the sinking Itanic, and port the features missing in HP-UX from Tru64. Even though HP-UX is a worthless pile of shit, and they should have just used Tru64 and scrapped HP-UX.
HP has actively thrown away all of their technical edge to become Yet Another PC Vendor.
...As well as the Alpha line which they acquired.
They nearly created the printer market, and now their printers are crap.
They've only released one new RPN calculator, and it's...questionable.
They're actively trying to kill off the HP-UX server/OS line.
They've already killed off the PA-RISC processor line.
All of their worthwhile tech gear got spun off as Agilent.
All they do now is make crappy printers and passable PCs in server cases. That's great--I'm sure they'll make tons of money grinding out crap without doing any basic research anymore, but it's lousy for the industry.
I don't think that HP will ever recover from Carly F. She destroyed the company and is still running free on the streets.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
1) That article is based on estimates. We'll see what happens at the end of the year.
2) If I sold a $100 lead weight to everyone on the planet would it make me a technology leader? Sales is an arbitrary statistic and probably one of the worst. Why not use profit margin or return on investment?3) How about patents?
4) How about leading-edge custom processor design. IBM owns this generation of game consoles (Wii, ps3, xbox360 processors are all being designed at IBM). Why? IBM has an entire service organization that will build you your very own custom processor and will let you be as hands-on or as hands-off as you want. And they win awards for doing it!
Is a company which once was an icon of high tech has settled into printers and its overprized in and computers the dell way... I would not say this is a big blue, this seems more like a thin ground to me.
That's a lot of ink. Not at HP's prices.
NINAEC! (Notes Is Not An Email Client).
Since IBM is more a service and contract company, I cannot see how the sales numbers are really that important, the big bugs for IBM are service contracts and consulting, as well as project contracts. Most of its "end" user sales stem from servers and its processor division. But that is a mere shadow of its support and consulting money
that would be Wal-Mart, no? Blue logo and all?
Then IBM has to stop selling it as a email system to every business that owns one.
All the Notes developers always *say* that. Then you go to the website, and what does it talk about? Email, calendaring, email again, look it competes with Exchange, email, etc.
So in other words, if IBM *sells* it as an email program, and it's terrible at email (which it is,) then they're selling a crappy product. Period. I don't care what Notes developers think it's supposed to be used for, but IBM *clearly states* that it's used for email.
In any case, if it wasn't used for email, it'd still be a crappy product. It looks like a mutant alien on every OS it runs on, the UI is arcane and terrible. There's no menu organization whatsoever (default browser is in *location* preferences?! Like I'd want to use Notes browser in one location, and IE in another!?) It includes features that are not only useless, but stupid (like drawing icons when you type your password.)
I know you probably foam at the mouth when anybody mentions a Microsoft product, so I won't mention Access but instead Filemaker: Filemaker can do everything Notes can do (that isn't email related; but according to you it's not an email client, right?) much, much better than Notes does it. It's also cheaper. It also has a good UI that fits in with the platform it's running on.
IBM either needs to rewrite Notes from scratch so it doesn't suck so much ass, or just kill it off. Right now, it's expensive, ugly, and everybody hates using it.
Comment of the year
Notes has always been built around replication--every document (or form or view) has a multi-part identifier (UNID) to distinguish it from other revisions made on different replicas. FileMaker apparently requires a third-party tool to support replication. I have trouble believing it works very well with no builtin support for the idea, especially when the designer of a database may not have even thought to accomodate it up front (it can be tricky).
Otherwise, yeah, there's a reason Notes had its own section in the Interface Hall of Shame.
Its funny how after Compaq bought DEC they planned to end of life the Alpha platform then shortly after they were purchased by HP who also planned to E.O.L. the Alphas several times but keeps them going. They say October 06 will be the end. Will the Digital Equipment legacy end, or get another breath of life?