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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.'"
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...
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!
HP is still big in the corporate and server business, for both x86 and Unix markets. While TFA makes some broad sweeping remarks about HP doing more consumer business than IBM, it doesn't reflect the entire spectrum of HP's product line. Up until 9 months ago I worked for a company that was a distributor/reseller of servers from both companies. Where IBM diferentiates itself is with their army of Global Services consultants. That's where the biggest margins are.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
You neglect to mention who those other companies are that IBM is just ahead of oh. Yeah, HP, is consistently #2 or #3 annually in patents.
The latest data from the USPTO is for the year 2004. HP is #4. IBM has been #1 for twelve years in a row. IBM received 3248, while HP received 1775.
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.
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.