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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?
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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.
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...
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! ;-)
You seem to have a long term view of things. That isn't compatible with Slashdot or the market. :-)
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?
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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.
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 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.
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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
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.
Not sure what to make of the rather incomprehensible parent comment, but I do have a hard time waxing poetic on Carly Fiorina.
"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore." - Carly Fiorina
While working in Manhattan I saw two entire floors' worth of HP staff become unemployed with a stroke of Carly's pen. At the same time she was eliminating and/or offshoring thousands of US tech jobs, Carly Fiorina and her ilk were cruising around in Jetstreams and luxury yachts, hobnobbing with celebrities and politicians. She epitomizes the grasping callousness, hypocrisy and greed that permeates the top levels of corporate America.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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!