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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
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 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.
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
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.
30 MB? try 300 MB for newer ones.
It actually is 30MB... of RAM!
Our HP Color Laserjet 2550L has, as many devices do, a web-based interface. Except this printer has no network support. How, then, does it have a web interface?
Because the driver installs a web server on your machine!
And guess what? The web server is written in Java! So the driver installs Java on your machine!
Of course, they both autostart as services. That's well over thirty megabytes of RAM, consumed constantly, to support what looks like a 45k HTML web app with a trivial USB backend to talk to the printer.
Utterly, utterly despicable.
--
Dum de dum.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
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!