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HP Spinning Off WebOS and Exiting Hardware Business

Posted by Unknown on from the there-can-be-only-one dept.

A number of readers submitted rumors about some announcements HP was set to make today. Now, the announcements have actually happened, and the news looks grim. For starters, they are exiting the tablet and phone market and repositioning webOS for use in appliances and vehicles. While confirming they are in talks to acquire Autonomy, they also announced they are considering exiting the PC hardware business entirely in order to focus on their software business.

4 of 514 comments (clear)

  1. Low margins by symbolset · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You have to work really hard for that PC dollar. In desktop PCs Microsoft makes several times the profit dollars per unit than HP or Lenovo does. Lenovo's crowing about "huge" $100M profits on $5B sales right now- about 2 percent. That's a lot of work and risk for $100M profit to be a good thing. You could blow $100M just by, say, building an initial run of half a million tablets that don't sell.

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  2. History of HP by tibit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, HP was an instrument company, started with an ingenious application of a light bulb no less. Then they became a computer company sort of by attrition, since they needed machines to control their instruments -- IIRC. Then servers came sort of naturally when they got to dabble with UNIX. Then the core instrument business got spun off as Agilent, pretty much tarring the name of Hewlett and Packard IMHO. Then the PC business gets spun off too. So what remains is servers? What the heck software is HP shipping that hasn't to do with their own hardware? It's becoming more and more of a joke to keep the same name. Their business got nothing to do with Hewlett nor Packard. They're turning in their graves. </rant>

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    A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
  3. I have a great name for the spin-off by NicknamesAreStupid · · Score: 5, Funny

    Compaq

  4. Fiorina's personality is irrelevant to me. by jamrock · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I couldn't care less about Fiorina's personality, and frankly it has no bearing on the success of the company. By all accounts Steve Jobs is a complete asshole to work for, the proverbial boss from hell, but investors will forgive anything if he delivers results. Fiorina did not deliver, and the acquisition of Compaq was in my opinion a dramatic strategic mistake. The culture of engineering innovation at HP seemed to go out the window on her watch, and the company became a low-margin mass producer.

    I've compared her before with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. Both come from marketing backgrounds; when both assumed leadership of their respective companies engineers took a distant back seat; and investors rewarded both with flat stock prices in recognition of their inability to innovate and grow the business.