Slashdot Mirror
HP's Shift On PCs Could Boost Acer, Dell and Lenovo
CWmike writes "With HP spinning off its PC business, rivals will be looking for a way to get a bigger piece of the hardware pie. HP's PC unit news, among other industry-rattling announcements, including pulling out of the tablet market and shuttering webOS, rocked the hardware industry since HP is by far the dominant maker in the world. So while HP decides what to do, rivals should be plotting their next move, say industry analysts. Who could benefit the most from any change-up in PC sales? The obvious suspects: Dell, which passed Acer in the second quarter of this year; and Acer is looking to make up some lost ground and could see HP's shake up as an opportunity. And don't forget Lenovo, which holds the third-largest market share. Despite the general downshift for PCs, Lenovo is riding some great momentum right now, reports Gartner. In the second quarter of 2011, the company saw 22.5% growth in its PC shipments."
A related article ponders the fate of webOS, looking at a number of potential buyers as well as the unlikely possibility that HP will open source it.
If they sell of their computer business what do they think they can sell?
"Personal computer business" != "computer business". Their Q3 2011 financial review indicates that, in earnings from operations in the quarter ending July 31, 2011, the rest of the computer business - "Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking" - was third, after the services business and the printer/scanner business, and ahead of the PC business.
I certainly would have never figured out that the largest PC maker leaving the market would benefit its competition
I guess that is where the market is headed now. And there will be no need for systems integrators.
Why? It's not their core business. There is a world of difference at being good at making chips and being good at making chips and whole systems.
Knowing when to cut your losses is a pretty rare skill among computer industry management. Apotheker might turn out to be HP's Lew Gerstner.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That would be right now then. You can natively run Linux and Windows on any current Mac sold since 2005 or so.
That is really sad, I was eager to get a ProBook. Business grade hardware from HP was almost always really good, I'm sad to see it go.
Maybe they will spin it off and call it Compaq, and little will change other than the name plate. OK, I admit it, that was a little optimistic.
Dell servers lack HP's quality
Apparently you are wrong about a lot of things. I've used plenty of dell servers and they are well designed and incredibly reliable.
Get a web developer
In the tech industry, there is a lot to see here of interest.
First, notably, a lot of the financial commentators are praising the dump of PSG because of the relatively weak ~5% margin. It is clear that a lot of the vocal members of that circle tear into the numbers piece by piece without consideration of how it relates to the whole. For example, dumping PSG means a lot of big contracts (like the NASA deal they were touting so heavily not so long ago) are going to be at high risk for cancellation. That means not only are they losing the PC piece of that pie, it means they are forfeiting some amount of server sales. The ability to sell all a company's IT needs from datacenter to desktop was actually a non-trivial advantage over IBM for a lot of procurement situations, this means they will forfeit that advantage going forward and lose server sales. There is also the reputation damage associated with companies that bet their business on the consistency of HP to potentially lose the bet. This last part will depend heavily upon how they handle existing contracts and make things right. Another consequence is on HP buying components. When you ship a whole lot of PCs, component vendors will be aggressive on margin and make it up in volume. If you are ordering only parts for servers, expect a hit to server base material cost due to lower purchase volumes. This applies to common components, but more critically distinct components sourced from the same suppliers even if they wouldn't fit in a laptop.
The whole palm acquisition handling demonstrated a complete lack of strategic direction, regardless of your opinion of WebOS. Either there was no market opportunity in the first place, meaning HP bet a couple billion based on poor marketing skills, Palm's team was a lost cause from the start, which HP should have figured out before the 1.2 billion dollar check, whatever capability was there was destroyed by HP mismanagement, or it would've worked but they canned it before even really trying. Of course, it's a combination of all of the above, but I do recall a mass exodus of nearly every single 'visionary' person who could take credit for the features about WebOS that garnered any praise, meaning HP either booted them out or at least failed to retain them, which reeks of mismanagement. Launching after the iPad2 at price parity with 0 mind share was absolutely insane.
Another thought I have is around their declared intent to move to software and services instead of PC industry. A lot of people describe this as IBM like, but IBM was *very* firmly entrenched in the software industry before they exited. HP is not nearly so robust in the software industry, and while they may be making moves in the name of getting there, they should be hedging their bets before betting those efforts will bear fruit. I do wonder if the Apotheker leadership is a bit biased from his SAP experience and assuming the answer to any company regardless of current positioning just just become a software development company. I wouldn't be surprised to see the guy handed CEO of McDonald's and tell them to shutter their fast food business and start coding.
In general, they lost 20% of their company value because 1 year ago, they said 'we want to be just like apple' and threw billions at the problem to say in only one year "we want to be nothing at all like apple". They've been showing more and more shortsightedness in their spending in the last couple of years, spending on the magnitude that demands long-term engagement and then changing their minds on short-term timescales.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That explains why IBM is out of business, unless you think that servers and POS are carrying all the load.
Right... but for the last few years HP has claimed it's competing with IBM Global Services, but I don't see much real evidence of that. And I don't see HP making a lot of software either... IBM has the DB2 and WebSphere product lines (sales of which are driven by their Global Services contracts). I don't know if IBM's hardware outsells HP's, but they have a lot of products available there, too, and they cost money.
But then again, although I have two consumer-market HP PCs here in my office, I'd categorize the tower as "average to meh" and the laptop is pretty much junk. I'd love to see HP clear some space in the retail channel if it means someone who actually knows how to make a decent PC takes their place.
Breakfast served all day!
I have a bespoke box from a relatively obscure web vendor. I have had no reason to disparage it.
My Apple machines are another matter though.
Also have a Compaq that's been a real trooper oddly enough.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Companies that don't make anything, can't sell anything, and can't make any money.
Tell that to Wall Street.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
No mention of the fate of HP/UX or True64.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Yeah, but the fuckups have long-term effects. Short term profit, long term loss.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
They're not spinning off the server, networking and storage business.
I dislike Apple as much as the next guy, but be reasonable here - the Macbook Air is expensive because it is ultra light weight unlike the Dell. A Samsung that comes close to the specs of the Macbook is NP900X3A at $1650 and it is half the hard drive and a weaker processor. Take a look at the 3 lb models from others and the Macbook is probably in the upper middle price range ($1400, $1650, $1600, $1950 were the prices for such a laptop with even a $128 SSD on TigerDirect).
The bootloader is EFI. Used in every modern PC. The partition is GPT, required in modern PCs these days.
Yes, most BIOSes these days comprise of an EFI loader, with BIOS backwards compatibility. Oh wait, Windows requires that to start up on the Macs as well. Hell, Ubuntu installs trivially on a Mac.
And GPT is required these days. MBR won't cut it unless you want to stick with drives 2TB and smaller (MBR has a 2TB partition limit). With 3TB and larger hard drives coming out, the OS needs to understand GPT in order to use it. Windows Vista and Windows 7 natively understand it. Windows XP requires a special partition driver to be installed. Linux... should understand it natively.
It's not hostile, it's different. And Apple, as always, seems to like to push the way forward. First by getting rid of floppy drives, legacy ports (for USB). Then they got EFI and GPT, and now, optical drives.
You are being so disingenuous, it is ridiculous. The fact that you have to be so disingenuous to pretend Dell is cheaper than Apple tells the whole story. Comparing a big fat notebook that most women cannot even carry day-in and day-out to the smallest i5 PC on the planet, with no moving parts, which can get lost in a purse, is just totally disingenuous. Plus you used the Dell base model but not the Apple base model. There is a MacBook Air that is 60% of the price of the one you chose.
The fact is, if you buy a Mac (any Mac) plus AppleCare that extends the service plan to 3 years, it will cost you a little over $1 per day for 3 years of worry-free computing, during which time, Apple will fix any software or hardware problem that comes up. You can buy before school and know you don't have to pay anything for 3 years. iPads cost a little less than $1 per day (they're cheaper, but only last 2 years.) It is CHEAP. Many Windows users spend more than $1 per day on consulting, just to nursemaid Windows.
The most popular low-end PC on the planet is iPad. The most popular high-end PC on the planet is MacBook Air. PC makers have to compete with those 2 systems or get out of the game. Those are the form factors of the next 5 years or more. None of them knows how to do it. So you see Dell is running away to servers, same as HP. Client systems are going to Apple because the others cannot make modern systems, which are not the crufty breadboard towers of yesterday. We all know this is the end of the PC industry. The question is just which PC companies go CE like Apple, and which go IT like HP and Dell, and which die.
HP PSG only has 5% margins. That is only slightly more profitable than Treasury bills. Apotheker said, "we have better ways of using that capital." Making PC's for Microsoft is not a good business and never has been. It is refreshing to hear someone at HP talk who is not a Microsoft-brainwashed zombie.
Apple just became the #1 PC vendor by volume last quarter. They shipped 4 million more systems than HP.
> but I'd dare say that there has to be more to this story than simply a change of heart
> whereby the CEO no longer wants to gun for the number two slot in the tablet market
> simply because he doesn't feel like it anymore
Can't fool you! Yes, there is more going on. This HP CEO is not the same HP CEO who bought Palm a year ago. Two months after the Palm purchase, HP fired their CEO and hired this new one. So the CEO did not just change his mind, he changed everything! He is a whole different guy now. No, he is not interested in being Steve Ballmer's punk, making almost no money assembling Windows PC's.
> less than 2 months
The other thing is that WebOS is much, much further behind iOS than is generally understood. They do not have native apps, they do not use the GPU well, they have all kinds of missing stuff. Software takes a long time to make. The tablet market is MATURE, it is over 25 years old. They do not have time to catch up to Apple. OS X is almost 30 years old, and has Unix components that are over 40. WebOS is 3, and made by a much, much smaller team.
The truth is, if they convert all the WebOS apps to iPad apps, that would be the best return on the investment they could make. Except I don't think their apps would be competitive.