Ex-Board Member Says HP Is Committing 'Corporate Suicide'

theodp writes "If Apple's looking for a seamless transition, advises the NYT's James B. Stewart, it definitely shouldn't look to Hewlett Packard. In the year after HP CEO Mark Hurd was told to hit-the-road-Jack, HP — led by new CEO Leo Apotheker — has embarked on a stunning shift in strategy that has left many baffled and resulted in HP's fall from Wall Street grace (its stock declined 49%). The apparent new focus on going head-to-head with SAP (Apotheker's former employer) and Oracle (Hurd's new employer) in enterprise software while ignoring the company's traditional strengths, said a software exec, is 'as if Alan Mulally left Boeing to join Ford as CEO, and announced six months later that Ford would be making airplanes.' Former HP Director Tom Perkins said, 'I didn't know there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is.'"

Comments

Re:Gave up too quickly

[JonJ]

HP just doesn't feel that they were making enough money selling PCs and they are correct

No, Apple has proved this to be very profitable. The problem is the guys on the other side refuse to a) ditch windows and b) make some good laptops. People are fed up with all the 'almost'-solutions in pc-land and would rather want fewer features, but those few actually work.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Hadlock]

I think the other problem was that everyone saw the iPad coming, and spun up development of iPad knockoffs. By the time the writing was on the wall that nobody wanted a tablet unless it was an iPad, HP had already bought a $1 billion mistake and had already paid for the tooling for the 2nd gen ipad knockoff, the TouchPad.
 
Apple had 8 years and $billions of R&D behind the iPad and associated ipod/iphone line. I think when the TouchPad didn't meet sales goals they realized that WebOS was going to be an enormous loss leader for years and years while they tried to break in to the market (see also: Microsoft's XBox department, ran at a loss to this date since 2001)