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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.'"
You realize that Ford DID make airplanes a long time ago. Not only that but they were GOOD at it.
Actually all Ford did was buy up a company that had shamelessly copied much of the technology behind what became the Ford Trimotor from Junkers Flugzeugbau AG in Germany (the same kind of intellectual property borrowing the US is now complaining that China does). One could almost say the Ford Trimotor was a Fokker F.VII made with Junkers' methods. In fact the Fokker F.VII and the Ford Trimotor look so much alike people often confuse photographs of the two even though the two aircraft used completely different construction methods. Mind you the Ford was easily the superior design... thanks in no small measure to Prof. Junkers. Ford's significant contribution was not their designs, it was the way they applied Ford's assembly line techniques to aircraft production making their prices highly competitive which was one of the reasons why Junkers never managed to get much of a foothold on the US market. Ford later contributed hugely to the 18.000 plus B.24 bombers made during the war.