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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.'"
I've heard that their Big Serious Expensive has its points; but every interaction with HP software that I've had down at the "commodity x86s and their peripherals" level has filled me with an unquenchable desire for bloody vengeance upon every last persons responsible for it.
Their winCE thin clients have had timekeeping bugs in certain models(that engineering kindly verified and then decided not to fix...) Their linux ones have glaring security deficiencies that they wouldn't even acknowledge our bug reports about(Hypothetically, if you were adding a diagnostic page that allowed the user of a 'kiosk' system to use ping to verify connectivity, would you implement it by giving them a freeform text field and then prepending 'ping' to whatever they entered and dumping it straight to the shell without any sanitization? Well, the input "$IP_ADDRESS && xterm" certainly suggests that HP did... For extra credit, the 'kiosk' program was running under a passwordless account on the sudoers list...)
The firmware of their network printers has been a mess for years, and their printer drivers(even for the workgroup networked printers with PCL/Postscript, let's not even talk about the direct-attached inkjet shit) actually seems to be getting worse as time goes on. Servers and workstations are ok, largely by virtue of being more or less stock intel or AMD kit, with drivers provided by people who don't utterly suck.
I know that hardware's margins don't keep the Wall street boys happy; but what sort of insanity could convince HP that they are a software company?
The people you mention were engineers and technologists, not bean counters. I guess that's the difference.