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

Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Nokia, anyone?

Re:Deja vu

[Opportunist]

Yeah, they should have stayed with making rubber boots. Heck, they should have stayed with making Paper.

Re:Deja vu

[alen]

they were screwed long before the current CEO took over. making feature phones and geek phones when apple and android are taking over is not a recipe for success

Re:Deja vu

[jhoegl]

Kind of,

HP has had so many leaders within the past 10 years that they have no idea what assets they have.
Hell, HP bought a company that was a start up for the cloud idea back in... 2006 I think. They did nothing with it.
Now they are scrambling to fix it up, and the offering wont be that great if current middle management has its way.
HP lacks direction because quite simply HP hasnt had anyone worth a damn at the helm, leading to assets that they bought in the past to stagnate.

HPs problem is literally itself.

Their management style needs to change, middle management needs to be cleaned out and those that are smarter need to rise up.
Until then, this company will bleed money, sell off divisions, and end up as small as it was back in 1995.
If HP sells its printer lines, then you know they are in trouble.

Re:Deja vu

[sortius_nod]

The problems started when Fiorina, maybe even before that with the Compaq merger. They really haven't been able to do anything other than sell large volume servers since. No major projects really have come to fruition. Everything seems to turn into a clusterfuck for HP every time they swap CEOs.

I remember a number of years ago a documentary on Silicon Valley where an ex-HP engineer said "HP's slogan is 'Invent', we stopped doing that years ago". I think that statement pretty much sums up HP.

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

She turned HP printers into plastic pieces of garbage. That's her legacy to me. The last "good" HP printer was I think maybe the LaserJet 5, of which we have one that's still happily printing out pages in one professor's office. Everything since seems to start misfeeding and jamming after a couple years, whether or not regular installation of maintenance kits occurs.

Re:Deja vu

[SmurfButcher Bob]

HP's issue really started with the destruction of their R&D. Remember the days when you'd walk into a lab, and all the nice freq counters and 'scopes and muxers all had HP stickers on em?

Right or wrong, they dropped that stuff like a bad habit and eradicated any aspect of HP's "think tank" culture. Granted, I'm certain that all five of their high-tech customers have missed them - but that signaled the shift toward The Cult of Printer Ink.

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to increase short term profits after slashing R&D.

Re:Deja vu

[northerner]

> "they dropped that stuff like a bad habit" The didn't drop the test equipment line, they split HP into 2 companies, HP and Agilent. Agilent is still making fine test equipment. http://www.agilent.com/

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

Carly killed the company. It is just that the shareholders has not been able to admit that to themselves yet.

Also Carly might be gone, but the people that hired that idiot remains. This is the problem with many large companies now, they are owned by brainless people who only has money because they have inherited it, not because they earned it.

Re:Deja vu

[kpainter]

> "they dropped that stuff like a bad habit" The didn't drop the test equipment line, they split HP into 2 companies, HP and Agilent. Agilent is still making fine test equipment. http://www.agilent.com/

Too bad they didn't split off the computer and printer business into "Agilent" and let the test equipment keep the HP name.

Re:Deja vu

[Chapter80]

The problems started when Fiorina, maybe even before that with the Compaq merger.

Hard to interpret this sentence fragment, but if you are saying that you believe the problems started when they hired Fiorina, or maybe before that with the Compaq merger, I think you have your timeline wrong. Firoina was hired in 1999, but the Compaq merger started in 2002.

Perhaps you mean that the problems started when they fired Fiorina. But I'd disagree with that - I think she was a huge mistake.

Re:Deja vu

[Colonel Korn]

While the old guard hated her, she put the company in a position to be profitable again.

It is looking like firing Carly was an awful idea. Like it or not, she had the company moving in a direction, and they were making plenty of money.They had kicked dell out of the corporate laptop business ( the end of the market that makes money ) and were starting to do the same with corporate desktops. They were making money, lots of it. And they have been chasing their tail since. They will soon spin out into two or three companies, the software services one will crash and burn. The profitable sector will be the one stamping their name on calculators and printers designed and made in China.

She killed their golden egg laying gooses in every department. Sure, cutting costs led to some short term profit but she simply erased the majority of HP's long term prospects. It's hard to believe she didn't know she was trading the future for a few years of profit.

Re:Deja vu

[SmurfButcher Bob]

> they split HP into 2 companies, HP and Agilent

Translation: they dropped that stuff like a bad habit and eradicated any aspect of HP's "think tank" culture.

Re:Deja vu

[Grishnakh]

I'd like to see HP sell its printer business (except the consumer inkjet part) to Agilent, and also its name. Then Agilent can change its name back to HP, and the current HP can just shut its doors.

Re:Deja vu

[swordgeek]

No. Sorry, but no.

Carly put the company in a position to be profitable again--in the short term. She killed off R&D, she killed off the long-term projects and plans, and she turned the company into a "PC and printer" maker. That's all they do anymore. Nobody cares about the odd bit of HP-UX gear they sell (and would kill off, if the US government would let them), they spun off the scientific instrumentation into a new company (thank god!), and now they can't even enter the generic consumer product market anymore.

Fiorina destroyed the company, Hurd kept driving it towards the cliff.

Re:Deja vu

[arglebargle_xiv]

They really haven't been able to do anything other than sell large volume servers since.

A fact that never ceases to amaze me, given that they're running PHUX. I mean the hardware may be nice, but... PHUX? Are people really that desperate?

Gave up too quickly

[yog]

Shouldn't HP have at least tried to make a go of their WebOs tablet before giving up so quickly? They can't possibly have recouped the investment costs of purchasing Palm, etc.

It's not as though personal computers are going away any time soon. Corporations still need desktop workstations, albeit more in the direction of thin Internet portal devices than the heavily loaded computers of the past.

HP should come out with a world class ultra lightweight laptop to compete with the MacBook Air, with a touch screen and very long battery life. They should come out with an innovative line of consumer and business PCs with touch screen monitors, tiny form factor similar to Mac Mini, remotely flashable, all the bells and whistles. And they should built on their handheld base, come out with some state of the art handsets and tablets to round out their portfolio.

Software services is all very well, but there are plenty of competitors in that space and HP will not be having a picnic. Why did they buy compaq and Palm to begin with? Methinks the current board has taken leave of their senses.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

HP looks at the way IBM dumped the (cutthroat margin) PC and laptop market and survives on consulting and big iron and fantasizes that they can do the same. The days when HP could produce ANY world-class widget ended when they stopped being an instrument company at heart, probably in Lou Platt's day, but certainly by the end of the Evil Queen's reign. By then, they'd lost (or gotten rid of) all their top engineering talent, and were no longer one of "the top 10 places to work in the world". The Compaq, later (attempted) PWC and finally (completed) EDS and Palm deals are just the fenceposts along the way of HP losing its soul.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[gl4ss]

you know what's palms biggest success? selling linux os TWICE(developing a linux os thrice) for large amounts of money to someone who makes no use of it. apotheker is seeing the ROI on his sw side and can't think that he should keep doing anything physical, when you can just rent out nerds at ridiculous pricing. the factories are owned by subcontractors already, though? so what they're doing is throwing away a strong consumer brand and consumer support organization. of course he isn't throwing away the sweet pie of ink refills though..

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Ecuador]

I was looking at ebay over the weekend and the Touchpad 16GB auctions were all closing at around $250-$270 - and we are talking about 1 auction closing per minute!
So, this means that they could have sold the Touchpad at around $300 (more for the 32GB version) and still sell-out in a few days. This would have been at a loss of R&D, as the cost of making them is astimated at around $315 & $330 for the 16GB and 32GB versions.
Now, after selling out in a few days they would have a big installed WebOS base, so maybe the app store would take off.
But nooo, they HAVE to sell their tablet at least $400, even though they are trying to enter late in a market dominated by Apple. And when they obviously can't do that, they simply give the tablets away and call it quits!
Now THAT is corporate suicide and yet it stands second to Nokia's recent "FU developers - we take back our promises, BTW we are just another windows phone maker now".

Re:Gave up too quickly

[sortius_nod]

I really don't think you can compare HP's aimlessness and IBMs ruthlessness. IBM actually probably did the smartest thing they could "fuck it, if you want the consumer end of the market China, you can have it".

Meanwhile HP dumps what could have actually lifted them out of the doldrums and focuses on an already overcrowded market. Not exactly the smartest thing to do.

Going up against SAP & Oracle is not as easy as it seems. Oracle isn't just Oracle, people forget this. Oracle is the base of a huge chunk of database systems (think... well... SAP & Maximo [IBM]).

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Hadlock]

As far as risk management goes, I think they already wrote off the WebOS as a loss, and sitting on that inventory for more than two months would have been a much worse story for HP and their "lack of vision and leadership" as bloggers frothed at the mouth, writing even more scathing articles about "hp's tablet was so bad it didn't even sell at cost. half their inventory is still unsold". Once the decision to can WebOS was made, unloading the tablets and announcing closing down the department was the smart move from a fiscal and PR viewpoints.
 
Canning WebOS perhaps wasn't the best plan, but by cutting their losses now, they still have an albatross around their neck, but at least they don't have the limp corpse of WebOS tied around their ankle creating turbulence in the media for months and months as they try and move forward.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Grizzley9]

HP should come out with a world class ultra lightweight laptop to compete with the MacBook Air, with a touch screen and very long battery life. They should come out with an innovative line of consumer and business PCs with touch screen monitors, tiny form factor similar to Mac Mini, remotely flashable, all the bells and whistles.

So instead of innovating, they should copy Apple. Got it. Seems other companies are in trouble for doing just that and getting trounced. They're not going to make any impact by continuing to play catch up with 2nd rate devices and services. Each of these big companies have a large budget for R&D, adding on obvious things is not the best use of those resources.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[mickwd]

I'd love to know whether there's something about the tech industry that makes it susceptible to this level of mismanagement, as so many tech companies seem to have been badly mismanaged over the years.

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Andy Grove at Intel (and perhaps Lou Gerstner turning around IBM) stand out amongst the rest as inspired CEOs, even if some of their business practises have left a little to be desired at times. But so many other once-dominant-in-their-field companies have just seemed to crash and burn.

Maybe I'm wrong and all other industries suffer from the same level of management problems - it's just that the technology industry is the one I'm most familiar with.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[vlm]

HP should ...

They should ...

And they should ...

They can't. All the "do-ers" "makers" whatever you want to call them, were downsized years (decades?) ago to boost stock proce. Nothing left. The death of the company is the endgame of that strategy.

They'd have to start over, and try to hire back all the people they fired, at a higher pay rate because once burned twice shy, etc. Frankly your average startup would be a better place to work, so they're going to have severe issues just getting to personnel to even try what you suggest.

Its much more like a "corporate zombie apocalypse", not a "corporate suicide", although both have the same end result and some similar symptoms. What happens to a corporation when most, but not quite all, of the brains are scooped out for short term gain? Look at HP.

Methinks the current board has taken leave of their senses.

The were driven into the dirt a long time ago. The options are rapidly narrowing as the end approaches. In that situation, where failure is almost certain, random thrashing around probably won't help, but then again it appears to be "doing something" and "being proactive" both of which are important for individual resumes for their next job, and who knows, maybe a 1 in a million shot will pay off after all. HP may yet survive, despite its own best efforts. Probably not, but stranger things have happened.

Personally I'd like the test equipment spinoff to buy the trademarked name back. Id like to see a new line of "HP" spectrum analyzers or "HP" scopes. HP had a beyond spectacular reputation for test equipment years ago, I don't know if their recent PC and printer operations and legendary mis-management style have tarnished it beyond value, but it used to be a great name. The test equipment spinoff, eh, who even remembers their name.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[AJH16]

HP already has a very nice offering in the virtual PC terminal arena which is probably going to be the future direction for a lot of corporate IT.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Merk42]

Yes any time a competitor to Microsoft fails, it MUST be because they were bribed, not because of poor sales and/or business decisions. I guess when Microsoft Kin failed it must have been because they bribed themselves.

Also, HP isn't just getting out of WebOS, it's getting out of selling PCs. It is the #1 seller of Windows based PCs. So why the hell would Microsoft bribe them to stop doing that?

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Anonymous Coward]

The people you mention were engineers and technologists, not bean counters. I guess that's the difference.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[interval1066]

Just think where FUD will take them next year...

Re:Gave up too quickly

[mfh]

They are talking about selling off the PC biz, so it's not like they are throwing it away. HP just doesn't feel that they were making enough money selling PCs and they are correct. There is no margin in it. You know when all the laptops are made at the same factories for all the PC brands (including Apple), then you gotta ask... why the hell would any of these big corporations stick with low-GM products when they could mop up the revenue selling high-GM software and support?

The real problem here is how HP made the shift from a low to a high-GM company. They did this the worst possible way, and it has cost them dearly. They have almost zero chance of turning this around. Any shift from a wide customer base to a narrow one is going to cause revolts, revolutions, so they should have expected and planned for this transition effectively, rather than running roughshot and making it seem like the axe was coming for anyone at any time. You can't run an organization on fear alone; a CEO needs to have respect, especially when replacing someone who had it all.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[mfh]

Once the decision to can WebOS was made, unloading the tablets and announcing closing down the department was the smart move from a fiscal and PR viewpoints.

They should not have entered into this market unless they were planning on sticking around. The problem with "WebOS" was the name "WebOS" -- it's dreadful. When competing with iPad, you gotta bring a classy edge to it. If HP called it OSome (awesome), or something to that level of coolness, then maybe they could have marketed it and challenged Apple for real market share.

No the real problem at HP is how they market stuff they do, and that's a new problem because they used to be good at it.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Sir_Sri]

Shouldn't HP have at least tried to make a go of their WebOs tablet before giving up so quickly?

No, they shouldn't have. Jumping into a market with 3 much larger, better connected competitors, who have the loyalties of 3rd parties was just stupid. HP is not, will not be, and should not try to be Apple. They were probably contractually obliged to produce something, or were so far along that they had to finish, but they should have realized this was a stupid plan from the get go.

It's not as though personal computers are going away any time soon. Corporations still need desktop workstations, albeit more in the direction of thin Internet portal devices than the heavily loaded computers of the past.

HP should come out with a world class ultra lightweight laptop to compete with the MacBook Air, with a touch screen and very long battery life. They should come out with an innovative line of consumer and business PCs with touch screen monitors, tiny form factor similar to Mac Mini, remotely flashable, all the bells and whistles.

Those are low margin high competition businesses. Apple, or apple suppliers probably have the macbook air locked down patent and supply wise. IBM abandoned the PC business for the same reason HP is: too much competition, too low margins, no customer loyalty. (HP and IBM are very similar in size and markets and run head long into each other on a regular basis, and some of those things are good reasons to copy your competitor). HP probably could be a premium business PC manufacturer or the like, but I doubt they see much profit in that. Software services and whole solutions with support costs are probably where the money is when you're 120 billion dollar (revenue) company. Too many little guys able to charge just a little bit less in the PC space.

And they should built on their handheld base, come out with some state of the art handsets and tablets to round out their portfolio.

Software services is all very well, but there are plenty of competitors in that space and HP will not be having a picnic. Why did they buy compaq and Palm to begin with? Methinks the current board has taken leave of their senses.

That would be an interesting one. Putting themselves in competition with SAP, oracle, IBM and samsung, HTC and Nokia wouldn't be a bad plan necessarily. I think if they're going to drop the PC business they'd be best to drop the tablet/phone business as well, since there's a lot of overlap there. But there's probably room for a high end windows tablet, along with more space for another high end WP7 and Android phone, though again, not sure there's a lot of margins there. They might be better to use handhelds as lead ins for software and services to connect those devices to corporate needs and build serious applications for them for big customers. But again, they're all crowded markets. Which I suppose is HP's problem, they're late to every game they're playing, and when they get there they are average or below.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[c]

> HP should come out with a world class ultra
> lightweight laptop to compete with the MacBook Air...

No, no, no.

First, HP should invent a time machine, and send someone back to 1999 to kill everyone on the board who thought hiring Carly Fiorina might possibly be a good idea.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[obergfellja]

as long as corporations have a need for Desktops workstations, laptops, and other devices like that, we will not see an end to the hardware format. Some people will purchase their personal computer based on what they will use @ work. Others will do the other way around, make tech decisions based on what they use at home. Heck, I learned program languages based what i can afford the hardware and software (based on what I am willing to spend @ home).

HP has been a decent company for me for 12 years and it would be a shame if they try to shed the market that I purchase out of. Many companies die due to the fact that they ignore their customer base in which makes them the most money. When Apple decided to focus on Audio, Video, and Images and created iPod and iTunes, they were smart, because they focused on the market they knew best and had a good customer base on. When a company leaves their main market without replacing it (with a proper transition), they alienate their market and not just shoot themselves in the foot, but aim the gun directly at their own temple.

Hopefully, they will not walk too thin of a line.

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

[Monkey-Man2000]

HP has a history of horrible CEOs, but you'll notice the key difference is that all three of your examples were co-founders of their respective companies. They actually cared for the company to succeed in the long-term as their legacy and not JUST line their pockets with money, watch the company burn, and skip on to their next CXO job. It seems in the tech-industry, once management is brought in from outside the founders of the company it will inevitably tank (see Sun, etc.) -- IBM being a significant exception. We'll see about Apple now...

Re:Gave up too quickly

[mfh]

Comparing Apple to HP is like comparing apples and oranges. Let's make fruit salad.

Apple is profitable because they overcharge but typically they do not cut corners so their customers feel that the prices are mostly fair. Their business is in a total solution and complete lockdown of their technology, and they do this all very well.

If you want to compare Apple to HP, you have to look at HP and Microsoft, because HP doesn't sell an OS. They nixed the idea of doing it for whatever stupid reason.

HP is not profitable because of a number of reasons. First, HP offers computers that look as good as Apple computers because they are made at the same manufacturer. Therefore what exactly is HP? They are a middle man. The same is not true with Apple. Apple creates and controls their own OS. They've always done this and it's proven to be the number one source of their stability as a corporation because it frees them up to do great things.

HP has to deal with Microsoft and that's why they are ultimately failing. If HP would have say, five years ago, embraced Ubuntu and made their own fork that was user-friendly and managed all their systems, well then we'd be having a discussion about how HP and Apple are very similar beasts right on down to how profitable they both would be under those circumstances.

It's not the first time I've laughed at a PC company like HP. It won't be the last.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Raenex]

If HP called it OSome (awesome), or something to that level of coolness

That's OWful.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[jonwil]

HPs problem is that IBM pretty much INVENTED the idea of the computer as something a company would buy (as opposed to something used by governments and universities) and have been at the "software and big iron and servers" game since before HP even started selling computers.

HP competing with IBM (or even SAP or Oracle) in that space would be like Toyota trying to compete with Boeing or Airbus in the Jet airliner business.

HP should keep doing the things its good at doing and that includes offering a full package to companies that lets them buy all their computing needs from the one vendor, everything from a big iron server to the CEOs fancy laptop to the fully networked printer/scanner/copier in the copy room.
HP even makes the network hardware (switches, routers etc) to make it all talk to each other.

Offer things other PC vendors arent doing.

How about a commodity desktop PC designed specifically to reduce power usage (lots of big companies would like saving money on their power bills).

What HP SHOULD do is to get out of the bottom of the market. Get out of selling consumer desktops and laptops aimed at home users and focus on the business customers. Or if it does need to stay in the home market, it could use the Compaq brand for low-end crap and the HP brand for the business-class hardware.

More to the point, stop doing crap like chipping your ink cartridges. Sell printers at realistic prices instead of relying on ink sales to subsidize printer costs and sell ink at prices that reflect the cost of production.

Most of all, TALK to the big business who buy large amounts of computer hardware and kit and find out what THEY want from HP.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[mfh]

You're Anonymous Coward, so you can't really talk to me about names.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[mfh]

Raenex... You're right but maybe someone could do something better? WebOS is horrible.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[petermgreen]

The test equipment spinoff, eh, who even remembers their name.

Anyone who actually uses high end test equipment?

Re:Gave up too quickly

[517714]

As for the PC market, it's now a market with razor thin margins.

HP chased those margins down, and has reaped the rewards of doing so. Apple has been criticized for selling form over function, but their strategy has kept them profitable and able to plot their own course, being first (or at least first to be generally acknowledged) to offer new and delete old hardware features. When was the last time that we heard a significant product announcement in laptops from any vendor other than Apple? Yes, I know the signal to noise ratio is terrible if it isn't Apple. The criticism aimed at Apple should be aimed at all the other laptop makers who are not invested in their own products enough to offer new innovative products. Panasonic has those cool ruggedized laptops that cost a small fortune, weigh a lot, and which I have never actually seen. Alien makes some good gaming machines. Those are some pretty small niches so even though they may be profitable, the unit volume is awfully low making for longer product cycles. Lenovo offers some nice products, but nothing too different than what IBM had before the sale, and the rest have little to distinguish themselves from the crowd. If some of those manufacturers/sellers don't raise the bar, those predictions of the post (consumer) PC era may be right.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Raenex]

Also, HP isn't just getting out of WebOS, it's getting out of selling PCs. It is the #1 seller of Windows based PCs. So why the hell would Microsoft bribe them to stop doing that?

Leading to the obvious question of why HP is getting out of PCs, and why the board would agree to it, and if there is going to be a shareholder revolt.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Wansu]

Personally I'd like the test equipment spinoff to buy the trademarked name back. Id like to see a new line of "HP" spectrum analyzers or "HP" scopes. HP had a beyond spectacular reputation for test equipment years ago ...

Amen. HP test equipment was top notch. It was so well made, much of it is still in service. I have a model 400D Vacuum tube voltmeter and the legendary 200CD sine wave oscillator that can source 80Vp-p. Both still work.

HP also made the best calculators at one time. My 25 year old HP-15C calculator still works after decades of heavy use and abuse.

Can the HP brand name be salvaged? I don't know. Much damage has been done, maybe too much.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[rlp]

Selling tech products to the consumer market is a losing proposition. Just ask Apple ... oh, wait ...

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Raenex]

I agree webOS is bland. It reminds me of WebTV. However, I don't think the name of the OS was their major problem. TouchPad was an OK name for the device it ran on. It just seems that they had a tough time competing with iPad and Android.

They probably should have had more persistence, though, after spending so much money on it. It's like if Sony had just abandoned the PS3 after its rocky start.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[sevenofnine]

Apple is profitable because they overcharge but typically they do not cut corners so their customers feel that the prices are mostly fair.

One would argue that if the customer thinks it's fair, then by no means are they overcharging. Or do I have my economics incorrect?

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Bert64]

The problem is that the tech industry is moving faster than most other industries, and once a corporation gets to a certain size it usually becomes slow and cumbersome and quickly falls behind... In order to move such a mass, you need a good leader who can recognise the changes coming and force the company to move with the times.

It happens less in other industries because they are generally less slow moving, but you do see examples such as general motors being unable to compete with all the asian car makers...

Re:Gave up too quickly

[joebagodonuts]

Ding! We have a winner.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[umghhh]

I read a in a German newspaper last week (that is a dead tree form on which somebody printed so called news) that they just cut the division that has a profit margin below median in HP. I read that twice to ensure I did not misread - so if you have two profitable divisions that you have to sell one because it performs worse than the other??? Hmmm

Re:Gave up too quickly

[DavidTC]

Maybe I'm wrong and all other industries suffer from the same level of management problems - it's just that the technology industry is the one I'm most familiar with.

You are. This sort of shortsighted next-quarter-stock-prices chasing happens in all industry. It's a fairly obvious flaw of how a stock market distorts the free market....stockholders are the bosses, and at some point it because easier to make money by bumping up the stock price for two months and selling their stock to new unsuspecting people, than to actually get paid any dividends from the profits of the company.

In other words, the American economy operates by trading intangible assets from one person to another and hoping that they make worse guesses than you in selecting what and when to buy, instead of actually paying people to take $X worth of goods, put in $Y worth of labor, and selling to customers for $X+$Y+profit.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[CrackedButter]

This could almost be a reality TV show.

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)

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Creepy]

EDS was bleeding money when HP bought them, and had spun off profitable divisions to keep their stock from going junk. The remaining company was a services company that had lost major contracts like Onstar. Palm also had been bleeding money and losing marketshare, as well, as they lost big time in the move from PDA to Blackberry and smart phones. HP wanted to move out of the low profit PC market and into the high profit services company like IBM did, but buying failing services companies is probably not the way to do that, unless you're just building staff. The road to successful services based companies is littered with corpses that tried to keep alive their services division at the cost of everything else like Control Data, and Unisys would have joined them if it wasn't for the GIF patent, but they're well on their way now, outsourcing services jobs to India... I don't think services is a market you can really buy your way in to, especially buying failing companies that had lost major services contracts. Also as much as I despise SAP for HR, I don't think you'll ever dethrone SAP from HR departments because HR is a career for sadists that like to make their customers (employees) use the most difficult, obtuse tools because they make nice pie charts.

Also Autonomy... ugh. It is a decent product, but they have been rubbing their customers the wrong way, increasingly demanding more money (I don't have access to financials, but corporate makes it sound like extortion). We have multiple teams working on integrating alternatives to Autonomy, so if they aren't careful, they'll soon be kicked to the curb by at least one major customer. I think the major reason HP bought Autonomy was EDS was heavily invested in their search technology.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[mlts]

HP needs to reinvent itself. I still remember the days where they made bulletproof printers, calculators that were what serious engineers used (as opposed to TI toys [1])

My ideas:

1: Remake the consumer line. Leave the low end PC market to Gateway, E-Machines, etc. Keep the business class, workstation, and servers under the HP name. Even better, charge $50-$100 more and have better support and materials quality across the board.

2: Get with EMC and find some way to integrate vSphere in hardware on servers. Cisco has UCS blades which are an insanely strong server platform, especially with a decent SAN. The future will be dynamic virtual machines as a platform, so make the hardware work this way. Even the "low end" Proliants that are for SMBs, consider having those be mini chassis for blades with a solid RAID controller.

3: Start breaking new ground. Blow the dust off of HP-UX, use the technology that came with Tandem, license some POWER patents from IBM and make servers that can compete head to head with Oracle and IBM on the high end UNIX front. Add a cloud front end where a developer could spin up a HP-UX instance with a few mouse clicks, use it for testing, add some disk, then decommission it, and all the resource usage would be logged for possible billing.

4: Start working to get into vertical markets again. As the parent said, start making HP scopes which are the best of breed.

5: Start R&D. HP used to be a groundbreaking firm. There are tons of markets that are useful, from dedicated, hardened security appliances, to communications, all kinds of uses.

6: Spin off the low end inkjet printers. Yes, they are decent quality, but a true HP printer should be something like the LaserJets in the mid 90s -- insanely reliable. All models across the line should have Postscript too, so drivers are a non-issue, unless one wants to use special printer specific features.

7: Start doing some cool server stuff. Make a server that uses low power VIA CPUs to run the OS on a low power core, but can power on power-hungry Intel or AMD cores when needed.

[1]: Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/768/

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Bert64]

Couldn't agree more... Apple's products may be made in the same chinese factories, but they offer a complete platform which differentiates them from the commodity dell/hp/asus/acer/lenovo/noname products...

HP just offer generic windows laptops, just like Dell and all the chinese whitebox makers... Why would anyone pay extra for HP?

Also, while the price of most components is subject to competition, the price of windows is only subject to the whims of microsoft, who have the ability to make or break any of the vendors except apple, merely by refusing to give them oem/bulk discounts on windows and therefore pushing the prices of their computers higher than their competitors.

Similarly, these whitebox makers are beholden to the whims of microsoft, look at the netbook market, atom cpus, no more than 2gb ram, screen must be below a certain size to qualify for cheaper windows etc... The very small cheap computers that started the netbook trend are all but gone, and ARM netbooks have not really taken off.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[c]

Please, no. You wouldn't want the hit team distracted by petty, scripted infighting, would you?

Re:Gave up too quickly

[vlm]

I think you missed my point, that they downsized all the people required to do #2 thru #7, and if they're smart, they're not coming back for more, after that treatment.

As for #1 that sounds like a pretty generic goal for every hardware manufacturer other than gateway/emachines/cruft. Its not really a "change" its BAU.

After the titanic hits the iceberg and starts sinking, the captain says "I have a new direction... we should build a ship without a giant hole below the waterline". Well, its a little too late for that.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Hydian]

Except that the low margin PC business is their foot in the door to selling their higher margin servers and software and very lucrative services (at least as much as their printers are.) It was their advantage over companies like Oracle, IBM, AT&T, etc. Not really much different in theory from gaming consoles where the hardware is sold at a loss and the real money is made on the software.

I've worked in the consulting/services world and I've seen companies shed their low margin hardware business to concentrate on their high margin services. It never ends well. IBM was able to be successful because of the way they did it with Lenovo and because they were so strong in big iron. Other than the company name change, everything appeared the same to the consumer and IBM maintained pretty tight integration for a period of time. Even now, the Thinkpads look just like an IBM Thinkpad, so even though you know it is a Lenovo product, the connection to IBM is still there.

With HP, they don't have an iconic PC line so they can't do anything to replicate IBM's success in that area. Companies that were HP shops will now be looking at Dell or Lenovo for their PCs and that leaves their HP servers vulnerable to replacement. At the same time, companies like Sharp and Cannon are smelling blood in the water and are going to be going after HP's printer business even harder. Pretty soon, HP is out of those companies all together.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[TheMadTopher]

I'd love to know whether there's something about the tech industry that makes it susceptible to this level of mismanagement, as so many tech companies seem to have been badly mismanaged over the years.

A lot of the people who rise up and take over get their positions due to their political positioning in the company and not due to their real business decision making ability. I've seen too many bad or even clueless managers/vices get to positions of power that way.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[OFnow]

I bought a generic Windows HP laptop only to discover after warranty expiration that the entire series had keyboard problems. Later I found out they put a check in the BIOS that prevented me from changing the wifi chip to any but two models. And neither HP printer we had would feed paper right. The HP 16C Calculator I bought years ago still works fine though :-)

Re:Gave up too quickly

[mfh]

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

You're right. HP was late to the party because like everyone else, they thought the iPad was awful at first. That was of course until you buy one and start using it. Then you use it all the time and realize how convenient it is. By then it's too late for HP and anyone else. They failed to see touch pads as a good prospect. So they were stuck in an old way of thinking and Apple beat them because of it.

But Apple will not stay on top because their stuff is overpriced and it's not that good. It's good, but it's weak in areas too.

The next type of platform I'm waiting for are neural nets. That's awesome tech that's on the verge of changing everything. Can you imagine logging onto work in a dream and waking up for a day at the beach... every day?

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Artifakt]

That's a market assumption for regular economics, You're basically saying that the customer can always enforce their determination. Macro-economics is, in some small part, just about what happens when they customer decision causes them to lose power to further enforce the market.
          Let's take a largeish example. Suppose a lot of customers think it's worth $26.37 for a copy of the 'Professor Y and the Y-men fight Gyroscopo' DVD. The company bet that it would sell 40 million copies in the first pressing, and it does (Whooo!!!) Year after year, the customers think, in large enough numbers, that the series is worth purchasing. Sales stay good. But, an increasing number of those customers are stretching their credit cards to the max, and getting into financial modes where they really need to go back and put more money aside for a rainy day, pay the car insurance, put aside more for little Billy's college, and so on. Eventually, a bunch of customers simply don't have the extra in their entertainment budget to buy Y Men 27 by the 40 millions. These people may still feel 26 dollars is a fair price, but they aren't customers any more, because they just don't have 26 dollars in the entertainment part of their budget. To make them customers again, the DVD maker needs to charge only $17.28, at which point the customers may be thinking, "This is a real bargain, way better than fair. With food prices skyrocketing and gas totally beyond my social class, this is a real steal!!", but it's still what the company has to charge if they want to get 40 million sales again. The customer can think that the high food and gasoline prices are what's unfair, but they are practical necessities. The slack is in things that are optional. The customer has an opinion about what's fair, but it may not match the market forces - when it doesn't, the market forces compel the customer's vote even by, if necessary, stopping him from being a customer at all.
            Apple could be overcharging, if the people who think the Apple premium is fair find themselves faced with other financial choices that take them out of potential customer status, and the people who buy the cheaper options increasingly attribute still having discretionary cash available to having made 'smarter' choices in the past.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Ohio Calvinist]

There are two basic options--

Sell off the less profitable unit and divert that money into the more successful one. This is ideal if the company can obtain more market share with more capital (newer manufacturing, more manufacturing, more programmers to meet feature demands from the market.) If this is the case, they will be more profitable under the single activity.

It would be like having two part time jobs. If the opportunity arose, it might be more lucrative to quit one of them to go full-time on the other, if the other offers better wages.

Alternatively, the company can keep multiple divisions and accept lower profits. This is ideal if the market is unpredictable and the company is adverse to "put all it's eggs in one basket." It is also ideal if the divisions sell complementary goods.

Under both scenarios, the company should pursue continuous improvement in any operation is chooses to keep.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[blueturffan]

HP is not profitable?

Re:Gave up too quickly

[gtall]

There's an easy answer to that, there's no profit in making PCs. Margins in that business are particularly low (Apple excluded). So the board of directors looks at the capital invested in making PCs and the return on investment and decides they can do better elsewhere. I don't think going into software is the answer for them, not because of the return on investment (which is supposed to be good) but rather HP has no experience in that area. A CEO from a software house doesn't make them experienced, he was probably the dullest knife in SAP's drawer. Going up against Oracle won't be easy, Uncle Larry plays dirty so unless they are willing to get really slimy, he'll have them covered in pig s--t before they'll recognize any significant return.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[s73v3r]

No, Apple has shown that selling Apple computers, at good margins, is profitable. PC margins are extremely thin.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[CastrTroy]

I thought the same thing. Why the sudden drop from $400 to $99 for the firesale. Why not lower the price first to $300 and see how many units they could get rid of at that price. Every 2 weeks or month, lower the price a little more enticing even more people to buy them. Sure some people might catch on and wait until price dropped really low, but they would be risking not having anything to buy.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[silly_sysiphus]

Except Jobs--he was a salesman first and foremost. Apple's driving engineering force in the early days was Wozniak

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Solandri]

It's a good lesson to any CEO thinking that engineering R&D generates very little return on investment, and so can be safely cut to reduce costs. HP cut R&D in favor of what it thought was directly driving their revenue - sales, manufacturing, and marketing. They're now learning that such a move limits their products to low-end easy-to-replicate low-margin items. R&D is what allows you to make and sell high-end high-profit hard-to-duplicate products. Heck, even their much-maligned inkjet printer ink business was spawned by HP R&D playing with microscopic resistors to create tiny bubbles in fluids. As it stands now, Intel probably makes more money selling a single high-end CPU than HP makes selling a dozen PCs.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[HiThere]

Notice that afterwards even John Sculley said that he was the wrong CEO to choose. He's an excellent manager, but not of a technical company.

Managers are often taught that they don't need to know about the product, just how to manage. I don't know about other lines of business (though I have my doubts), but in the tech field this is a recipe for disaster.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Bucky24]

This is probably the most insightful thing I've read today. Too bad I've already spent my mod points.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Dogtanian]

The days when HP could produce ANY world-class widget ended when they stopped being an instrument company at heart, probably in Lou Platt's day, but certainly by the end of the Evil Queen's reign.

I don't know when Lou Platt was in charge, but Agilent, which included HP's electronic and biomechanical instrumentation division, was spun of in 1999.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Sell off the less profitable unit and divert that money into the more successful one. This is ideal if the company can obtain more market share with more capital (newer manufacturing, more manufacturing, more programmers to meet feature demands from the market.) If this is the case, they will be more profitable under the single activity.

Yes, that is the hope, to be sure. And in the real world, sometimes the opposite turns out to be true.

It is often the case that slightly less profitable products open the doors into bigger and more exciting deals. One of HP's strengths is they can build out whole data centers for Fortune 1000 companies, with oodles of their HP branded hardware. Thus they achieve effective lock-ins, because the customer is stuck with a long-term relationship with HP, whether they like it or not.

Does HP make more profit building out a data center with, say, Dell hardware? Maybe. Or maybe not. And we the contract is up for renewal, HP does not have the same access to the inside track.

Most big companies are swimming in cash. If HP needs to sell a division for cash, it is either a mismanaged company, or they are looking for cash to finance aggressive acquisitions. HP is profitable enough that any of its most profitable division should not have trouble financing strong organic growth or modest-sized acquisitions.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Alex Belits]

then you gotta ask... why the hell would any of these big corporations stick with low-GM products when they could mop up the revenue selling high-GM software and support?

Solution: let's all sell drugs to each other.

Why would anyone care about margins anyway? It's not like it costs anything to pump a predictable flow of hardware parts from their manufacturers to your consumers, the value the company produces is still what it is being paid for, it just is attached to huge amount of work done by others.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[lgarner]

That's very true on the consumer end, but you have to watch the use of the word "overcharge." Normally this means to charge too much, but this contradicts the earlier post saying "Apple is profitable because they overcharge but typically they do not cut corners so their customers feel that the prices are mostly fair."

Actually, that statement doesn't even make sense. Either they're charging too much, or they're charging a fair price. Some people (including the poster, it seems) may feel that the price is too high, but if enough people disagree then Apple is likely charging the correct price.

They could charge less, increasing sales, but the effect on profit might be small. They could also charge more, increasing per-unit gross profit at the expense of reduced sales. The first part of the statement "Apple is profitable..." indicates that they've found a good price point even if it's not the optimal solution.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[sjames]

Too bad for HP they don't HAVE any big iron to match IBM.

The only thing of any real value HP has is some of their ethernet switch gear and perhaps their higher end printers. They jettisoned everything else so they could buy up crap that they then ignored to death.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[jafac]

Yes - it's called: when an engineer founds his own company, innovates, builds a solid product, but perhaps, demonstrates some lack of market savvy, and brings in the "professional businessmen" types. The MBA. To run the company.

You see this all over the place, in the self-destruction of DEC, Sun, . . . now, HP has been spiraling down the drain for a while. The MBA gets in there - they don't give a crap about technology. AT ALL. They ONLY care about the money, and this is all you should expect them to care about - because they are NOT engineers, nor lovers of technology. They are MBA's.

What happened to Apple Computer when Scully, a professional businessman, was hired as CEO? They pretty much became a lame, mindless money-machine. No style, no innovation, no vision, except what they could MANUFACTURE. Scully's job was to extract maximum profit. And that's what Apple did, until Jobs came back. (now that Jobs is leaving - expect more of the same).

(I will say the same about Microsoft - in the Ballmer/Gates duality - Gates is in the role of visionary engineer - such as he is. Gates *is* a genius, no doubt, but Ballmer is a thug, and he's been at Microsoft from day one. To Ballmer, Microsoft, first and foremost, has always been a business. And that is why Microsoft is, as it is. It succeeds as a technology company because they have been first to market, and enjoyed their PC monopoly. Like IBM - who had their own headstart, in the mainframe business . . . but don't forget what the "B" stands for. IBM and Microsoft are different, because they are "too big to fail" and there are too many stakeholders vested in the continued success of their extortion. All other players are fair game.)

It is true - that every company *IS*, first and foremost, a business, and must earn profit to thrive, and survive.

But if you hand control over to a person who does not give a shit, and only sees far enough to get their stock options, and pump and dump them for their 10-20 year value horizon, so they can retire in luxury, then this is precisely what will happen to that company.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Nyder]

...

It's not as though personal computers are going away any time soon. Corporations still need desktop workstations, albeit more in the direction of thin Internet portal devices than the heavily loaded computers of the past.

...

You do know that we went from terminals connected to mainframes in the work place, to desktops, and now your saying we should go back to the terminals connected to the mainframes (albeit that they call them "Internet Portal Devices" these days)?

Ya, that sounds good.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[AmiMoJo]

IBM actually probably did the smartest thing they could "fuck it, if you want the consumer end of the market China, you can have it".

And yet plenty of other non-Chinese players do well in that market. Toshiba, NEC, Samsung, Dell, Sony... oh, and Apple of course.

HP lost a hell of a lot from the nVidia chipset failure debacle, both in terms of money they had to shell out on warranty repairs and reputation. They where shipping those chips in 95% of their laptops and more than half their desktops for a good three years, and every single one had the same flaw. They couldn't just sue nVidia because they needed the supply of chips and doing so would be admitting the problem and having to properly deal with it, which would be more expensive than trying to bullshit their way out of honouring the warranty and consumer laws on a case-by-case basis.

Eventually shareholders start to notice these things. HP turned in year after year of shit results and after a while couldn't keep pretending that things would get better, so they gave up. IBM was at least genuinely clueless when it came to the consumer market but HP knows it well, meaning things must be really really bad.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[jacks0n]

Seriously. Most of the kids coming up in real-stuff engineering these days have no idea who HP is, but they all know Agilent. That said, if Agilent doesn't start really competing with the stuff NI is coming up with they may end up a niche player. GPIB (aka HPIB aka IEEE-488) doesn't rule the instrumentation market anymore.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[oztiks]

Nah, you know whats happening here.

HP drops its tables as it may pose a conflict of interest with potential partners.

Steve Jobs steps down as CEO and Tim Cook, ex HP CEO steps in position.

A Apple + HP merger is in the pipeline!

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Bert64]

No, they shouldn't have. Jumping into a market with 3 much larger, better connected competitors, who have the loyalties of 3rd parties was just stupid.

So instead, they jump into the enterprise software market which already has Oracle, SAP, IBM etc?

Tablets are a very new market, and Apple have their large market share mostly by virtue of being first to market... There is a very good chance of taking a big chunk of the market, especially with a competitively priced product... The Touchpad didn't sell very well at $400, but its selling like hotcakes at $100...

The right price point would have been somewhere in between. If HP really put their weight behind it, they could have sold it for considerably less than the iPad, at or just over cost price..
They could also have made it capable of running Android apps, both WebOS and Android are based on a Linux kernel, so including an android compatible user land wouldn't be a huge task. This would give them quick access to a much larger base of apps, while still having the product differentiation of running their own OS.

Apple are seen by many as a premium brand, so when people see an iPad costing $400 they expect competing devices to cost considerably less for similar spec.

The reason the PC market is low margin, is because of competition, all of the hardware components are competitive, as are the whole machines... windows on the other hand is only available from one place, and they can make or break a pc vendor at will.

Apple are able to differentiate their product, and aren't beholden to microsoft.. Which is why they're the only pc vendor with decent margins.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[mickwd]

Interesting comment. Thanks.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Bert64]

HP already did that to their high end servers, ditching PA-Risc and Alpha to replace them with the incompatible and poorly performing IA64 caused a lot of customers to migrate away (well if your going to migrate to an incompatible platform anyway, might as well move to one that isn't going to be pulled out from under you).

Desktops, workstations and laptops have long been commoditised, generic hardware which the chinese can manufacture much more cheaply than any american company. Unless you have something to differentiate your product, like Apple, then your margins will be razor thin and you have to compete against the chinese.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[JonJ]

PC margins are extremely thin.

It's only thin because they made it thin. Apple competes in the high end of the scale, and they are basically alone there. Wonder why? A complete platform, advertised as "It Just Works"(And it does, if you stick to Apples walled garden), and no Windows. It's also all the little details in it, like having displays with actual usable resolutions(15.6" with 1366x788 or whatever it is, sucks). If HP either a) stole BSD code and made their own system or b) Co-operated with a Linux-vendor to create the idea of an exclusive operating system where things just work with no viruses or spyware they'd go a long way. Divert some resources to develop some pro/pro-light apps like Aperture/iMovie, and persuade Adobe to release CS for Linux. They'd not sell that much at once, but Apple didn't either.
Oh, and create a proper sync-program for Android to automatically backup the phone, settings and stuff on it. It's the details people.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Raenex]

There's an easy answer to that, there's no profit in making PCs.

I don't consider over $2 billion a year "no profit", even if the margins aren't as large as Apple's or software. This is just greed and gambling.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[Sir_Sri]

The only reason these tablets are selling in droves is because people figure they'll be able to get android running on it, and it's a 100 bucks for a $250 piece of hardware (which would be lucky to be 350 at retail normally). The right price, as in the one that would make money, was probably 350 or 400 dollars, which is what they started with. There's no margins in the PC or tablet business to speak of, regardless of what OS you stick on it, unless you can charge a premium for putting an apple logo on it, or otherwise source slightly cheaper parts, which Apple and Tim Cook have done a good job locking down.

If they'd gone headlong into the android space they'd have a Xoom/Galaxy Tab 10.1 clone. Which isn't bad, but they'd still be late to the market, and basically the same price as the competition. The problem is a 'android light' linux machine is going to look like RIMs plan for android apps on their OS, it won't be as good as a native android, and frankly, if it's the apps that matter, running actual android is preferable.

In terms of the enterprise market, they are substantially larger than Oracle and SAP (even than Oracle and SAP combined), and they're already at least partially in that market. As I said, they're about even with IBM. Compared to google and apple and microsoft they're downright tiny.

Re:Gave up too quickly

[wdef]

Both Gates and Jobs dropped out of undergraduate study and never completed any degree as far as I know, let alone an engineering degree. They have both been given honorary doctorates by now in various universities.

IBM did the same

[foniksonik]

I'm not saying this was a great idea or that the execution was ideal but there is precedent. IBM long known as a hardware company shifted to software and services in a fairly short period of time and seems to be doing quite well at it. If this new CEO has a vision and a strategy behind it HP could end up better off.

I was personally looking forward to more WebOS devices though.

Re:IBM did the same

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I am fond of webOS(application base is tiny; but the interface is actually quite well thought out. The "cards" work quite well. Hell, maybe team Google will pick up their smoldering remains at the firesale and polish up the 'chromebooks' with some of the UI touches...)

As for the IBM analogy, though, HP has a hard road ahead of it. IBM has always made hardware; but they've always had a software/support/consulting arm extracting its pound of flesh along with the hardware, from back when their job was to customize the Hollerith card reader for your application up the the present 'enterprise database middleware yadda yadda' stuff. They did ditch their desktop/laptop business, and they will, if asked, sell you some bare servers, dell style, for just cost+warranty; but they have always been a combined hardware/services entity. HP, by contrast, is more of a pure hardware/engineering shop that has been bleeding actual engineering talent for a while now.

Re:IBM did the same

[Attila Dimedici]

The difference is that when IBM was a hardware company people bought their hardware for the software and services that came with it. In its heyday as a hardware vendor, the type of software and services that it sold were thought of as part of the hardware. It made the switch from a primarily hardware company to a software and services company when it realized that all of its hardware competitors had gone out of business and all of the companies that it was competing with for business were software and service companies. HP does not, as far as I am aware, have a reputation for business software and services. I am aware that they own EDS, however, EDS has lost quite a bit of its luster under HP stewardship.

Re:IBM did the same

[Hatta]

IBM always had good software to support their hardware. HP ships 344mb printer drivers.

Re:IBM did the same

[whiteboy86]

IBM is retaining some inertia because of old reputation, but that is fading, numbers seam to be stagnant at best, reality is that they are just another IT industry service man, no "big blue" anymore. It is like if Jobs sold Apple hardware division to China, focused on "software solutions" and then contemplated about being a smart exec to cut the low profit margin hardware level stuff.

Re:IBM did the same

[Kjella]

Yes, in fact it was one of their great failings in the PC market, they were too heavy on selling support contracts, implementation services and the corporate desktop, completely ignoring what happened with the consumer market. That and over-engineered and over-tested solutions built to last 20 years from top-rated components with huge stockpiles of spare parts. They were still in the Big Iron mindset, where people want an exact replacement for whatever setup they've tested and certified. So the support contracts were ripoffs and if you didn't have a contract the spare part prices were ripoffs to make you sign up. And rather than trying to be that lean and mean deliverer of barebone hardware they tried putting the cat back in the bag with MCA, the rest of the industry went with EISA and IBM disappeared out of any real PC significance. But if we're talking failures they screwed themselves far more on software than on hardware...

Re:IBM did the same

[jmauro]

EDS was fading before HP bought them. They basically got into a multibillion dollar fixed-price contract with the government (NMCI) that they completely underestimated the costs for and wound up losing a fortune. HP acquired them in the death spiral when they were ridiculously cheap.

If anything HP slowed EDS's decline rather than causing them to lose their luster.

Re:IBM did the same

[vlm]

HP, by contrast, is more of a pure hardware/engineering shop that has been bleeding actual engineering talent for a while now.

Can't bleed forever, there's practically no one left. General /. public has this idea that HP is still an engineering corp that makes scopes... not so. They can not get out of their predicament by "engineering" solutions because they downsized or spun off all those guys. They have done "eh" at consumer electronics. They can continue their "eh" performance at importing Chinese hardware and marketing it as HP, or they can try something new. The new options do not involve innovation or engineering or consulting, those guys are mostly downsized. Maybe they could take up patent trolling? They could try some more trendy "me tooooo" but they can't even sell a tablet, so I think not.

So what does a company with money, no R+D department, and proven inability to produce commodities, do? Honestly, I donno. Go out of business once the money runs out, dotcom style, I guess.

Re:IBM did the same

[mwvdlee]

IBM is still a hardware company for a large part. They just don't sell consumer-grade devices any more.
Basically IBM sells servers with full vertical integration.

Re:IBM did the same

[Jawnn]

mod parent up - underrated. The comment is concise and insightful - pointing out HP's wholesale abandonment of engineering excellence. Me? I think it started over twenty years ago, when they realized that they could adopt the "free razors" marketing strategy for their line of ink jet printers. Profitable? Sure, but not the kind of thing that stands up as a market gets crowded.

Re:IBM did the same

[Cobalt Jacket]

I guess those Jeopardy-playing robots don't count as research? That's just an example, but you know and I know that IBM has a strong research arm (including important basic research) that HP lacks. Indeed, IBM's research arm is world-class.

Re:IBM did the same

[jalefkowit]

I am fond of webOS(application base is tiny; but the interface is actually quite well thought out. The "cards" work quite well. Hell, maybe team Google will pick up their smoldering remains at the firesale and polish up the 'chromebooks' with some of the UI touches...)

Google's one step ahead of you :-D When Palm sold to HP, Google moved in and lured away the guy who designed the webOS user interface, Mathias Duarte. His current job title there is "Director, Android User Experience", so it's safe to assume that we'll see some of the same ideas that animated webOS making their way into the Android UI, if not their specific implementations.

Re:IBM did the same

[Waffle Iron]

Hmm... that sounds like a a good value to me.

When I choose HP, I'm getting more printer driver for my dollar.

Re:IBM did the same

[merky1]

IBM was a Services and Software company with a personal PC division that was only known for one thing (thinkpads). They had to sell of the thinkpad name to sweeten the turd that was IBM's desktop line.

HP is not in the same position. HP is known as a consumer electronics company, and is trying to enter the software / services business.

Re:IBM did the same

[Anonymous Coward]

You are comparing Apples to Pomegranits. IBM and HP are VASTLY different companines #1. #2; hardware is still a VERY BIG chunk of IBM's business. They did not say "hey, lets get rid of all of our mainframes and go into the software business." Far from it, the concentration on software at IBM was to enhance their hardware.

Re:IBM did the same

[Baikala]

About 10 years ago a couple of Alpha servers (Tru64 Unix) and EMA storage in a cluster arrangement was as fast and as stable you can get below the mainframe category (thanks to DEC VAX multiprocessor and shared memory technologies). The natural evolution of the alphas never came out of HP because of their infatuation with Intel Itanium processors, and see how that affair ended up.

Re:IBM did the same

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

IBM is still a hardware company for a large part. They just don't sell consumer-grade devices any more.
Basically IBM sells servers with full vertical integration.

They've gone back to their roots, and it seems to be working for them. Prior to the IBM PC, they didn't really sell to consumers, just businesses.

Re:IBM did the same

[Creepy]

Also losing OnStar and other contracts, spinning off profitable divisions like UGS to save their stock from junk (their spin was they were realigning to be service only, but the bottom line is if they didn't sell UGS, their stock was going to be junk). I watched Control Data do a similar tailspin, so I can't say I didn't see it coming. Unisys, you're up next. HP, you're on deck.

Re:IBM did the same

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I'm not saying this was a great idea or that the execution was ideal but there is precedent. IBM long known as a hardware company shifted to software and services in a fairly short period of time and seems to be doing quite well at it. If this new CEO has a vision and a strategy behind it HP could end up better off.

You're right, but here's the problem. When IBM did this, their services and software business was very well established. The companies I have worked for, including Uncle Sam, have all employed IBM consultants for various tasks. If there was any company that could have pulled this off, it was IBM because of their size. HP isn't a big player in this field right now. With IBM's move, if it failed they still had core hardware businesses they could fall back on. With HP, the CEO has bet the company on them being able to do something they've never been able to do in the past - become a big time player in the services market. I could be wrong and HP could indeed pull it off. But I admit to being skeptical because they are going to have to win on price to get bigger in this field of business. The big players who are already there might cut prices below what HP can match just to keep customers. Or it could be that HP simply cannot compete on price with the bigger players and they'll have to hope that they can get consumers in this economy to pick them for other reasons. That's not likely. My previous job was working in the US subsidiary of a major EU telecom and our business in North America was terrible because our cost structure was too high and everybody bigger than us did what we did for less cost. So I'm kind of skeptical about this whole idea HP has as I've seen first hand how difficult it is for smaller companies to compete on cost with the bigger, established players.

Re:IBM did the same

[LWATCDR]

So going head to head with IBM in the enterprise space seems like a good idea?
IBM never fell as far into the consumer space as HP did with it's computers. In fact the Think-pad was they business laptop for a long time. "And a really good one at that".
No I am all for they blew it. Had they pushed to make WebOS enterprise friendly that would have made a lot of sense. Android and IOS are getting better at that, Blackberry is the best but it is dropping from favor, and WP7 is really lagging in that respect. WebOS really could have been a strong contender if HP had supported and pushed it.

Re:IBM did the same

[OFnow]

A The natural evolution of the alphas never came out of HP because of their infatuation with Intel Itanium processors, and see how that affair ended up.

HP was the source of the particular wide-instruction (instruction level parallelism) madness with, somehow, Intel involved. Fabulous amounts of money wasted by HP, Intel, and even small-fry SGI (believing the HP/Intel nonsense), and others.

Re:IBM did the same

[dido]

All of this thanks primarily to one executive in HP and later SGI in the mid-late nineties: Rick Belluzzo. He got a plum position at Microsoft in 2002 to reward him for his efforts in destroying HP-UX, IRIX, PA-RISC, and MIPS in favor of NT and Itanium at both companies. As an aside, the parallel to today's Nokia and Stephen Elop are unmissable, I think.

Re:IBM did the same

[Woy]

Worse than this, they ship printer software that will stop to ask questions after the installation progress bars are started, making it impossible to perform even that little function unattended. They often ship installers that unpack other installers, several levels deep. All their stupid autodetection schemes fail miserably all the time. JUST LET ME WRITE IN THE STUPID PRINTER IP!

Re:IBM did the same

[davros74]

No kidding. Tried to get my HP OfficeJet 7410i to work with my new Windows 7 64-bit machine, and neither the inOS or 350MB of HP printer drivers will print to the darn thing in network mode (IP address:9100). After trying to uninstall the bloated HP drivers, I still had HP folders and junk all over the HDD, so I just wiped the disk and reinstalled windows 7. Ironically, when I plug the printer into my machine via USB port, the inOS windows 7 driver just works. However, for MacOSX and Linux (Slackware), it's always been about a 1 minute affair to install new printer, enter IP address, print test page, and be done with it, even with said 7410i.

I recall having major problems getting the Windows XP driver back in the day to print to the 7410 in network mode also. HP printers + Windows + networking is a total joke.

I miss my good ol' HP-IIIP from 1990. Used it all the way up to 2006, with a postscript cartridge and parallel-port -> RJ45 print server. For Linux, it was awesome as a networked JetDirect PostScript printer. Had to recycle it when the fuser failed after 16 years and it would cost more than a new printer to replace the fuser. I have been pretty disappointed with this OfficeJet7410.

I do really like my HP ProCurve 1810G switch, however. The only thing I have from HP right now that I am proud to own (well, and my aging 48GX).

Ford Trimotor

[Jafafa Hots]

n/t

(No this is not a fricken defense of HP, I could give a shit if HP shoots itself in the head.)

Re:Ford Trimotor

[hcpxvi]

I could give a shit
You mean you couldn't give a shit. Your homework is to watch:
David Mitchell's soapbox (series 2 episode 2)

Re:Ford Trimotor

[asylumx]

Yup, Ford has made planes before... it wouldn't be THAT surprising if they wanted to break back in to that business. Not to mention, engine manufacturers often make aircraft engines, too...

Re:Ford Trimotor

[chill]

Exactly. Think Rolls Royce and Volvo. Both are big manufacturers of aircraft engines.

Re:Ford Trimotor

[Cobalt Jacket]

To be sure, both examples you cited have long-since jettisoned their automotive divisions. "Rolls-Royce" is really BMW (Rolls-Royce wound up with BMW's aircraft engine division) and Volvo is in the hands of Geely, one of the ruthless photocopying Chinese firms.

Re:Ford Trimotor

[Deadstick]

Consolidated, not Boeing. The Willow Run plant was built to produce B-24s.

They built cruise missiles, too. They were given a captured German V-1 and a contract to make two thousand of them...those would have been used against Japan if the invasion had come off.

rj

Re:Ford Trimotor

[Patch86]

The aircraft and automobile manufacturers branded both Rolls-Royce and Volvo have long since been completely separate companies. Short of a few of the big Japanese mega-corps, there aren't many companies these days that operate in completely disparate markets like that.

Re:Ford Trimotor

[Hydian]

There are more than you might think...just off the top of my head...Siemens, Orkla, Northrop-Grumman, GE...I'm sure that we could compile a pretty extensive list if we really wanted to.

Re:Ford Trimotor

[treeves]

My first thought after RTFS, too.
Maybe it should have used the example of John Sculley going from PepsiCo to Apple and having Apple start making beverages instead of computers.
Apple Juice?

Disgruntled Former Employee?

[NoobixCube]

Oh yeah? Well my NEXT company is like TOTALLY gonna crush you guys! You'll be living in cardboard boxes by the time I'm through with you! (Commence mad zealous scheme to try and use another company to crush SAP)

Re:Disgruntled Former Employee?

[somersault]

How do you know that it wasn't the board that wanted to move in this direction, and so head-hunted the guy from SAP specifically because he had good experience in the software sector?

Re:Disgruntled Former Employee?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Oh yeah? Well my NEXT company is like TOTALLY gonna crush you guys!

Is that you, Steve?

Re:Disgruntled Former Employee?

[Miseph]

Because that isn't nearly delusional or hysterical enough to be true.

Re:Disgruntled Former Employee?

[sgt scrub]

Considering the ass woopin HP's stock just received the guy doesn't know he's working for a new company. Oracle should give him a bonus for killing off competition.

Re:Disgruntled Former Employee?

[dcollins]

From the WSJ: "Draw public criticism from a major corporate-governance advisory firm, alleging Mr. Apotheker filled board openings with cronies."

Re:LOL.. they don't get it...

[Jafafa Hots]

In my limited experience, CEOs like this are brought in to wax the car before it goes in the sales lot.

HP is looking for a defining product

[Opportunist]

HP used to mean printers in the minds of many people. That time faded. Today, they're at best one of the many printer manufacturers, no longer the ones defining standards and leading the way. Servers/Computers? They sure dropped that ball too. Dell is where people go for ready-made computers today.

So what's left for HP? HP is a company looking for a market, I'd guess. Every time I see something like this, I can't help but wonder whether their costs are just too high to compete with another player in the field and are now looking for a market that they can either corner or where the competition charges even more outrageous prices. And looking at how they try to muscle into the markets of SAP and Oracle, I'd say it's the latter.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[OzPeter]

HP used to mean printers in the minds of many people. That time faded.

In my mind HP will always be remembered as being the one of the best test equipment manufacturers, followed closely by calculators. A company that was by engineers, for engineers.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[RogerWilco]

I think HP as a company has been focussing too much on cost reduction and too little on innovation.

And now they have lost their touch and it will be very hard to regain footing.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

You young whipper-snapper, HP used to mean frequency generators/counters.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[bhodikhan]

The best part of HP is their instrumentation business. This was spun off as Agilent. They still stand out in the market and are very competitive. Too bad HP forgot to keep innovating.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

It's called Agilent now.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[Anne Thwacks]

HP used to mean printers in the minds of many people.

Then they had to pay for an ink cartridge, and the word "ripoff" came to mind..

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[pz]

Was, yes.

I still, from time to time, need to purchase test equipment. When I see a used HP unit for sale, that is always my primary choice: if it still works when I plug it in, chances are it will far outlive my needs.

Anecdotally, I bought a used HP industrial power supply to build a rack-based research computer some years ago. The power supply (5V at something crazy like 500 A) looked a little beaten up but produced the most solid and quietest voltage I've ever used (and, yes, I did check with a scope and dummy loads). That was from the era when HP was not just good, but balls-to-the-wall the best engineered products money could buy.

Then this crap with Compaq started, and it's been all downhill from there. Probably started earlier.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[psydeshow]

A company that was by engineers, for engineers.

So now you know what will happen to Google, eventually. Engineers cost real money. Boards and shareholders don't like spending real money on anything but executives.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[jafac]

HP used to mean printers?

No - HP Used to mean calculators, mainframes, chips, high-end workstations, operating systems.

HP has been in a bloody death-spiral for over a decade.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[jafac]

. . . the only reason their costs are "too high" - is because their bean-counters want to take the profits home, and spend them on their whores, instead of leaving them at the company to be invested in R&D.

Period.

End of story.

It is as simple as that - and that's really all there is.

Never trust an MBA.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[richlv]

it seems to me like large part of the problem is not pleasing the technical customers. many years ago hp printers were nearly guaranteed to work just by relying on a standard set of drivers. a new device would often "just work" with some ppd. snmp monitoring was there, and snmp mibs were easily available.

as for servers... _their_ servers never were that good. compaq was much better, and it seemed like hp realised that, judging by their server transitions :)

then printer mibs got worse, were harder to find (a hp rep told me they don't even provide them at all...), raid array controllers started hanging when queried for their state (and the "fix" was a wrapper shellscript to limit query rate...), raid controllers became more limited (unable to expose drives directly)...
network equipment didn't seem to degrade that quickly (at least mibs were somewhat better :) ), but the attitude from printer & server guys was "fuck off, we sold it to you, use what you get". that didn't inspire confidence much.

Re:HP is looking for a defining product

[MadKeithV]

HP used to mean printers in the minds of many people.

Then they had to pay for an ink cartridge, and the word "ripoff" came to mind..

Come on, those cartridges aren't that expensive. They just come in a very large package that says "HP Printer".

Re:They're looking to the future.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you Mr Apotheker?

Trying to be like Steve?

[Jack Kolesar]

So, I guess this is what happens when you have a CEO with the 100% of the EGO/CONTROL issues as Steve Jobs yet 0% of the VISION. Seems too bad for HP.

HP should be seporated from their belt and laces

[sensationull]

Given HPs current actions they should be put in a padded cell with their laces and belt removed. It's current actions are retarded and their CEO should be thrown out of the corporate jet.

Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[blind biker]

It's time we start acknowledging that CEOs of publicly traded companies don't give a shit about the companies they are supposed to lead. They got into positions thanks to buddy networks and golf course chats. These people are supremely capable at social manipulation and lining their own pockets.

Why, is the HP CEO in any way going to feel the sting if he leaves a smoldering corpse of a company behind him? Is he not going to get paid? Scrap that: is he not going to get handsomely paid + bonuses + golden parachute? So why the fuck wouldn't he blow up HP? The guy is getting paid in either case, so why not get on with his psychopathy and have fun with wanton destruction of other people's lives?

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[dkleinsc]

To add more evidence to this, consider how well Carly Fiorina has been treated in the press. When she was running for public office, all the press was on how she was a successful businesswoman who knew how to make an organization successful, despite all the evidence that the opposite was true.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[Spinlock_1977]

John Stewart had an author on a few weeks ago that claimed a disproportionate percentage of CEOs were sociopaths - i.e. those for whom guilt and conscience have little meaning.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[ducomputergeek]

Say what you will about Apple and Steve Jobs, but at least Jobs gave a damn about the products his company made.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[CaptainLard]

I work for a large publicly traded corporation. The priority list goes like this: Shareholders, Customers, Employees. So if they increase the perceived value of the company, they are doing their jobs in looking out for the #1 priority so they do give a shit, just not about anything else. In HP's case I'm guessing someone "ran the numbers" and got x% greater profit margin in corporate software over corporate hardware so the board jumped on it like a college basketball player jumping into his team mates during the home game introductions. Then because they were so smart everyone gave themselves raises and high fives like a college basket ball player high five-ing his team mates during the home game introductions. In summary who cares about HP, how long till midnight madness?

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[OzPeter]

John Stewart had an author on a few weeks ago that claimed a disproportionate percentage of CEOs were sociopaths - i.e. those for whom guilt and conscience have little meaning.

Well if it is your job to direct the company as a whole its best not to be bogged down with how your vision negatively affects Jimmy in the stock room or Mary in the typing pool (and yes I remember when secretaries et al actually typed), otherwise you would end up paralyzed with indecision.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[CriminalNerd]

Just so you know, there's a difference between "good, strong leadership" and "sociopathy".

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[OzPeter]

Just so you know, there's a difference between "good, strong leadership" and "sociopathy".

Yeah, but either way you make the little people dance - whether it is for your pleasure or their benefit, you still make them dance.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[Archangel Michael]

THERE is the real story in all of this. ONE company's CEO wants the "best" products, the other doesn't want products at all. What is funny is that Apple once didn't want to make great products, and ended up getting its lunch handed to them from a start up called PowerComputing. HP is going the way of old Apple, and they may need to bring back someone fanatical about its products.

On a side note, I'm glad HP has lost almost half its value since they made the announcement. Maybe the board will fire the guy and put one of its engineers at the top.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[sarhjinian]

That's because the media likes to pretend to be objective. What this means is that they'll either say something nice, or something bad, and then in the same article offer a contradictory---if way-out-in-left-field---opinion. No one likes to look biased, even when they are, so they'll write fluff that looks vaguely professional

This is how some of the most incredulous ideas get airplay ("Doctor says vaccines don't cause autism. Of course, some disagree" and suchlike). A discussion of Ms. Fiorina would comment that she was the head of a successful (in that it didn't hit the iceberg on her watch) major technology company worth $x billion dollars. It might, at worst, say that some disagreed with her leadership. No one is going to go out on a limb and say that she's largely responsible for HP's position as an also-ran behind Dell, Apple and IBM.

A company has to be in serious, indefensible trouble (or ripe for a few bucks from short-selling) if they knives are really going to come out. Which should make you think a bit about, eg, Research In Motion.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[Anne Thwacks]

there's a difference between "good, strong leadership" and "sociopathy".

Dont say that too loud in Wall St - you will be eaten by lions!

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[Lisandro]

So true. And i this is from someone who wouldn't buy an Apple product if his life depended on it.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[misexistentialist]

It's against the rules to criticize a woman's business performance.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[failedlogic]

I think here on /. there seems to be an instant association with a CEO as either a psychopath or sociopath. I don't think you can just write off every CEO as being "either or".

The thing is, when someone is in a position of power and has a great network of people to play golf with, it goes to their head. They care about their image in the media more so than the employees and communities and world they effect.

There's also the pull the rug over your head effect. The CEOs when they make these moves probably already have them figured out months ahead of time. They just want to implement at the best possible time. Anyone who thinks he didn't have an opinion about what to do with HP, before working there is naive.

A CEO should do an MTV style 'a day in the life of' where we see them day to day doing their office work. Then for the next 10 episodes, they should do a job in each division of their company preferably in a labour position.

I want to see the CEO program a computer, assemble ink jet cartridges and pack them in boxes, smell the fumes of assembly lines in China and work 18 hour days on the line. I want to see him deliver a computer to a corporate client. I want to see him do some tech support.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[mcmonkey]

A CEO should do an MTV style 'a day in the life of' where we see them day to day doing their office work. Then for the next 10 episodes, they should do a job in each division of their company preferably in a labour position.

There's already a show like that. It's called Undercover Boss. And it's boring and predictable as frack.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[discord5]

Replying due to mismoderation, my apologies. Carry on, nothing to see here.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[perpenso]

PowerComputing products were not better, they were less expensive. We had both Apple and PowerComputing products at a previous employer. It was a startup and every dollar spent came out of the owner's pockets. Despite being one of the most enthusiastic believers in Apple you will ever meet, even in the darkest days of the 90s, he decided to save some money. The machines worked fine but there were a serious of noticeable relative deficiencies. One that comes to mind is being distractingly loud, a cheap power supply with a fan that made it sound like a friggin vacuum cleaner.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[quetwo]

This is no different than when Rick Snyder ran for office in Michigan. He ran as a successful businessman, when all he did was destroy Gateway and sell it to the Chinese. People bought it, and the "businessman" was elected governer, even though he didn't state any of his plans to lead the state. He has been busy trying to figure out if he can sell the state to the Chinese for a profit...

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[perpenso]

I work for a large publicly traded corporation. The priority list goes like this: Shareholders, Customers, Employees. So if they increase the perceived value of the company, they are doing their jobs in looking out for the #1 priority so they do give a shit, just not about anything else.

The flaw in the system is not the priority list, it is in the timeframe. If one's timeframe is long term then focusing on the customers yield the greater benefit for the shareholders.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[sgt scrub]

Executives pay, Executives bonus, Executives parachute, Shareholders on the board, largest Customer. FTFY

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[dcollins]

Agreed. Additional info for the unaware -- The very raison d'être for "Undercover Boss" is to present a PR-manufactured Cinderella story: (1) boss confronts some minor challenges, (2) boss overcomes challenges, (3) boss picks struggling unknown worker and showers them with gifts, (4) boss is roundly praised by everyone he secretly came in contact with as a line worker. Which is really the only logical reason for a CEO to agree to the show, anyway.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[greg1104]

No no no...it's Apple's competitors who have been eaten by Lions. On Wall Street, people are eaten by bears.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[mounthood]

Replacing the CEO with a committee would be better: pay 20 people a million each and they would never screw-up this bad; cost less; be more responsive to the board/customers/employees; have to have reasons, plans and even data to get consensus. Paralysis and compromise works for government, so why not multinationals?

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[Bucky24]

Sometimes I feel like my CEO is a sociopath but then he comes out and does something so amazingly nice for someone (sometimes me) that I get very confused.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[Billly Gates]

Ironically, Carly Fiorina was quick to defend CEO salaries saying they are all worth every penny because the job is unstable to this economy compared to other workers. ... the other workers were the tens of thousands she laid off who got the boot and no bonus.

Can you say hipocrite. I hate Nancy Pelosi with a passion, but I did not want this woman to win. If she is that ruthless and irresponsible with other peoples money invested in HP, god help us having her in charge of tax payer money as well.

She is all image with a super stroke ego of power.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[Billly Gates]

Actually, I do think the show is a great idea.

A good CEO is the best worker, accountant, lawyer, marketing, analysts, and so on at the company. He needs to know the job functions better than anyone else in order to do his job effectively to deserve that big salary. He manages them after all. If you can't do the other job you have no business managing them.

If you took a CEO job with a nice big office far seperated from the peons below how would you know how the company works? How would you know what the customer wants? Bad companies die slowly from the bottom up by stupid polices from the top where people are clueless to what is required.

One episode the CEO blamed the low share price on bad employees at the assembly lines being unproductive. The cost accountant who never worked there said so. He did it and couldn't even pee on the job as the extreme pressures were rediculous and widgets were being thrown at full speed left and right. Good employees were quiting. The CEO learned that the process was flawed only after doing it and decided to hire more workers as the real losses were exhaustion slowing productivity and low pay through excessive cost cutting.

Not all CEOs give a rats ass. But a good one would certainly want to know what is going on as ass kickers and brown nosers surround you at that level and blow smoke up your ass all day.

Steve Jobs is a good one because he is involved at many layers underneath as he micro manages details and works with cost accountants rather than having them direct product development decisions.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[Archangel Michael]

Standard Powersupply to a standard connector on the MOBO ... easily replaced ... and still cheaper than Apple ;) Yeah, I had a Power Computing Mac too.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[sjames]

I suppose it's because the psychopaths really stand out, there's an unusually large proportion of them and it's just plain bizarre to watch the media and wall street fall all over itself to fawn over an obvious psychopath. It's like watching Jeffry Dahmer getting a ticker tape parade and hundreds of standing job offers (each worth more in a year than most of can ever hope to make in a lifetime) should he ever get out of jail.

There are many other somewhat less visible CxOs that are just as you describe, blinded by the trappings of their position and out of touch with the rest of the world.

It doesn't help that the corporate structure itself is practically tailor made to emulate the behavior of a psychopath. The final straw is the way that corporations are so little punished for psychopathic behavior that they often actually find that they can make a tidy profit even by counting the fines as a cost up front.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[jafac]

This is actually not true:
There was a HUGE and VERY COSTLY propaganda, on her part, to paint herself in a positive light.

Former employees of HP spoke out, of course, and she worked very hard to try to have them silenced.

In my opinion, in the end, it really came down to some of the really stupid lame remarks she said, in public, having nothing to do with either politics, or the debate over her record at HP. I think it was stuff about criticizing Nancy Pelosi's hair or something like that. But I think the whole exchange got really ugly, and she showed a complete lack of tact and class that one would expect from someone who was supposedly a lawyer, CEO, and running for public office (and "future president" material). I think there was also some infighting in the Republican camp that did her in, because she was possibly going to be "in the way" of some other prominent female republican presidential candidate.

All that said: She very tightly packed every closet in her house with skeletons, during her tenure at HP. Her horrible reputation was very well deserved, and she can ride a gold-plated broom straight to hell for what she did.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: I was never employed at HP, never knew anyone personally who was an employee, nor was ever particularly a big fan of their products - just. . . I used to like the fact that we had a healthy, robust technology industry in our country, in our state, at one time. And we no longer do. And she is a part of the reason why we no longer do. She and her KIND.)

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[jafac]

The thing is, when someone is in a position of power and has a great network of people to play golf with, it goes to their head.

So ban golf?

I have no problem with that.

Also, let the god damned shareholders fucking VOTE!
Not for board members. For governance issues.

Lack of shareholder governance is the most fucking stupid thing about American corporate law. And it has fucking KILLED this country. Sucked our industry, and economy dry.

Re:Not _sui_cide - destruction by external party

[dcollins]

I agree that the idea of the show is compelling. The first episode I thought was great. The next 2-3 struck me as repetitive and fixed on the same pre-planned story arc, almost scripted minute-to-minute in synch. I stopped watching after that.

The episode you describe sounds better than most, if it resulted in actual structural changes.

Re:They're looking to the future.

[gtvr]

You're half right. Long term thinking is good and should be rewarded. A company losing 1/2 its value doesn't mean that they are guaranteed any long term success though. Still plenty of servers to be sold.

I want what HP is smoking...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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?

Re:I want what HP is smoking...

[musicalmicah]

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 same insanity that allows SAP to prosper while creating terrible software: enterprise contracts.

Re:I want what HP is smoking...

[DigiShaman]

With thin or non-existant (in some cases it costs you) profit margins on the hardware, one would think HP should just close the doors and sell all the assets to ZTE or Lenovo. But in fact, America's weakness in this area is actually our strength. We have transitioned from a manufacturing based economy to one that's based on service. Apple knows this. They have the winning formula. Dell has it too to a lesser extent. Focus on premium support and special offerings. Make your company so damn good, that it too has a cult following among CIOs. Engineering is important, but HP needs to focus on marketing as to why they're special. Not on price, but on the ability to hand-hold and provide outstanding customer support. The idea being even if they sell a product with a shitty MTBF rate, all that can be washed away with up-selling them to a better product line and/or hand-holding them further to resolve the issue. Above all, don't get them irate if you can help it. Make your customers feel welcome and not as though they're walking through some revolving door of two-faced madness.

Re:I want what HP is smoking...

[SmurfButcher Bob]

...but what sort of insanity could convince HP that they are a software company?

You are SO out to lunch. Honest, the answer is simple.

Both the Android and Apple phone and tablet markets each have a glaring lack of apps that sit in the system tray and preempt whatever you're doing with pop-ups about ink and print jobs.

Re:I want what HP is smoking...

[0123456]

When I'm asked to recommend a printer, I say "not HP". Their drivers are a bloated mess.

Yeah, we have an HP printer at home that we inherited when the previous owner bought a new one. The last Windows drivers I downloaded were about 150MB; that's a quarter of the size of a typical Linux distribution.

Also it will only feed one sheet of paper at a time. From what I gather they used some crappy component inside which needs to be replaced after a couple of years if you want the paper feed to work.

Re:I want what HP is smoking...

[ToasterMonkey]

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

I hear you, but have you experienced SAP's, Oracle's, or I'll imagine IBM's enterprise business software?

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?

From what you've described so far, they may be ahead of the competition.

I mean if you haven't had an insatiable urge to off a coworker for the sport of it after navigating the support website, it might be pretty good software in comparison.

It's kind of like how town cars and limos would still be here if they were really hard to drive. The drivers aren't the customer.

WebOS - Try Samsung

[QuasiSteve]

I was personally looking forward to more WebOS devices though.

Well, reportedly, Samsung is still interested in WebOS. Where before they were interested in licensing it off of HP ( http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/29/hp-confirms-its-in-talks-about-licensing-webos-samsung-tipped/ ), they may now just grab it outright.. even if only as a precautionary move to the recent Google-buys-Motorola move ( http://www.slashgear.com/samsung-webos-rumors-reignite-amid-ex-hp-pc-vp-grab-29174760/ ).

Personally I'm not sure why they'd be doing that. They're going strong with Android - which, while heavily Google-influenced, is under governance of the OHA - while on their lower-end systems they've got their own OS already - Bada.

Though if there's any chance of WebOS going forward, Samsung would be a good place to start. Them or Huawei, perhaps. Not seeing HTC being interested.

Re:WebOS - Try Samsung

[jp102235]

well, if google goes vertical in the tablet market (I think they will -> there is no other way), samsung will be left out in the cold (I also believe microsoft will go vertical in the tablet space as well). There is really no way to make money in tablets without having an appstore, and media to make addl money off of. We already see that amazon is going in this direction.

Mulally example not great...

[Richard_at_work]

Considering that Mulally launched one of the most bodged development programs at Boeing, the 787. Not only did this program reach in the direction of considerably technical improvement over current generation products, it did it with a design and build methodology that Boeing had never tried before.

This irresponsible cock up by the board, headed by Mulally, drove the 787 to be over three years late for EIS, with huge problems yet to rectify, and Boeing billions of dollars worse off.

Mulally has a lot of great achievements, but the world would see him completely differently if he had remained at Boeing to see out even the first few years of the 787 debacle. Instead, he bailed early on and now is remembered for the positive work he has done at Ford.

Re:Mulally example not great...

[Hadlock]

Kicking Boeing for being chronically late on delivery and grossly overbudget. Either you're new to the aviation industry, or you didn't grow up in washington state ;) You're forgetting that you're talking about a defense contractor. over half their revenue comes from defense spending. This is completely par for the course. In the 1990's there was a big hubbub about Boeing not even being sure if they were running at a profit or a loss.

Re:Mulally example not great...

[drinkypoo]

In the 1990's there was a big hubbub about Boeing not even being sure if they were running at a profit or a loss.

They were sure. Their tax records, not so sure. This is by design. Today we simply have a more obfuscated tax code designed to permit corporations of that size to still not pay taxes even when they admit they are making a profit.

Re:Mulally example not great...

[Richard_at_work]

I may not hail from Washington State, but Im certainly not new to the aviation business - and while Boeing IDS may be profitable, Boeing CA still needs to pull its weight...

Boeing attempted three things all at the same time - first brand new product in 15 years, brand new (to Boeing) way of designing that product, and a brand new (again, to Boeing) way of building that product.

Fast forward 5 years from launch, and we have Boeing bringing huge work packages back into their internal structure (and in several cases outright buying out their third parties to take over the production line), reabsorbing design authority for major assemblies and having to open another final assembly line just to bring the monthly production numbers up to the original estimate.

Boeing changed way too much (infact, it would be easier to list what they kept from the 777 program than what they changed) and it paid the price - and they did it chasing cost reductions, with Mulally leading that pack.

Boeing is billions out of pocket, they have four 787 aircraft they cannot sell (they wrote them down in accounting terms, to shift them from a liability on the Inventory books to an R&D investment - and they had to write them down because the rework required on them makes them uneconomical to sell, Boeing decided to go with new build aircraft to deliver to the airlines that had these particular birds on order, which is unheard of).

Not to mention the fact that Boeing are in a forward loss situation for the entire 747-8 backlog, but thats another discussion entirely...

This isn't about being fashionable bashing Boeing, they outright deserve the criticism they get - and a lot of it is down to decisions made by Mulallys board.

Re:Mulally example not great...

[yeOldeSkeptic]

High risk projects that carry a high rate of return when successful are important in the technology industry. More so in aviation. Boeing needs to do this in order not to become like HP---a company that rested on its laurels and never took the risks of innovating. You sound like one of the guys at Wall Street.

In any project that involves, new, innovative, and highly speculative technology there is always the possibility of failure. If NASA decided to shut down its space program after several rockets exploded on their launchpad back in the 1950's and 1960's, America wouldn't have landed on the moon and the space age would be Russian and Chinese dominated and not American. Even so, if the financial and risk management is any good, project failures should not bring a company down. NASA continued with its space program because it had a mandate from the president and the bottomless pockets of the US government.

Boeing is still alive and kicking. They do have enough projects that are successful that will keep the company in the forefront of aviation for years to come. Remember, Boeing created and dominates the industry of pilot-less drones that many believe shall be the future of military aviation. They invented the Boeing 747 that redefined how many passengers can be carried safely into the sky by a single aircraft. The 747 is the gift that keeps on giving but Boeing is right in not resting on the success of this 1960's era project. I hope it keeps on conducting the high risk projects that Wall Street and arm-chair analysts like to criticize when it fails.

Re:Mulally example not great...

[Richard_at_work]

The problem is, Boeings level of risk on the 787 was not merely high, it was "hey, lets go sky diving but you know what would be fun? Throwing the parachutes out first and chasing them!" levels of risk.

They were fantastically successful on the 777 project, so much so that they beat all expectations on it. But the 777 largely used the same design and production methodologies as the 767 (although the 777 was the first airliner to be CAD designed, it was still largely using the same design techniques as the 767) and thus only the design of the aircraft was a risk factor. And that paid off.

With the 787, Boeing went for a full composite fuselage, something that had up until then only been done on low production rate regional and business jet aircraft. They also went for electrically drive hydraulics, HVAC and other systems rather than conventional bleed air powered systems. They also went for fully composite wings, another first. Engine pylons and support systems designed to support a quick swap of engines between two totally different engine manufacturers - again, another first (reengining an aircraft from one manufacturers engines to anothers is a several day job on other airframes - Boeing wanted it down to the same time as a normal engine swap).

All of that on its own would have constituted a high risk project. Several of the things noted above have thrown up their own problems in manufacturing, which have needed solutions. Several of the things above have resulted in multi month delays. Thats what happens when you have a high risk project.

But Boeing didn't stop there - they parceled out the design to third parties. Which involved having several disparate design teams working together across teh globe, in many different languages.

Boeing still didn't stop there. They also completely changed the production process. Large sub assemblies built across the globe by risk sharing partners and flown to Boeings final assembly line. Never done that before, the largest structure preassembled on the 777 was a few sheets of aluminium and everything else was done on one assembly line. Now Boeing had twenty assembly lines across the globe to manage and sort out.

And they did all of this so they could parcel out the risk - reduce their own risk. Only that didn't work... Boeing ended up with tens of billions of dollars in "unforseen" expenditure, including having to buy the assembly lines of several of its partners, and bringing most of the design for the 787-9 variant back in house. Ending up with 4 unsellable airframes in their inventory that they had to write off. Billions of dollars in compensation payments. And an inventory backlog that analysts put in the hundreds of billions of dollars...

Not to mention that its just recently come to light that most of the first 300 or so airframes were ordered at prices near to $70Million each, and they will cost Boeing around $180Million each to build and deliver. Thats the way to make money...

This wasn't just a high risk program, it was an "all or nothing" fantasy leap into the unknown. And Mulally got out well before it started to show.

Oh, and its nice of you to bring up the 747, but that ship has sailed - the 747-400 ended production a few years ago, and the 747-8 (the latest variant) won't make any money with its current order book.

I have no problem with Boeing innovating, but you don't have to innovate *everything* in the damn business at the same time - its sheer stupidity to change things like the design methodology and the production methodology when you are already taking huge risks on the product itself. Mulallys board wanted a complete change in the way Boeing CA worked, and thats what they pushed for when they launched the 787. And it didn't pay off.

With Boeing trying desperately to remove as much risk behind the 787 as possible, by moving so much of the design and build process back in house, is anything I am saying really that wrong?

Perhaps hardware outsourcing doesn't work

[davide marney]

Maybe they've decided that no US company can win a market where manufacturing is outsourced, which means unless they win the software race, they're out of business eventually anyway.

Re:Perhaps hardware outsourcing doesn't work

[RogerWilco]

I think it just means that they have no clue how Apple is doing it.

Re:Perhaps hardware outsourcing doesn't work

[geoffrobinson]

Others have mentioned Apple. So I would add no company that relies on another company's OS will be able to do better than have really low margins.

I thought that was the point of WebOS. I assume they thought it wasn't going to work so they pulled the plug.

Re:They're looking to the future.

[alen]

too bad HP has generally crappy software and you can't sell enterprise software like servers. people don't just dump their old product because HP is here now.

memristors was to be that product

[bzipitidoo]

Or so I thought when I heard HP was mass producing memristors. Memory that was far denser, faster, and longer lived than current flash memory technologies. It was so good, memristor based memory products would also replace DRAM and SRAM, and we'd finally have computers that would not forget everything when the power was cut. Was that just so much talk and vaporware?

Re:memristors was to be that product

[vlm]

Or so I thought when I heard HP was mass producing memristors. Memory that was far denser, faster, and longer lived than current flash memory technologies

No, not it was not. No shipable memristor product has come close to current tech, even in the lab, lab curiosities are not even close to off the shelf tech, with unknown yields. The vaporware promised that theoretically it could happen. The problem is the current tech is improving faster than memristor R+D is improving, and current tech is actually shipping in quantity.

I could quote that in 5 years we'll have flash with 10 times the density and one tenth the cost of today. (This is actually pretty reasonable based on past performance). That smacks memristors down pretty hard, who are merely promising that someday in the future they might be as good as flash was in the past, maybe.

Its very much like "bubble memory" in ye olden days. A perfectly valid "new" tech, hyped to the gills, it just developed slower than conventional tech developed and got kind of washed away. Unlike memristors, bubble memory actually shipped in quantity before it became hopelessly obsolete.

Re:memristors was to be that product

[Anne Thwacks]

I believe there is a bridge in Brooklyn available at a very competitive price.

RPN calculators

[Stephen Chadfield]

They should focus on RPN calculators. In DayGlo colours to attract the youth market.

Re:RPN calculators

[ducomputergeek]

These days you can download the M48 emulator for iOS, I have it on my iPhone. I still have my HP48G and it still works after close to 20 years, but I rarely have use for most of it's advanced features these days. It's been a while since calculus.

That being said I still love RPN. So I switched the skin to emulate the native iPhone calc only now it has the old HP48 screen and is RPN. Best of both worlds...

Re:RPN calculators

[Culture20]

"With RPN, your parents can't understand what you're calculating!"

Re:RPN calculators

[vlm]

These days you can download the M48 emulator for iOS, I have it on my iPhone.

Is the tactile interface as good as the legendary HP calc keyboards of old? Touch screens make nice mouse replacements, not so good at replacing keyboards.

Re:RPN calculators

[azgard]

"With RPN, your parents can't understand what you're calculating!"

But your grandparents can..

Re:RPN calculators

[Culture20]

Well, Oma's
5130001 8007 +
547 1 -

Re:RPN calculators

[Doctor Faustus]

"With RPN, your parents can't understand what you're calculating!"

"RPN calculation parents understand not"
(leaves true on the stack)

Re:They're looking to the future.

[somersault]

The whole "cloud computing" fad hasn't helped the demand for hardware, either.

It's amazing how all of these new cloud hosting services are magicking their hardware out of the clouds..

Re:They're looking to the future.

[erroneus]

I agree that a company losing half its value in the market doesn't mean anything other than what it means at face value. But it would be optimistic and refreshing if HP really were looking to the more distant future and aiming in direction beyond the next quarter.

Ford DID make airplanes

[scharkalvin]

"'as if Alan Mulally left Boeing to join Ford as CEO, and announced six months later that Ford would be making airplanes."

You realize that Ford DID make airplanes a long time ago. Not only that but they were GOOD at it.

Re:Ford DID make airplanes

[theVarangian]

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.

Re:Ford DID make airplanes

[tibit]

This deserves a +5 Informative.

Re:Ford DID make airplanes

[Chris Mattern]

Not only that but they were GOOD at it.

Not really. The only model they produced in any numbers commercially was the Trimotor, and they only produced a couple of hundred of those. They were pressed into service again to make B-24s as part of the war effort, though.

Re:Ford DID make airplanes

[sznupi]

Yet you probably don't mind Bombardiers flying above you; plus it could just as well end up as ~"you(n)cares" in colloquial language (and what was this another suspiciously sounding name... "baang", "booming"?)

Re:They're looking to the future.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The cloud guys certainly do need hardware, and by the truckload; but I suspect that they make comparatively lousy customers:

Your smaller shops tend to have limited bargaining power, and often no choice but to over-provision with respect to their needs(Can't have just one web/file/exchange server because it might fail; but don't have enough load to keep that one over 50% utilization, much less give the backup any exercise unless the primary should happen to go down...)

The(successful) cloud outfits, by contrast, tend to have in-house expertise in management and provisioning tools(so your 'value-add' management crapware isn't a selling point) and fairly tight control over utilization(or they'll be out of business) and some sort of software-level failover scheme in place. So they certainly do need servers, by the rack; but they are unlikely to have any interest in paying more than commodity prices, and are also unlikely to take any upsells to more expensive fault tolerant gear.

They are sort of the server equivalent of supplying house-brand desktops to WalMart: The volume is there; but you won't like the margins, and there are plenty of people who could replace you...

And how much do these dumb-ass CEOs get paid?

[tekrat]

You know, I could also make stupid, ass-backwards decisions for $millions of dollars per year. Heck, I'll take half of whatever you're paying the current clown. Here's my resume HP, I hope you'll consider that I probably have a better background to run your company because I am actually familiar with your products, unlike you're current CEO, who obviously has decided that being CEO of HP means burning it to the ground and hopefully making a small pile of the ashes to chop up among the primary shareholders.

Re:And how much do these dumb-ass CEOs get paid?

[sgt scrub]

You forgot the link to your resume.

Pinky the Clown

The difference...

[Junta]

When IBM shed it's PC division, it was already a somewhat modest chunk of their revenue (less than 10% of their revenue), lost money three years in a row, and represented less than 5% of the PC market. There was some non-trivial impact to IBM's x86 server business, but generally speaking the PC division didn't give IBM good financials and the x86 server business learned to continue without PC division there.

Now let's look at HP. Their PSG represents a good third of their revenue. That division operates with a positive margin (though some feel 5% is insufficient, I think it's healthy enough, particularly compared with negative numbers at the time of the IBM sell). It also represents a very very strong share in the desktop/laptop space (even if people say that market is dead, I don't think it would be 'horse and buggy' dead, it's going to plateau and sit there at worst). Considering how much mindshare they have and how that influences server sales, and how much volume of equipment they push through PSG and what that means to procurement, this poses the significant risk of shooting their server hardware business in the head. The Apotheker leadership says the focus should be on software and services, and while the EDS acquisition has secured services as a strong chunk of services income, their software picture today comprises less than 3% of their total revenue (20% margin may sound nice, but when it's on one tenth the revenue that PSG pulls in, the raw numbers are pretty dismal). So immediately they ditch a third of their revenue, and de-emphasize another 2 thirds of their revenue (servers and printing), and declare an intent to bet the farm on the last third of their revenue.

There was a time when IBM looked more like HP, where hardware was king. When they first chased services and software, they did not ditch their hardware business to do so. They hedged their bets, continuing to take in revenue the way they knew how while growing their business in the ways that looked promising. Only *after* establishing a healthy software and services stream and reputation did they ditch PC division. HP on the other hand is already betting on success that hasn't been proven yet. There is a mindset that 'so long as you make software, you'll get more revenue', but as the person in the article says, not every company can be a successful software company and to assume so is irresponsible.

Re:The difference...

[Ohio Calvinist]

Very good points.

My only objection is that 5% isn't very significant when considered with it's risk. HP could liquidate the entire unit and use the case to buy essentially risk-less treasuries at 3-4% (though the downgrade may cause some analysts to re-consider treasuries as a baseline alternative). That is only a 1-2% margin in a market that could turn sour quickly if their costs increase (labor or materials) or they continue to fail to provide a consumer product that rises above it's competitors.

If 30% of HP is only providing mediocre returns, it should find a unit that would be more productive with that ton of capital.

Re:The difference...

[Compaqt]

Best post in the thread. I'm replying instead of modding because the latest Slashdot update doesn't allow you to mod without JavaScript.

The stupidity is just stunning. IBM was prudent; HP is being reckless.

CEO background

[Kupfernigk]

What do you expect? How on Earth did HP come to appoint a CEO from a software-only company that has probably never seen an end user customer in his life? It isn't as if Ford appointed a CEO from Boeing; it is as if they appointed a CEO from a fleet leasing company. The result; a decision announced in haste that was bound to deprecate HP as a brand. Apotheker seems to have forgotten - or did not know - that today's phone buyer may be tomorrow's CIO.

Yes, the could have sold the tablets at a small loss. And, since the Pre 2 phone sells happily in its unlocked state at around $200 in the UK, they could have sold off the Pre 3 for maybe a little more. Legally in the EU they must support the things, so they might as well do it properly. But no...

I happen to like phones with portrait format and keyboards. Some people do. I'm now having to look at the BB Torch 9810 for a next phone. It doesn't look to be as good or as convenient as the Pre 3. OK the screen is smaller that an iPhone's, the processor is slower than on a Samsung. But the actual operation as a phone/messaging device is that much nicer than either. Some people prefer, say, the Prius to an Audi or a BMW. HP just never bothered to find its market and then market to it. Yet if there was a company that could have taken on RIM, it was HP.

Re:CEO background

[Eponymous Coward]

How on Earth did HP come to appoint a CEO from a software-only company that has probably never seen an end user customer in his life?

This may be the most insightful comment in this thread. In hindsight I think it should be obvious that this is the direction the board wanted to go. Why else would they appoint Apotheker as CEO? He makes no sense as CEO otherwise.

Re:CEO background

[bws111]

On the other hand, when IBM was in deep trouble in the early 90's it brought in a CEO with no tech background at all. He came from RJR/Nabisco (cigarettes and food). At the time, IBM was in the process of being split up into smaller companies, and he put a stop to that.

Re:CEO background

[LWATCDR]

It all comes down to Passion IMHO. Wasn't there anyone in HP that has made a career at HP that could have become CEO? It seems to me that if you stay at one company you are looked down on because you are not a shark. HP used to mean excellence now they are the cheap plastic Laptop at Best Buy. So they will be? What was that name of that company that was so big?
Nokia seems to be following the same business plan as well.

Re:CEO background

[Comrade Ogilvy]

How on Earth did HP come to appoint a CEO from a software-only company that has probably never seen an end user customer in his life?

This may be the most insightful comment in this thread. In hindsight I think it should be obvious that this is the direction the board wanted to go. Why else would they appoint Apotheker as CEO? He makes no sense as CEO otherwise.

HP's vision of its own future seems to be that the real money is made in selling consulting services for building big corporate software solutions out of existing technologies. This is not news. They have been trying to emulate IBM and Oracle for a while now.

Fiorina may have bought Compaq, but the annihilation of any meaningful amount of genuine innovation was well under way under her reign.

Hardware is a means to get a foot in the door and keep the customer an HP shop, but is not the primary really the place that will generate profit growth. That said, dumping or starving hardware divisions that are, in fact, profitable seems like a lack of vision to me.

I do think that HP is stumbling on a major opportunity with respect to smart phones and pads. Corporate IT departments are uncertain right now over which or whether to support a non-Apple smart phone or pad device. Android offers a mess of too many slightly different devices.

A nimble HP could offer a compelling solution to big corporate clients. There is a window of opportunity that behemoths like Google, IBM, and Oracle do not have the hardware chops to execute on. Whether it is WebOS or Android is not necessarily important.

Re:CEO background

[catchblue22]

Watching HP change from an innovator and creator of truly innovative products into a marketing flagship has been disappointing. They spun off their truly innovative activities to Agilent, and instead sought to become largely a brand-name stamped on generic low quality computers that could have been made by any number of competitors. In my opinion this is a result of adopting business school ideology in the management of the company. The MBA type managers had very little actual knowledge of technology. They wanted to maximize profit while minimizing costs, leveraging existing assets to provide the highest rate of return. Creating truly innovative products was seen as too expensive and not profitable enough. The managers likely didn't see the benefits in true innovation, the way it percolates throughout a company. Now HP is a shell of its former self. It is sad to see a formerly great organization reduced to this.

WSJ Piles On: How to Kill HP in a Year

[theodp]

H-P's One-Year Plan (WSJ): Let's say you were given a year to kill Hewlett-Packard. Here's how you do it.

Re:WSJ Piles On: How to Kill HP in a Year

[Lisandro]

Great article. Mod parent up.

Re:-1

[Junta]

Well, assuming there *was* money to be made in airplane sales by a new brand *and* Ford was remotely tooled to produce airplanes, sure, Ford could try to make airplanes with maybe only a hint of investor punishment for spending money on a dubious endeavor. If Ford announced today they were discontinuing car production *right now* because they *think* that one day *in the future* they will be selling airplanes and achieving healthier financials that way instead, that would be batshit crazy, and what HP is talking about doing.

The prescription for HP

[Registered Coward v2]

[quote]"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.'"[/quote]

Only time will tell if Mr. Apotheker's prescription for HP was the right one.

While abandoning low margin stuff makes sense, my guess is the real end game is a merger with one of the big software companies. You hire a software guy and you get a software guy - someone who sees the margins to be made in software vs hardware and are surprised he ditches the hardware business except where there are still decent margins to be made?

It's not surprising - HP tried to move more into non-hardware business when they tried to buy PwC's consulting arm, this is just a continuation of that strategy.

PS Ford actually did build airplanes at one time.

Need more coffee...

[o'reor]

Did I just read that Oracle was the Hurd's new employer ? Someone wake up Ninja Stallman. Ang get me more coffee...

Good riddance

[dalias]

Does this mean an end to their crapware-filled laptops and $20 printers subsidized by $80/month DRM'd ink refills?

Re:Good riddance

[daid303]

I have one of those crapware-filled laptops, with windows vista. Guess two wrongs do make a right, because I love it. All the crapware can be uninstalled with the normal uninstall dialog, and it's running smoothly. It's lightweight, and gets about 3 to 3:30 hours of battery life. And it was cheap because they wanted to get rid of it, Win7 was just released, so vista was no longer hip.

Re:Good riddance

[dalias]

3-3.5 hours is nothing to brag about. A real laptop gets 10+ hours of battery life and costs about $650. (See Asus UL80VT) It also doesn't fall apart when you carry it in a backpack...

Re:Good riddance

[SmurfButcher Bob]

Three hours of battery? So you're happy with a craptop that takes 2+ full battery charges to uninstall the crapware from?

On the good side, you have successfully just qualified what your time is worth.

Re:Good riddance

[Bucky24]

Three hours of battery life is what I'd expect from a laptop that's 7 years old.

Re:Good riddance

[daid303]

Does that laptop weight about a kg?

Wow, that's terrible

[Lazy Jones]

It must be almost as bad a decision as when Apple decided they wanted to build phones ...

Re:Wow, that's terrible

[DrgnDancer]

Except Apple didn't decide to simultaneously stop making iPods and Macs. They kept their profit centers moving while branching out into a new area. If the iPhone had been a debacle (always a possibility, albeit a small one given the hype Apple was getting), it would nopt have meant the end of Apple. They would still have had profitable products.

Re:Wow, that's terrible

[Lazy Jones]

They [Apple] kept their profit centers ...

I'm not so sure that desktop PCs and laptops were HP's "profit centers", so the comparison is stretching things a bit ...

Re:Wow, that's terrible

[DrgnDancer]

At least according to what I've read, they make money on that division. Not great margins (5% or so), but they made money and in volume it adds up. Sure it's a crappy business to be in, and getting out it might seem like a good idea; but dropping a profit center, no matter how annoying it is or thin the margins, to bet the farm on an unproven idea seems a bit crazy.

Re:Wow, that's terrible

[Lazy Jones]

At least according to what I've read, they make money on that division. Not great margins (5% or so), but they made money and in volume it adds up.

Computerworld writes: "The hardware business is by far HP's least profitable segment, with an operating margin of 5.9%. Excluding financial services (at 9.4%), every other HP business segment's margin was in double digits last quarter." ... So it's hardly a "profit center" and who knows what kind of outlook they had for it, perhaps they expected losses soon.

Re:They're looking to the future.

[UnknowingFool]

Long term thinking should be rewarded however many here think that HP is lacking that thinking based on their recent acquisitions and missteps. Losing the razor-think PC market isn't what most people complain about. It's that they realized the situation five years after IBM did. Buying Palm for $1.2B isn't the issue; it's the plan to stop making WebOS devices only a year after buying Palm.

CEO question.

[kurt555gs]

Does any one else wonder why all these CEO's have funny last names?

Re:CEO question.

[mjwx]

Does any one else wonder why all these CEO's have funny last names?

No.

Signed,
Anora Morcock.

The Mulally analogy is broken

[Cobalt Jacket]

1. Mulally is a competent CEO. The jury is still out on Apotheker. 2. Mulally actually knows how to design and build planes. He led the project to build the Boeing 777, which is a high-margin product that kept cash coming in during Boeing's last decade, which has been rough for other reasons.

Re:The Mulally analogy is broken

[tibit]

Mulally doesn't know how to design and build planes. He merely had the reins while competent people did just that. I'd credit him with not destroying Boeing while he was there, but that's about all the credit he deserves. He's no Steve Jobs nor Lee Iacocca. He didn't have to show some stunning executive acumen, just had not to mess with things too much. As far as I'm concerned, he's as clueless as they come.

HPs future has been written...

[Lisandro]

...since they let Carly Fiorina run HP. It's been downhill since then, with a continuous stream of screwups. And now that HP is, essentially, focusing only on services i expect them to continue loosing relevance with each passing day.

I mean, what's the logic behind buying WebOS (a great, but ultimately dying platform) for $1.2 billion just to drop the platform entirely 6 months later?

Re:HPs future has been written...

[wdef]

When a company that size changes CEOs, there is no logic across the transition.

Whatever happened to the HP Way?

[thiswillbegreat]

They used to have such a wonderful culture there. I would think that a large part of their problems is the fact this is no longer existent. I found this great quote from Bill Hewlett on HP's site:

"We knew what technology was available," Bill said, "and we figured out how little bits of it would fit within the area where we wanted to be. There was not one giant step that we took at any point; there were a lot of little steps. Pretty much we just stuck to our knitting. I think we were concerned about making a technical contribution and we operated on the assumption that if we made a contribution to society, rewards would follow."

Can you imagine any exec at HP saying something along those lines today?

Re:Whatever happened to the HP Way?

[k6mfw]

In the 1980s there was the right way, the wrong way, and the HP way. A group of us from college made a field trip to HP (this was back when HP was really HP and made the ***best*** test equipment) and a few other Silicon Valley companies including a startup. Engineers at the startup were former HP, they said some engineers love the HP way and others hated it. You either had those at HP for more than 20 years or those less than 2. I did notice all were very good at what they did, it's just some of them didn't like the way HP operated. I also sensed they hire only fresh outs, no experienced engineers (cannot mold them to HP way) but the ones they do hire were top grads (high grades, good interactive skills, HKN, etc.).

But all that's back in the 20th century. Since Bill and Dave have passed on, it seems HP went off on different strategies (i.e. as Scott McNeally said, "they're a printer company!") and they've been floundering ever since. But damn back then the test equipment was the best, and the instrument controllers (what they called their desktop computers) on Rocky Mountain BASIC. Software ***never*** crashes, of course accessing an instrument with a bad GPIB address or divide by zero will halt the program. You could always do a basic reset and resume (even values in variables were still there!). When places like HSC (Halted) have old beatup HP voltmeters from the early eighties (non-working with lots of battle scars and cracks, HP stuff is not quite invincible I guess), it will carry a price tag in range of $250!!!! For working test equipment, people will keep it until they are dead of old age.

HAHA

[tibit]

Here's what will happen: in 10 years, Agilent will buy back the right to use the name HP from HP's smoldering shell. And engineers the world over will rejoice.

Re:HAHA

[frank_adrian314159]

Agilent will buy back the right to use the name HP from HP's smoldering shell.

From your mouth to God's ears... Maybe "The HP Way" can mean something again.

just slightly irresponsible

[eyenot]

i think the analogies used are inappropriate. hp owns the memristor. think about it... they're poised to recreate our entire concept of storage. but it pains me to see them being so reckless. when the fuck are we getting memristor?! can't believe they're screwing around like that.

Secret to HP's Black Ink ?

[retroworks]

This PC World article from 2003, http://www.pcworld.com/article/112199/why_do_ink_cartridges_cost_so_much.html, might actually have understated the mark up in the HP ink cartridges which, on the books, accounted for 50% of HP profits during some years. Taking something that costs as much as a pack of ball point pens and charging $22 for it was "visionary" for awhile, and Dell tried to follow HP into the giveaway-printers-to-sell-cartridges model. But the "Gillette" strategy - making money on the blades, not the razor - may not work fit the strategy of outsource to China. Did Gillette ever outsource their razor blade manufacturing?

Track record?

[gilesjuk]

Do they have any track record in enterprise software?

It seems like HP is just another tech firm looking for the next bandwagon. But ultimately they don't have the courage and conviction to stay on it until it gets where they want it to go.

This is hardly encouraging for customers who don't like their platform investment to be wiped out by scatter-brain CEOs.

Re:Track record?

[EmagGeek]

The only track record that I am aware of is their acquisition of Neoware in 2007 (maker of thin clients and enterprise remote management software). Other than that, this seems like new territory for them.

Re:Track record?

[Chapter80]

I still have documentation (independent reports from the '80's) showing that HP was at the time the manufacturer of the world's most widely installed Database Management System (DBMS). Granted, they gave Image DBMS away with their HP 3000s. The story of Oracle dethroning HP as most widely installed is an interesting tale. Now I'm not sure who the leader is now - MySQL? Oracle? Microsoft?

But HP had a *free* database product and couldn't beat Oracle's outrageously priced DBMS. I wonder what would have happened if HP had invested even more in Image (/TurboImage / Allbase SQL), trying to get it to all major platforms, courting the major software vendors to write enterprise software for it, etc. Maybe even opening up the source for community contributions. Would MySQL have even existed?

Re:Read the tea leaves

[tibit]

That company has been spun off as Agilent. They are doing pretty well for themselves :)

Actually, they committed suicide....

[WindBourne]

when they moved production to China, they were simply killing themselves.

IBM was already a huge SW company

[sirwired]

There is a big difference. Prior to the Lenovo divesture, IBM was already a huge software and services company. They were the largest player in the services market, and for quite a long time, a much larger software company than Microsoft. (They practically printed money with OS/390, AIX, DB/2, CICS, and mainframe utility software) The Lenovo divesture simply dumped a division that was a time, money, and resource sink of marginal to no profitability.

That's how it looks

[marquis111]

I've been watching HP's slide for a while, wondering what they were thinking. I look at their LaserJet III, IV, and V printers and compare them to the trash they sell these days, and I blows my mind. Or how about, their obvious attempts to wipe the memory of 3COM's products away? Over the last 8 months, I've run into an absolute brick wall finding utilities and firmware updates for some legacy 3COM equipment. http://infodeli.3com.com , once my go-to site, is no longer of any use to me. If HP is trying to drive me away from 3COM to HP, the opposite will likely happen. Don't get me wrong -- I like the ProCurve line and like their warranty terms, but if HP is intent on continuing down the path they are on, who can say if the warranty will mean anything in a year?

Acquisition strategy

[frank_adrian314159]

Maybe the strategy is about moving into the "enterprise software" market in order to be an acquisition target for one of those two "competitors". After all, Oracle bought Sun. You might be seeing HP trying to be enterprisy enough for SAP to buy it. It might be worth what an acquirer would pay for HP to spin off the profitable printer and server segments (or sell those parts to other entities). God knows it's the only way that the moldering corpse which HP's stock represents will ever increase in value at this point.

Accepting applications?

[failedlogic]

I went on the HP careers website. I typed in CEO and executive and there does not appear to be a job opening at the moment. Strange, I think, since many other employer websites are always accepting applications.

I don't have experience as a manager or executive. Over the years though, I have owned several HP last printers, a desktop and a laptop. This is probably more HP merchandise than all previous CEOs combined have ever purchased. So I know a bit about the company's products.

I'm not after the multi-million dollar salary - $900,000 ought to be good enough and I think it is survivable in this economy. I'll work as hard as I can for 6 hours a day. Between lunch and coffee breaks, I think this is about the most I can honestly commit. As additional compensation, I'll settle for Apple, Oracle and IBM stock options instead of HP's.

Re:Accepting applications?

[greg1104]

Your application sounds interesting. You left out the important detail though: how is your golf game?

Re:Accepting applications?

[yuhong]

I think they were accepting applications back before they select Leo as the CEO. Now it is too late for that.

Re:Accepting applications?

[Alex Belits]

Not really. They print those options on their inkjet printers.

Re:Accepting applications?

[gmhowell]

Not really. They print those options on their inkjet printers.

Given the price of HP refills, that might be more expensive that the Apple stock.

Re:Accepting applications?

[MadKeithV]

Your application sounds interesting. You left out the important detail though: how is your golf game?

Good enough to convincingly let you win.

If HP really wants to re-invent themselves

[WindBourne]

they would move the production back to America and focus on INNOVATION. It is easy enough to do. However, HP no longer does that. Right now, the only major American company that is into innovation is Apple and google. The reason is that we have allowed too many MBAs to run companies. If you notice, neither Apple nor Google has MBA's running them. Sadly, Apple's new CEO IS an MBA, and he will probably destroy them.

Re:If HP really wants to re-invent themselves

[HiThere]

But *IS* it easy for them to do? Would *you* want to work there?

It seems quite likely that they no longer have the capability of innovating. That requires skilled engineers, and managers that those engineers respect. And a modicum of trust between the employees and the management. And skilled designers. And somebody, in some position, who has the right and the power to focus on a project and drive it through to completion....or to eventually decide that this is a bad idea and see what parts can be saved into another project.

When the managers aren't trusted by the employees, then you can't innovate. When the managers have no knowledge of either the current possibilities, or the current problems, then you can't innovate. I suspect quite strongly that HP can no longer innovate. Just looking on from outside, *I* wouldn't trust that management. And it seems notably ignorant of both the possibilities and the problems with current tech. OTOH, I haven't needed to make a close study of them. So I could be wrong. But I know how I'd bet.

Re:If HP really wants to re-invent themselves

[gilesjuk]

Great, so what HP needs to succeed is an inferior hardware product that costs twice or three times as much as the competition?

As much as people like to think that their own country can assemble and produce a better product, places like China and Taiwan are geared up to doing such work. The chips are made near by, the boards are made near by and there's plenty of people to do the work.

Re:If HP really wants to re-invent themselves

[n4t3]

HP has always managed to make pretty decent hardware - its their software thats always sucked. Oh, the irony.

Re:If HP really wants to re-invent themselves

[jafac]

You are exactly correct, and we have a perfect example in Apple's history:
When Scully took over and fired Jobs. Apple did not die overnight, but the lack of vision was palpable. Jobs' return was more than simple cult of personality. - - and I don't think it was anything magical about Jobs personally, but, I expect Apple to not be succeeding in any way like its current form, within 5 years from now. Unless they change their leadership back from a business-oriented team to an engineering-oriented team. It must be about technology. Not money. Apple is not a bank. They make computers. Not sugar water.

Re:If HP really wants to re-invent themselves

[WindBourne]

What makes you think that it would be inferior? When I worked there, we had production of printers, PCs and HP stations just downstairs. We could go see and talk to the production ppl. You would be surprised what can be found out by talking to the line ppl. In addition, chips, board and even system manufacturing is now energy intensive and low labor. The reason is that it is extremely automated. Energy is cheaper in America than in China.

I had an offer to work at HP

[SlippyToad]

It was lucrative, it was working at home, it was working with their Client Automation software, formerly Novadigm's "Radia." I have a demonstrated expertise with the software and my company won four customer awards based on my work (including developing a patch management system before they released one).

There wasn't a lot to complain about with the offer, except that it was with a company that had repeatedly shown zero forward vision. The moment they inked the deal to buy Novadigm's product line, they buried the excellent tech support website, let go of the lead architect, and turned the product to a barely-good-enough substitute for what it had formerly been.

HP's hardware, in the meantime, is being removed from our company's data center at a rapid clip to be replaced with Cisco UCS equipment. It's like they simply can't help ruining whatever they put their fingers on. Kind of a shit-Midas touch.

I'm so glad I didn't take that offer.

Fiorina in the press

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Forbes, at least in its glory days, didn't shrink from being opinionated, so it wasn't objectivity when they gushed over her. Forbes even gave her credit for financial results that happened after she left.

Didn't know there was such a thing??

[Svartalf]

I didn't know there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is.

Heh...apparently he wasn't paying attention to the IBM v. TSG lawsuit that's still ongoing. Suing IBM for 3+ Billion over IP infringement on the Linux Kernel is pretty much "corporate suicide" and in the most painful, public manner possible. All HP's doing appears to be doing corporate suicide in the lingering zombie-like tradition.

Giving a CEO 1M shares in the company ...

[perpenso]

So maybe giving a CEO 1M shares in the company, 50% vested in 5 years and 100% vested in 10 years is not such a bad idea?

By the way, you are touching on the principal agent problem, ie how to get management's incentives aligned with the owner's incentives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem

Re:as long as

[joebagodonuts]

Please don't wait. Leave now.

Serious RPN calculators with colors

[perpenso]

They should focus on RPN calculators. In DayGlo colours to attract the youth market.

A self serving post but Perpenso Calc offers RPN, 20 digit precision (enough for 64-bit arithmetic), decimal based arithmetic (no binary rounding), fractions, complex numbers, ... It's basically scientific, statistic, business and hex calculators in a single app. You can have a serious calculator and have some fun with color schemes too.

For fun try "0.5 - 0.4 - 0.1" to see if your calculator is using decimal math or the FPU and try "2 ^ 64" to see if your calculator can support 64-bit calculations. You should see whole number, no decimal points and fraction components, no exponents.

Re:Carly started the destructive process - nitwit.

[Z00L00K]

That's what you get when you place bean-counters in the leadership.

Unlikely

[MrEricSir]

Agilent was already broken up further after the HP spinoff. There isn't much left.

Besides, who would want the HP name at this point?

Re:Unlikely

[tibit]

They were further broken up? Wow? Do you have link(s) to details? Thanks!

Re:Unlikely

[MrEricSir]

Yes, I do have a link for you: http://www.google.com/

secret ingredient of HP smoke

[Lead Butthead]

shredded HP stock certificates soaked in their expensive ink and rolled into joints.

HP's name seems really appropriate now

[vgerclover]

Looking at this, it seems fitting for Hewlett Packard to find such a Cthulhian fate...

What is the Corporate Valuation?

[MarkvW]

When you bait executives with stock, this is what you get. That and watered stock.

Not a chance

[sjbe]

Yup, Ford has made planes before... it wouldn't be THAT surprising if they wanted to break back in to that business.

Umm, yeah it would be extremely surprising if for suddenly declared they were getting into the aircraft manufacturing business again. They have no in house aerospace engineering talent (an ex-Boeing CEO doesn't count), no sales staff, no production facilities built for aircraft, few/no aerospace technology patents, and they almost went out of business doing what they supposedly actually do know how to do. Furthermore they'd be entering a mature and very competitive marketplace. Aircraft have come a LONG way since the Ford Trimotor was state of the art.

Any Ford CEO that even hinted at such a foolish move would likely be promptly sacked.

Actually, Ford DID make airplanes.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Look up the Ford Trimotor for starters. Also, see the Henry Ford Museum for some of the early radio beacon navigation equipment.

They also made the Lunar Landers (among the other products of Ford Aerospace).

However, if Ford were to STOP MAKING CARS in order to focus on aerospace it WOULD be as stupid as HP dropping the PC business to focus on IT services.

(Especially given the DISASTER that the company I was with at the time experienced when they were bought out and the "bigger fish" replaced the local IT department with HP contracted IT services. Given the level of competence I observed, I'm betting that the main Chinese competitor now has the entire set of design files and documents, along with all the business secrets, by now.)

Re:-1

[xeno]

Mod parent up. Very insightful, and cuts to the core of the "HP gave up too fast" argument. Apotheker is just the latest in a string of lousy managers, but it's worth noting that the core of HP's current train wreck was NOT Leo's panic over low Touchpad sales and high-risk alternative proposals. It's that HP's board is so adrift that Apotheker was allowed to turn his panic and high-risk ideas into instant ill-planned actions . It's the speed that is indefensible. I suppose the title of CEO conveys a certain direction-setting authority, but even the captain of a supertanker is not allowed by the engineers to demand turning at such a speed that the ship will flip over.

They are renting it from this guy

[Technomancer]

http://xkcd.com/908/
XKCD is always the best ;-)

Re:You know nothing about cloud hosting providers.

[somersault]

Cloud hosting and virtualisation allow more efficient use of server resources, but the hardware market is still growing. Users still need to buy client devices to access the cloud resources. People are buying expensive laptops, tablets and phones by the metric fuckton. And as more places offer cloud services, even if they're all done through third parties like Amazon EC2 etc, the overall hardware will still have to be scaled up to meet demand. Not as quickly as if all these services had bought their own hardware, but you also have to take into account that a lot of these services wouldn't even have been created it weren't for hosted/cloud computing (either through lack of technical ability or laziness to set up the appropriate hardware, or a simple lack of funding).

Re:They're looking to the future.

[Bert64]

Bespoke software (including customisation) and support services is what's going to be profitable in the future, mass market software will become even more commoditised than hardware since there are much lower reproduction costs involved.

Most software has reached the same stage as hardware, 10 year old software is more than adequate to the needs of the vast majority of users.

Management.

[ResidentSourcerer]

Even in small businesses the transition to a new person at the helm is fraught with peril. Indeed this is a leading cause of failure in companies over 5 years old.

There are companies that specialize in helping small businesses come up with a succession plan (often family...) that reduces the risks from this transition.

Parent commented about the 'money grubbing bean counters'

This is a problem in many sectors of the economy, most notaably in the the financial sector.

IMHO the answer to this is to make upper management remuneration dependent on the next 20 years success of the company. E.g. THIS year's pay is $100,000 plus the stock dividend on 100,000 shares for the next 20 years.

NEXT year you get $100,000 plus your first dividend cheque plus the stock dividend on another block of shares for the next 20 years.

Put in 20 years as CEO. You're getting dividends on 2,000,000 shares. And you better leave the company in good shape, because you're getting dividend cheques for 20 years after you leave.

I would love to see it hit bottom

[hesaigo999ca]

I hate to say this, but I would love to see the stocks hit rock bottom here, and see this guy still try to get his bonus at the end of it all.....
to show how much of a circus all these big companies have turned WS into.....
at the end, who can fire this guy, who put him in charge, and where those people any more informed about what would happen with this strategy...
it is not like they would be getting a consultant to review a CEO's strategies for the position BEFORE he got it......or is that not an option?