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Ex-Board Member Says HP Is Committing 'Corporate Suicide'
theodp writes "If Apple's looking for a seamless transition, advises the NYT's James B. Stewart, it definitely shouldn't look to Hewlett Packard. In the year after HP CEO Mark Hurd was told to hit-the-road-Jack, HP — led by new CEO Leo Apotheker — has embarked on a stunning shift in strategy that has left many baffled and resulted in HP's fall from Wall Street grace (its stock declined 49%). The apparent new focus on going head-to-head with SAP (Apotheker's former employer) and Oracle (Hurd's new employer) in enterprise software while ignoring the company's traditional strengths, said a software exec, is 'as if Alan Mulally left Boeing to join Ford as CEO, and announced six months later that Ford would be making airplanes.' Former HP Director Tom Perkins said, 'I didn't know there was such a thing as corporate suicide, but now we know that there is.'"
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.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
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?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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?
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.
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.
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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..
which is totally what she said
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.
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.
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.
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.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Hmm... that sounds like a a good value to me.
When I choose HP, I'm getting more printer driver for my dollar.
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.