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Could Open Source Investment Save HP?
deadeyefred writes "HP's new CEO, Meg Whitman, has a number of issues to deal with to right the ship and put the company on a growth track again. Instead of massive changes to its organization and product line, could $4.5 billion in open source investments do the trick? An argument might be made that HP could boost its competitiveness by putting half of its R&D budget ($1.5 billion a year) into projects like Xen.org, Android and OpenStack. It would still be less than half what HP is paying for Autonomy and allow it to focus on solving problems rather than protecting proprietary product lines and fiefdoms."
Sun - no
Netscape - no
Palm - no
more examples?
like meg whitman is actually going to do anything to right the ship. she is more concerned about her golden parachute than righting HP.
for someone to actually right the ship you need someone like Steve Jobs who is currently in short supply. besides, the board would probably fire steve even if he was put in charge.
Man, what a dream that would be! A company that focuses on solving problems for customers, and doesn't try to own every little crappy angle to squeeze their customers!
Seriously, imagine if HP took *every* possible open source option in building a PC, and opened as much of the system as possible to allow crowd sourcing of solutions to the problems that always pop up in systems! Now with Windows, that would still be pretty limited. But hey! This would be a company I could buy from!
Sun - no
Netscape - no
Palm - no
more examples?
So, your answer is 'maybe,' since a negative expample doesn't acutally prove anything....
The HP board of directors would never stand for the short term instability that such a dramatic move would generate. They're too focused on the immediate share value to even begin to think about the long-term health of the company.
HP should sell of their cash cow - printer ink - and start working on building living spaces for unicorns. They have about as much experience with that as they do in software, and in contrast, haven't demonstrated gross incompetence in unicorn housing.
Can I be CEO next?
Figure out how to make a profit off of manufacturing Touchpads at a $100 and flood the friggin' market.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
N36L forever!
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/06/17/project-massive-array-of-inexpensive-servers-aka-mais/
... does every major story have to be followed up with a "open source" side story?
The problem with open source -- the competition has imitated your product before you've recouped your R&D $. When you have a solution to that one, let me know.
IMHO. It's been HP that has lead the way for corporations to outsource services to India, and manufacturing to China. Hell, at Fry's,(Fountain Valley), I was told HP hardware was being phased out. I use to like HP hardware, now the new stuff will become as tainted as the refugee from Goldman Sacks. If her job isn't to bring jobs back into the U.S., and manufacturing back to the U.S., then the only thing she has experience in is Mergers, and Acquisitions. I'll go out on a limb here and say, "SELL ! SELL ! SELL ! SELL !", because I wouldn't trust her engineering knowledge to properly plug in an extension cord for her portable hair dryer.
There is no reason to care about what happens to HP any more. The old HP is long dead, and the current HP sucks.
Die soon please.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
While OpenStack and Xen.org may be viable investments, they will have to find a way to get a return on their investments. As long as they don't kill off their Linux-based server products, they could really benefit from a competitive and strategic advantage.
Android investment? Huge Legal liability, as Google is finding out from Sun currently. It could also be a huge white elephant. No-one is seeing ROI in their involvement with Android. It could be argued that Android isn't open source either
This sounds like a very short sighted idea in a moment of desperateness
There's actually a lot to be gained from taking from and contributing to open source. There are so many great products out there based on open source software. Red Hat is poised to be a billion dollar company this year, and Apple's growth has been meteoric after the rise of OS X and iOS, both of which have kernels rooted in open source. Even though a lot of these big companies have evil tendencies, a commitment to open source can be a healthy way to integrate robust technologies without having to spend a fortune developing something new and proprietary which could ultimately fail anyway. Additionally, it gives something back to the enthusiast community, and many freelance open source contributors get to sharpen their skills as a hobby at home, which makes them valuable to the companies for which they work (mostly high-tech sector). It's a win-win for everyone and I'm excited to see another company realize the value of open source.
getting a team of good designers and engineers, led by someone who drives for excellence and style, and let them do what they do best will save HP - nothing else.
Hiring me to put the team together and lead it will save HP.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
there isn't a single manufacturer of computers that is going to 'come back to the US' unless the US allows mass dumping of toxic chemicals from the tech process to be dumped into the local river, and protestors put into labor camps.
because thats what they do in China, and it saves a bundle of money.
or doesn't know HP internals, or rambling incoherently or all at once.
I am an open source advocate my self but that doesn't change the fact the HP is not dying and investing half of their R&F budget is going to resurrect it. HP does contribute to Open Source moment, there was a server farm, for instance, open to public, but it was shutdown a while back.
What HP needs to do is streamline the product line (cut down dizzying array of offerings each slightly different than the other). This cuts down the organization proportionately.
HP has this incredible fault tolerant computing on Guardian/NSK, they should adapt and port it to commodity hardware and fight back in the Data Warehousing space with NeoView.
HP also should keep CEO and top level compensation to decent levels, beef up support.
HPs problems aren't due to high level leadership issues, the platforms it's promoting or how it's getting to the market. The problem with HP is that they produce utter crap, and have support that makes me want to scratch my eyes out. That is, once you dig through a few pages and manage to finally figure out how to contact their support. In my most recent interaction they were absolutely useless in helping me and got my name wrong.
I'm typing this on an HP computer that is absolutely LOADED with bloatware. I cant figure out how to get rid of this junk that keeps popping up, requesting to update, requesting to this that and the other. Next to it is an HP printer that literally came out of the box and has refused to admit that I put ink cartridges in it. I've tried everything to get this printer working and HP support has been absolutely useless so far.
Let HP suffer a horrible death, and let the free market learn that producing shoddy products and/or pushing computers out with proprietary crapware is bad business.
Hate to break it to the original poster, but the fact that their printer ink costs more than gold suggests they aren't in the game to lose money on Open Source.
They can certainly contribute or sell services based on open source material, but if they want to get ahead of the curve they would be better off leveraging what they already have and do well (which is ... nothing.)
They do servers, time to make them less of a boat anchor and start making them low-power, high-multicore,high-memory designs and then do what everyone else is doing and market the VPS advantages. I'm so damned disappointment when it comes to trying to find a good (read as in not designed to waste my money) server configuration and the stupid CoLo only has between 7 and 15A @ 120V, which means that I need as many cores and as much RAM as possible stuffed into a 2U and fit a 3A envelope. But the shit that HP and Dell sell are always UP 4 or 8GB ram max systems instead of the DP or MP systems with 192GB that I want. Realisticly I only need 12 or 16GB, but the configuration pages on their sites always make it more cost effective to buy 2 or 3 systems at a third of the configuration.
Why would HP fund Android? Android makes more money, at this point in time, for Microsoft than WP7 does and will probably do so for quite a while. Google makes its money by showing Android users advertising.
No, God no. If they want to improve things, they can focus on making their laptops bullet-proof. Focus on the hardware, and let the software guys do their things for now. I want a titanium or some other metal case on that laptop. I have a plastic one right now, and I melted part of it with pieces falling off.
Yes, focus on the hardware.
I am John Hurt.
Actually being closed source could save them. They already saw a massive demonstration of what to do, give webos away on a device relatively cheap, building a huge user base quickly, driving in developers quickly, and make money off the market mechanism for development and delivery of apps. Hell give them away and what the market share grow into a major player over night.
Why would HP throw money at Android? That's Google's baby, and they've got the resources to take care of it. Along with Samsung, HTC, LG, various Chinese and Korean manufacturers, and Motorola.
I would rather see resouces thrown at desktop Linux. If you're going to invest in mobile, why not Ofono?
Hey everyone, I have a HP G62 laptop - Excellent laptop.
I also have a dual core netbook which came with a linux version that boots in 10 seconds - excellent computer as well.
I have two scanners as well from them.
I was looking at there 25" LCD as well.
I would have purchased the Tablet but it needed a bit better hardware to be competitive. Similar to the samsung galaxy 10.1 specs. They web OS is a great system just needed more advanced hardware on tablet. Example like a 8 - 10 mb camera to front and 5mb camera facing the customer. along with similar specs to the galaxy 10.1.
I am not sure why they went away from printers? Maybe not as profitable as the market once was.
I have seen the R&D they have done in the past and it has been great.
So overall
Laptops = great
Tablets = needs work.
Printers = still good.
Montitors = good.
So in my opinion they are not doing bad at all and would still buy there products over competitors most of the time.
Sorry, this idea makes no damned sense. And even assuming that it DID make sense, Whitman is not the person to do it. She does not know how to make things. She's a professional manager, which makes her an upper-class twit who will continue to get paid millions to run companies into the ground. Apotheker collected $25 million severance in return for destroying HP. Whitman is not smart or capable enough to do any better than he did.
Seriously, this is an insanely stupid suggestion. HP sells about $130 Billion dollars worth of goods and services each year. All the open source software on the planet would deliver a very small fraction of that in revenue. Whether they invest more in open source or not is irrelevant to their survival.
Acquired by HP last year, getting the hell out of dodge as soon as the retention bonus clears.
HP's problems are much worse than that. They've been driving customers away for years now - and those customers won't be coming back.
I gave them the benefit of the doubt a few times, but the DV2000 laptop was end of my relationship with HP. It had that bad Nvidia chip; HP knew those chips were bad and they had a warehouse full of laptops with bad chips in them. What did they do about it? Yup, they sold those laptops knowing they'd fail.
What did HP do about it? My experience was that their "customer service" hung up on me twice and the email response to my request for help amounted to little more than "go F yourself".
I guess fraud is OK when a corporation does it. I'll never forget, though - and I will NEVER buy any HP product again. I'll advise my friends and family to avoid them.
It'd be better to keep them out of open source; they'd screw up a wet dream.
As the CEO of EBay after it hit its "upward spiral", Meg proved to be a mediocre executive. She managed to broker one of the largest deals in history, the purchase of Skype, without managing to buy the source and lost her company tons of dollars. Having been handed one of the sweetest hands in executive history, she managed to not actually bankrupt the company.
She managed to spend STUPID amount of her personal money trying to become governor of California, only to fail miserably. I voted against her, and I give her a vote of no confidence.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
HP donates the kernel.org servers and they always have. And Linus' personal development gear sometimes. They push a lot of gear on the kernel team, in the prerelease phase. They employ hundreds of engineers, perhaps thousands, to validate their gear against Linux and submit patches upstream. Usually just to fix their gear before release because if it has a problem with Linux it's usually broke, but bugs in Linux are found too. They get good value from this because when HP explores corner cases with Linux and something breaks it's easier to get right down to the lines of code right before the thing wrong and examine the machine states that led to the failure. Linux is actually used to make the machines run Windows services better too, because the things that go wrong in Linux usually would go wrong in Windows too but would be harder to find.
They have Linux support for every server they sell, and nearly every printer too. RedHat and Suse are validation targets that must be met before a server is launched. They have their own Linux distribution for thin clients. Their in-house LeftHand San (and Virtual San Appliance) run Linux. Their million-dollar fileserver in a rack run Lustre on Unix or Linux.
HP's own diagnostic CD they used to ship with every server, but which is now just a download usually, is also a custom Linux distribution. They have their own Honest to God Unix as well - HP-UX - so they don't have to do these things. But they do.
HP didn't come to have 31% of the top 500 supercomputer installations in the world by accident. They didn't become the top server vendor in the world by accident. It's their rock-solid Linux support that helped put them there when others didn't bother to try - because a metric boatload of servers run Linux and Linux server buyers know better than to get their gear from Dell. On the server side the best answer usually wins.
These open-source installations have huge things to do with HP's profitability and productivity because servers have fair margins and they almost always get high-margin support uplifts and services besides. They try pretty hard not to have Windows-only components in their business desktops and laptops too. They don't try as hard as they could on the consumer side. But they have little choice about that.
On the consumer side it's different. Even after they've had the thing built in the same depressing factory iPads are built in, reducing their component costs to the bare minimum with world-beating economies of scale and loading them up with every bearable form of shovelware, adware and crudware, they still lose money on every single unit. It's only when they add in the "co-marketing" dollars from Microsoft that they get for putting "HP recommends Windows 7" on every page of their website, by including Windows in their advertising and on every machine, and so on, that they turn a profit at all. And it's the same across the industry. When HP adds in these monies and it makes five points of operating margin in a good year, that's a huge win. Some OEM companies actually lose money every year (not the same companies every year, of course). Naturally this means that whether or not a PC OEM makes money in any given year is entirely at the whim of Microsoft's marketing department. That's why HP, at the pinnacle of success in client PCs wants out of this game. By being on top HP's a target for Microsoft to trim their sails, and Microsoft wants leverage on the server side of things. Better to separate the two so that in at least one you can drive progress and establish your brand - and get good margins.
At the executive level there are some confused folk, as there often are. But HP has some engineers yet that know a good solution when they see it.
Now if their web team would find W3.org and build their websites and management software to dish well-established standards, that would be nice. Guys, believe it or not coding to the internationally accepted standards is actually easier and more effective than the proprietary alternatives. Also, you can make me use IE - but I'll hate you for choosing to do so.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
HP is far too retarded to pull it off. All of there products are crap firmware, software, printer drivers especially
Red Hat: Tiny, tiny, tiny compared to HP. And how could HP emulate them? Rolling their own Linux server distro? Opensourcing HP-UX? (If Sun was late, that would make HP even later.) Throw their weight behind desktop Linux? How would that improve their profits? Red Hat abandoned desktop Linux, and if Red Hat is small, Canonical is even smaller...
IBM: IBM backs open source for purely pragmatic reasons. Customers demand Linux, IBM provides it (just as HP does also, incidentally.) IBM's other open source efforts (i.e. Eclipse) are laudable, but they could hardly be regarded as "company saving."
HP is in bed with Microsoft to a great extent. They sell a huge number of PC, servers and various solutions based on Microsoft technologies. HP wouldn't risk Microsoft hiking prices for them or cutting them off their goodies. I was suspecting this was one of motives behind axing WebOS and Palm.
. . . is taking a belt-fed to the boardroom.
Regards;