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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?
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!
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
Except their net income is only 8.8b dollars. Compare that to a software company like MSFT, which nets 70b in revenue, and keeps 23b in profit.
There's clearly money to be made in OSS. The RHEL model nets Red Hat about 10% profit on their revenue, which is a lot higher than what HP is netting on theirs.
Message is: spend billions on OSS, obtain a cash flow 1.5x higher than average.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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.
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;