Slashdot Mirror
HP To Combine PC, Printer Divisions
itwbennett writes "Apotheker wanted to sell off HP's PC division, Whitman vowed not to, and now HP is combining the PC division with the printer division in an effort to cut costs, unnamed sources told the All Things D blog. Given that both divisions reported declining sales last quarter, is HP hoping that two wrongs make a right?"
Oh wait, they already do that.
HP will now start shipping all their PCs with 32 MB of RAM, but you can buy an additional 256 MB for just $100.
PC with built in printer. Just one unit, hopefully it will be a laser printer cause if its not you'll be stuck with a useless printer module in your PC for however long it lasts.
Never had a HP inkjet that lasted longer than the first set of cartridges
No, but the power supplies will have chips in them that run out every 6 months, and you'll have to get a replacement - which costs about 75% of the cost of a new machine.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"PC Load Letter" will finally mean something! The fact that it means that your motherboard won't POST until you refill the paper tray and replace all ink cartridges with cryptographically verified and datestamped new ones(see also, HP 'all-in-one' devices that refuse to scan if the printer's consumables are not in good order...) is sort of a downer; but at least that puzzle will finally be solved...
More seriously, I imagine that there might be some economies to be wrung out of combining two divisions that both specialize in the logistics of rebadging and regurgitating plastic shit; but I cannot think of a single positive design or engineering lesson to be shared between the two.
Desktop PCs and printers:
Buggy whips and horse shoes?
Fat collars and bell bottoms?
Sextants and paper charts?
(He quipped while typing on his desktop PC and printing the morning meeting agenda...)
That is actually a part of their corporate philanthropy policy: By setting the price of their printers at approximately what they are worth, rather than their cost of production, and the price of their ink as though it were FDA-approved for human surgical applications, HP has contributed more free steppers and sensors to the hobbyist robotics community than just about anybody else...
Five years ago, HP made pretty nice printers and pretty crappy computers.
Now they make pretty nice printers and pretty crappy computers, but the print drivers are so horrible (and bloated) they might as well give you a rock and call it a printer.
Correction, HP used to make good products period. Not so much anymore... they are simply a commodity manufacturer that goes for the lowest manufacturing cost. Last time I opened up an HP PC, it was like "seriously, this is supposed to be well built?".
The Current HP makes cheap crappy printers even in their business range of laser jets that always have problems. Their PC division makes cheap crappy PCs that are no better than anyone else. Is it just me or do these things sound like being similar enough that maybe they can be formed into one division that makes crappy Printers & PCs? I mean how much work is it to make crappy devices anyways? So cut the engineers in half again by making them work on both... They are already crappy so it's not like they can go much further down at this point...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
If HP hadn't more or less gutted itself(between spinning off the good stuff as 'Agilent' and the Carly era), there might have been one thing to hope for:
Purely for the pointless nerd-value, who among us would not smile to see a line of x86 PCs that, instead of a BIOS or EFI, had a firmware based on the unholy fusion of the design principles of Open Firmware; but with an extended PJL command set, rather than Forth, as the underlying language?
It'd be magnificently pointless(as would the postscript and PCL RIPs implemented entirely in SMM); but the world would be a better place for it having existed...
I don't know what the revenue breakdown is between consumer and pro markets, but HP's printer division also produces really high-end devices. The sorts of printers that print huge banners and posters - they'll take paper a couple of metres wide and of any length. These are really expensive, but you buy the ink in huge bottles for about the same price as a tiny cartridge for their consumer printers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
HP still makes some of the best printers in the world. The difference is that they now also make a load of cheap consumer crap.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
More likely they are combining their losers in preparation of either selling them to someone, or spinning them off into their own company.
Putting them together makes jettisoning them at some point easier.
if i need to print a few pages every few months i'll do it at work?
You haven't eliminated your need to print at home, you're just stealing the service form your employer rather than paying for it yourself...get off your high horse thief.
i haven't had a printer at home for years now and hardly miss it
photos? - CVS or any of the online places and either have them shipped or go pick them up. $.19 cents a photo can't be beat
if i need to print a few pages every few months i'll do it at work
a big job like 50 pages i'll pay the $7 to fedex/kinko. but i only need that once a year or so
what is there to print that people see a need to buy these things for home use other than for a home business?
My wife is an editor. Textbook manufacturers contract her out to edit textbooks. She receives about 200 pages of text at a time and hates sitting at her PC to read all of that to do her edits. It is much easier for her to print out a chapter, go lay on the couch or bed with her pen and mark up her edits there. When she's done, she loads edits into the PC and replaces the paper back into the printer (backwards of course to print on the back). I told her I might be able to load this onto her Kindle, but she was not interested as she can't mark it up.
Cheap printing still has its place.
**NOTE: I recycle or compost all of the used paper. Please don't tell me how much I hate the environment.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
That's because they assume that unlike consumers, professionals factor the price of consumables into the buying decision.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
I agree, their commercial offerings are still real printers. But the consumer side is a nightmare. I wonder how they justify a 300mb driver install in a consumer machine when you compare it to a 90mb install for a commercial plotter printer? Not to mention that the aforementioned 300mb driver install takes nearly an hour when AV is active.
This actually might not be a bad idea. If we could apply the miniaturization craze to printers that has been used on computers, maybe we could end up with a laptop that can spit out hard copies on request. Obviously it wouldn't have a huge reserve of blank paper, but for things like a boarding pass, movie ticket, or even just a quick print of the photo you just took, this could prove to be a useful idea. As small as current gen laptops have gotten I think you could combine one with a printer (and scanner too) without exceeding the 'reasonable to carry in a shoulder bag' size limit.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Remember when some CRT TVs had integrated VHS decks? I hated those things. So cheap. So ugly.
blog
I happen to work for said behemoth...so take this as you will. HP has a driver that works with ANY HP printer, it is called the Unified Printer Driver, or UPD. Light weight and trouble free...if you have driver problems, give it a try, it will make you happy again. Combining the PC and Printer divisions is not the only changes being made, they are also combining some of the sales forces, streamlining the Enterprise Services divisions and attempting to focus on Cloud, Security and Big Data. I believe Meg has the best intentions, but it may be too late. HP is such a behemoth of bureaucracy and idiotic busy work that I doubt it can be saved, more likely it will be like watching a large air ship crash...really slowly waffling and coming to rest on the ground without much of a crash, or it may crash like an F-16 doing MACH 3 and hitting a brick wall. Anyway, I digress. HP has too many old timers at the helm that won't allow the company to become more agile, they have to fill out form H-1165537u3 in triplicate in order to sell a customer with cash in hand a $400 laptop. I happen to work for the Enterprise Services group and have been working on a deal that is worth $40,000.00 US, and it has taken nearly 2 months to get through the paperwork (digital as it may be) in order to help a customer implement something that will take about 6 days. That is what HP has come down to. Peace & Love!
Actually, if you price them out, the commercial supplies come in at exactly the same cost / mL as consumer cartridge ink. I've only compared Canon ink to their commercial inkjet printers, but commercial prices range from about $0.34/mL to $1.03/mL (PFI-103MBK, 130 mL tank, about $45-$140 retail). Small format cartridges, (BCI-6BK 14.5mL, $5-$15 retail), cost anywhere from $0.34/mL to $1.03/mL.
The difference is that a printing shop charges their customers enough to cover all their costs and make a profit. If ink prices go up, so do customer prices. A customer is far more price sensitive, as they see those ink prices directly.
John
I've now observed the computer industry for some decades, and I think this move by HP is a loser. Two wrongs don't make a right. If the PC division was not profitable on its own, combining it will only make it less efficient.
HP's PC business is in trouble because the Windows ecosystem is broken. The last HP PC I saw had 2 hrs worth of spyware removal, old drivers, no customization to make it easy for the user, 200 programs in the start menu, and annoying registration pop-ups. Although I will never trust Cupertino, if you buy a Mac you have none of this. Users want stuff to just work. HP's business model is based on selling cheaply made PCs to idiots and profiting from the advertising. That's not a real business model. They need to find a way to make fewer types of machines, and make more of them, so that they can use economies of scale to make good profit. They also need to cut out the spyware/spamware and configure these machines for your grandmother to use them to web-surf, email and word process. And for the love of whatever absent gods you believe in, install Chrome or Firefox but not IE!
HP's printer business is in trouble for the same reason. About 15 years ago they realized that the product was the ink, not the printers, and started selling really expensive ink in cheapie printers because they realized most people don't print much and don't think about it until they have to. The problem is that now the old rule, "You can trust any printer you buy from HP," is no longer true. Their brand is worth a lot less as a result and the new printer manufacturers are eating them alive. Again, they got fat and lazy on the easy money from the oblivious cows of the mid-American middle class consumer.
Someone else here on Slashdot said something that I've known to be true from my own experience:
HP suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen. As soon as the easy money rolled in, they got greedy and hired a lot of idiots to cover their tracks. Now they can't manufacture a PC at low cost, or act quickly, or do anything without 10,000 committee meetings. The human disease has taken over. It takes very little brainpower to make a great PC for $600 with $50 in profit to the maker. If you had the bulk purchasing power that HP does, you could make that same PC for $50. It's a mystery how they're losing money in this market, until you look at how big and bloated HP has become over the past 15 years.
Canon NoteJet 486. It even offered an "optional facsimile modem."
you can't print without a driver, tray icon, update app, update app for the update app, scanner tray app, and update app for the scanner app
The problem is that Samsung and Brother are somehow making consumer crap that only costs 1/2 as much. Why buy a HP when I can get a Samsung or Brother laser printer for under $60?