Slashdot Mirror
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
Axolotl_Rose writes with news that Hewlett-Packard is preparing to cut around 30,000 jobs, close to 10% of its total workforce. CEO Meg Whitman reportedly wants to use that money instead for new products and for bolstering the sales force. From the NY Times:
"China, which is one of H.P.’s highest growth areas, will probably be spared, as will its research and development efforts. Ms. Whitman, who became H.P.’s chief executive last September, 'is trying to build a new company,' one senior executive said of the job cuts. 'You can count this as a part of that.' The final plan is expected to be announced on Wednesday, when H.P. announces earnings for its second fiscal quarter. Considered a slow-moving giant in the tech industry, H.P. had revenue of $127 billion in fiscal 2011, but net earnings of just $7.1 billion. While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers, H.P. has been late or unsuccessful in many recent tech trends like providing cloud computing services for big companies and smartphones and tablet computers."
An article at Forbes suggests HP should instead 'retool' those jobs by recruiting makers and hackers, TED conference speakers, and others who have experience building and inventing things.
HP still has a R&D division? Has hell frozen over? Is a CEO being intelligent for once??
Why not just cut 300,000 right away and get ahead of the game for once?
Because when you offshor^H^H cut a bunch of jobs, you need more salespeople to sit by the phones to answer calls about products you offshor^H^H have sold-off in order to mak^H^H save money.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I have a friend who works at HP, and he's constantly tell me how they're overworked due to constantly lowering employee count. /sarcasm
I'm sure cutting out 10% of the workforce, shoving even more extra work on everyone else, will just be a huge moral boost.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The first commenting HP employee, on the bus on the way to his job laughing uncomfortably a bit to himself
The modern CEO doesn't grow his company in the long-term. He doesn't build good products and increase sales, putting profits back into R&D, new products, and new hires. He doesn't pay shareholders modest dividends and tell them about his long-term strategy for slowly growing and maintaining a profitable company. That shit is old school!
The 21st century CEO boosts short term profits by cutting jobs and forcing existing workers to pick up the slack. He shows the shareholders that the next quarter's profits are great and they call him a visionary. He hides debt with a shell game, cuts workers to hide sales declines, and outsources everything he can to some sweatshop that produces crap product to lower prices. The 21st century CEO looks AMAZING on paper.
And in the long-term...well, who gives a shit about the long-term? By then the 21 century CEO has long since bailed out with his golden parachute. Let Uncle Sam bail them out.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Overpaid hack CEO moves in, cuts jobs for short term stock price gains. Company eventually falters as the productivity from cut workers eventually works its way out of the system. CEO leaves with golden parachute, buddies on board of another company move CEO to another fresh ground to continue to the slaughter.
I'm beginning to see why the french thought the guillotine was such an attractive option.
"...CEO Meg Whitman reportedly wants to use that money instead for new products and for bolstering the sales force."
I bought a HP netbook, believing that I would have something of quality. Big mistake. I think is not going to help increase the number of sellers, if you only have crappy products for sale.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Anyone who watch Meg Whitman run for governor should realize by now that she is an abject retard.
I wouldn't put her in charge of a car wash, much less a multinational company.
I guess after that other Republican candidate, Carley Fiorina started driving HP into the ground they needed another mentally handicapped Republican to finish the job.
ah western culture - too bad we (EU) are also selling off everything for that short term quick fix.
Did it bug anyone else that they kept using H.P. instead of HP?
Maybe it's just me...
Sir, I take my hat off to you. Got it in a nutshell.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Look at all those saps in China stuck working in all the high tech sectors manufacturing plants, you think their standard of living is any good. Trust me people no nation ever improved its status with factories.
it seems like almost everything they sell is OEM'd by someone else and HP just makes sure it works together, rebrands the drivers, rebrands the hardware and markets it. I've bought HP branded Emulex HBA's that looked just like the Emulex branded ones. drivers were compatible as well.
except printers and ink does HP really make anything on it own?
Life is always a two way steak.
Yes, companies have changed... if your view for the worse.
But employees are also changed.
Today is the IPO of Facebook. There's a link there. The link between the decline in the long-term innovative company and the innovative-startup culture.
I tell my tech-friends. It is a two-way streak. It's an odd worldview that we cheer the startup culture and the innovation economy... while at the same time complaining about the modern company as you do.
Life is about trade offs. And we have traded stable boring R&D for rapid innovation and profits.
Perhaps it was a good trade. Perhaps not.
Perhaps the startup culture was merely a response to the old boring R&D being thrown out in favor of crazy profiteering business.
You ask about the long-term? Well maybe you haven't noticed the new government model of innovation. The long term is handled by the public sector and universities getting public funds to do research. The private sector runs on short term and fights to the death for the best products. This way progressives think we get the best of both worlds. We get rapid innovation and long term R&D.
It just sucks to be a private sector worker who doesn't hit it big in the rapid innovation part.
You may not be a native English speaker, so you may not be aware of the fact that we have no gender-neutral, third person, singular pronoun for a person. One must choose either "he" or "she" or the much more awkward "he/she." I supposed one could also go with "it" but most humans take offense to being called an "it" for some reason. Being as most CEO's are men, I chose "he" in this instance. I think that's a reasonable choice.
And as for Meg Whitman, well I'm sorry if I may have offended the woman who just threw 30,000 families into dire crisis. I suppose she'll just have to live with it.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Well - in Whitman's defense, HP needs to retool itself. If their claim to fame is personal computers, they will be an also-ran within 5 years. They need to retool with services, get in on the cloud-storage/processing game, and start putting out products and services that people are interested in. Otherwise, they can sit in a corner with Gateway and talk about the olden days.
That, unfortunately, takes drastic measures. Apotheker had the right idea, but just executed it in the worst possible way. Now the question is whether Whitman has the right idea, AND can execute on it. Cutting 10k workers sounds harsh, but it's a nasty requirement for effecting a turn-around.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Life is always a two way steak.
AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Good one!
On a side note, the rest of your post is now invalid.
CEO Meg Whitman wants to use the savings for new products? Oh, come on.
She just needs more cash to pay her household staff. You can't have people talking, you know.
American based IT firms have been very vocal about "shortages" of IT workers and then it became "Americans aren't qualified enough" so we have to move to Inida and other countries because that's where the qualified people are.
Well assuming that's true, why should we buy from an American company whose business is to just resell Indian services at a very hefty markup or to just ship the work overseas? They offer no other value and the Indian firms offer the exact same services directly.
Why not just cut out the middleman and buy from Indian IT firms and dave at least 50%? Either way, you will get the same quality.
You forgot the classic CxO loot your own company scheme: fire everyone, use the "savings" to buy back stock, then cash out/exercise your options on the overinflated stock before it crashes.
Carly Fiorina gutted the company and put it into a tailspin. Hurd took over and promised to fix things by gutting the company. Now Whitman has taken over and promised to fix things by gutting the company. I hate to see HP go, at one time it was a great company, but they lost their way under Fiorina and never recovered.
Fuck off troll.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I'm sure they have plenty of chaff to cull from the EDS merger. As a former worker for a *profitable* EDS group that was spun off, they were in what I call the Control Data spiral before being snapped up by HP. The CD spiral is when you sell off all of your profitable divisions to keep your stock from going junk, which in turn dooms your company. Anyway, I have nothing but ill to say about EDS, so I probably shouldn't say anything. Motherfuckers.
I wish I could give you some points, this is whats wrong with Western industries. I think things will hit absolute rock bottom before anything gets better if it ever does.
So the 21st century CEO takes the exact path and prescription forced upon him by the 21st century type of government. What else is new?
You can't handle the truth.
There is nothing quite as beautiful as seeing the plane in free-fall and on fire behind you, as you float to your new private island on a parachute stitched from gold thread and destroyed lives.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Facebook is a media company, more like Time/Warner than IBM, except they produce even less. Facebook delivers eyeballs to advertisers, nothing more.
The use of H.P. is pretty rare. Nearly as bothersome is the use of H-P by the press. Nobody says I.B.M., do they? Then why H.P.? I've never owned an H.P. product or H-P product, but lots of HP calculators, printers, computers, etc.
What about Apple?
This is why, in these cases, I use "she/he/it". While this probably isn't correct, either, I like the way it sounds.
HP should send everyone a hp touchpad as a farewell gift, that they always remember why their jobs are now gone. Hope they don't forget the "Thanks Leo" sticker on the backside.
HP going, going, gone....
I see into the future a day where there will be no more Proliant Servers.
All servers will now be Taco Dell.
Oops, I mean all restaurants will be Taco Bell.
Whatever.
PS: pass me those three sea shells.
So, does that mean, like it typically does, when a company cuts like that, they will also find ways to "save" on produced products? Which means they will cut corners on products, to make them cheaper, but still sell them at the higher price to "improve" the bottom line.
You reply is a bit shortsighted. Perhaps throwing 30,000 families into crisis is a better alternative to closing the companies doors and letting 300,000 families face the music. This is life. Not everything is roses. CEOs need to make hard decisions that can have bad outcomes for some individuals. Cut the woman a little slack before calling her evil.
Back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, HP had a (deserved) reputation for making the most awesome, reliable, and innovative tech gear available. The president kept the business on track, and the vp of engineering (Dr. Bertram Raphael in the 80's) kept the technology on track. Now, HP makes crap. In fact, my data center managers (multiple world-wide data centers) won't buy their stuff because it is unreliable. Even 10 years ago, that would not have been the case. HP got caught up in the "business", and forgot about their vision - innovative gear for engineers. Now they are just an "also-ran" PC manufacturer. Sad.
Though to his credit it seems they might not touch the R&D which would be contrary to what you are talking about. That is of course if it is true...
Tell your tech-friends it's a two-way streak, then.
think of what she would have done to California if she had been elected. They dodged a bullet with that one.
That's a good idea.
Outside of the obvious gender bias, I agree with most of what you said. HP Shareholders should realize that the 30,000 people they are about to screw over are also customers, and advocates of HP products. Obviously this is going to drop 30,000 people from their customer and advocate list, plus all of their friends and family members will think twice about buying or using HP.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Or you could just re-write the sentence without the need for a he/she/it reference, which is usually the first choice.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I'm sure that with the EDS acquisition, as well as all the other companies HP went out and bought, there are tons of people hiding out waiting to see which group of employees survives the merger. With the PC and printer divisions merging, that looks to me like a lot of sales guys, account managers and customer liaison people are going to be looking for work as well. HP has 300,000 people or something like that. It's kind of like IBM -- once a company gets too big, people can build themselves a very safe spot without doing too much work simply because it's too hard to keep track of everything.
I've had some limited experience with EDS, and from what I saw, there's LOTS of room to cut there. Outsourcing contracts can only support so many project managers, support staff and liaisons-to-liaisons without affecting the number of actual workers who do work.
The problem is that mass-firings like this, especially ones led by management consultants, tend to gut product engineering and design teams, and leave the overhead in place. Even though Whitman may be sparing HP Labs, which was cut to the bone under Fiorina and Hurd, that doesn't account for the everyday hardware engineers who have to design HP's next products. If HP wants to stay successful long-term, they need to ignore the typical McKinsey speak and keep the people who can build stuff that HP can sell.
I'm working in one of the very few dinosaur-era fields that actually needs to buy good-quality PCs and servers for customer projects. Think stick-in-the-mud customers, low or no network bandwidth and old applications. HP and Lenovo are basically the only choices if you want a decent, well-made business grade PC with a warranty and stable configuration. All the hardware manufacturers need to lay off the cloud kool-aid and realize that there will be a balance between local, private and hosted for quite a while. Not every business is ready for the cloud, the cloud doesn't make sense for some businesses, and even the cloudy people need decent machines to run VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, etc. on. In HP's case, I'm sure the McKinsey people read the Gartner people's Magic Quadrant stuff, concluded that every business will be in the cloud by 2017, and recommended that HP get out of the traditional PC and services business, and become strictly a cloud provider. Problem is, when the social media/Web 2.0/cloud bubble pops, things are going to swing back to a sane mix of hosted and local, and HP might not have anything good to offer anymore.
They need more H-1b workers from India. That's the solution.
Seastead this.
I know at least one (talented) person who has been let go from what was once EDS. I'm willing to bet that a lot more less-talented ones are on the way out.
Seriously. I really don't know what GM did to EDS before HP bought them, but from the stories I've heard, they have to be the largest collection of mental defectives to run an IT shop. Their processes were totally divorced from reality. I half expected Randall P. McMurphy to show up as new employee one day.
I'm no fan of "resource actions", having been through 2 myself, but purging the Enterprise Services division, or whatever EDS has been re-christened, was probably long long overdue.
.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Used to really like HP printers but that past few had such crappy, bloated software I'm looking for alternatives when I'm upgrading.
Oh come on... This is HP we are talking about. They likely have 30,000 people in the packaging division responsible for the absurd amount of trash every time you buy an HP product.
The company needs to be reborn, and that is going to require re-prioritization of jobs. Saying they can't fire people will doom them to Kodak's fate. As long as they use the money for something good, it is how you run a business. So far, Meg isn't talking about a share repurchase or some other nonsense.
Great job on walking the walk
If you get one person doing the work of three, that's management success and you should get a big bonus.
If that person does 3 jobs badly, that's his personal failure and should be noted in his next performance review!
0 1 - just my two bits
I like that the solution to a formerly well-regarded hardware manufacturer is to do the same "services" crap as everyone else, which will most likely be outsourced to India or China until such time as an Indian or Chinese company does the same services crap and puts HP out of business. Go Team America.
>Considered a slow-moving giant in the tech industry, H.P. had revenue of $127 billion in fiscal 2011, but net earnings of just $7.1 billion.
That's a 7.1bn dollar profit, right there in the summary. So no it wasn't about having to close up shop otherwise, and likely not about anything other than upping that number for the investors.
"While it has a leading position in the sales of low-margin personal computers."
How ironic and sad that this is HP's claim to fame now days. There was a time when this was simply so not true. There was a time when you bought HP stuff (and you paid top dollars for you), you knew you could throw it against a wall or drive a car over it and it just kept working. Quality was #1, bar no competition. That was back when the engineers still had a bit of say in what went down there.
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Technically and formally you would use "one". But no one follows formal English rules anymore.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
1. This isn't a 21st century thing. Human history is full of tyrants and kings who don't exactly treat their serfs very well
2. Nobody's forcing any CEO to take any path. They could have, for example, moved the business completely out of the country, away from those governments they hate.
Any large company that thinks giving 10% of their workforce to their competition is going to make them a better competitor in their market has got to be dreaming.
But, obviously, clearly, cutting 10% of your overhead must immediately increase your profitability by 10%. This is truth.
For truly it is said: 'any idiot can cut costs, only a true leader can grow sales'
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Their documentation is in such a disarray your have to navigate a shit labyrinth of documents on their website to find the one you need, only to realize its just flat out wrong.
God ford bid you actually need to speak to any one, India is the only place you can call, if you try your sales rep, or "regional manager" they give you the same shitty number where the ass clown in India tells you to restart your entire server cluster, in the middle of the day, to fix a failing HD issue.
I welcome this as an opportunity to jump ship on a sinking empire that has lost its way.
This makes me wonder if Meg Whitman hasn't received some "economic advantages" from China. This is really very sad. HP is a United States-based company. The layoffs should hit China first. This makes me think Meg Whitman isn't very patriotic. She is loyal to her own bottom line. I understand things were better at eBay before she came on the scene. Let's watch her further decimate HP.
I believe Futurama established that the correct pronoun is "shklee".
Actually, the use of "singular they" is a gender-neutral option in English. I've seen it used more lately, although my middle school English teacher would probably cringe at the idea; it still sounds wrong, somehow. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
My favorite answer to this problem: Clearly, saying "he, she, or it" every time is a bit cumbersome, but at the same time we want to be inclusive. This eventually leads to the contraction "h'or'sh'it"
I am officially gone from
That's not a 21st century CEO, its a recession CEO. It only works if your employees are truly terrified of being fired. HP thinks its still 2009.
Who was in back in the 1980s that famously said "No company ever downsized its way to greatness"?
A great company would 'retool" itself by shifting all those human resources into emerging technologies. You know, people who are already familiar with the HP corporate culture and way of doing things? A loser company simply jettisons everyone and hopes to acquire the new skills somewhere at a discount, competing for that labor pool with every competitor. Bonus points for management shuffling and desperate sales campaigns while doing so.
Then again, HP has had about the same level of culture as a case of off-code yoghurt ever since Fiona got hold of it.
Nice idea except the HP CEO *appears to be* a woman.
There, FTFY.
Women are people, and people have souls, therefore Meg Whitman is not a woman.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Oh come on... This is HP we are talking about. They likely have 30,000 people in the packaging division responsible for the absurd amount of trash every time you buy an HP product.
The trash is actually on the hard disk. The packaging is actually much more easily got rid of.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
HP, at least in San Diego, is your nightmare enterprisey hellhole full of desperate low talent people just hanging on because any one with any drive and talent left long ago. Endless meetings, no clear vision, you're just puttering along and hoping you don't get fired - quietly collecting your salary as long as you can since your skills have completely stagnated.
This is not the sort of place makers and geniuses would want to work, unless their R&D department is a lot different.
Eh? The old HP which everyone knew and loved (well, mostly) had a claim to fame to PCs, workstations, calculators, printers, scientific instruments, and a host of other fringe but cutting edge stuff. That's what gave them a competitive advantage, respect for their brand name. Y'know, back when they were a leader in the tech industry. Their problems right now are due to "retooling" to become a generic PC repackaging brand. They got exactly what they wanted - they're now leader in a market with probably the thinnest margins in the tech industry, indistinguishable from the likes of Gateway.
If you find yourself constantly chasing the hottest new thing, you are by definition an also-ran. You should be creating the hottest new thing. Like back in the day when businesses would pay a premium for HP workstations, printers and scientific equipment; and geeks would pay a premium for their calculators - because they were considered the best and most advanced. They didn't dominate the inkjet printer business because their sales department did a good job marketing them. They dominated the inkjet printer business because they paid a few geeks to play around with using electrostatic forces to spray ink - they nearly single-handedly invented the inkjet printer market.
Unfortunately they gutted their R&D which was producing their high-profit distinguishing products, in favor of sales to promote their high-revenue generic products. I'm sure the high revenue looks impressive on their sales staff's resume, but if it's on razor-thin profit margins it's not really helping the company. I don't see how shifting their sales from one thing to another is going to help. They need to revive their R&D departments if they want to become an industry leader again and enjoy cushy profit margins.
Yes - but you don't just shift people over into emerging technologies. I'm good at what I do, but if you want me to develop mobile apps, you're shooting yourself in the foot. You first get rid of the people who don't have the skills you need for the future, and then you hire people who have those skills. That's why I said that it is an open question whether she can execute on the turnaround: firing is easy, hiring is about the hardest thing you can do. Now that she's planned the firing, I'd like to see what her plans are for the hiring. Because otherwise, you're entirely right - they will downsize themselves into oblivion.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
As Google will tell you, there's a huge gap between having a product that you know has to succeed, and having a product that is actually successful.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
According to the article "China, which is one of H.P.’s highest growth areas, will probably be spared, as will its research and development efforts." . Basically, cut 30,000 American Jobs and replace them with 30,000 Asian workers for 1/10th the cost.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Your a lair and ignorant to boot.
Given that HP Cloud Services only went into public beta last week, it's probably a touch premature to know if it's going to be a success or not.
I wonder how many more corporate jets Meg is going to buy now. That's what Carly did after she cut jobs after all.
Vote Romney!
Absolutely, if you want to see even more lay-offs, and off-shoring!
aren't empathetic women problem solvers supposed to innovative humane solutions to old generation issues created by men ? otherwise who care for woman on the top ?
I'm sorry, but you missed the joke. That's just shitty.
Auctionem uti faciat: vendat oleum, si pretium habeat, vinum, frumentum quod supersit vendat; boves vetulos, armenta delicula, oves deliculas, lanam, pelles, plostrum vetus, ferramenta vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, et siquid aliut supersit, vendat. Patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet. -- De Agricultura, Marcus Porcius Cato, ~160 BC
"Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit." -- Hooper & Ash public domain translation.
Furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.
Or you say "fuck this overzelous PC bullshit" and write whichever you want and people can get over themselves.
> "No company ever downsized its way to greatness"
Apple basically fired everyone and downsized to only three products, and now look at them. Of course, they invested correctly in R&D.
So eventually most of these guys will be fired and replaced with less skilled labor that needs to be trained. Yeah. Very effective.
Wang?
All of the weenies with their iPhones and iPads and iUnemployed don't get it. I lived fine
without (and continue to) an iAnything my entire life - don't support companies like these that
continue to rape us.
As a society, we're not going to teach our kids to compete if we continue to support
these closed proprietary architectures. I can pretty much guarantee that any SE
worth their salt did not learn their skill in school; refined, maybe. If it wasn't for openness
back in my learning days, I would not have been able to start a career. It's that simple.
H.P. should not be allowed to operate outside the U.S., much less a (not openly) hostile country
like China. I honestly believe this should be true for many companies - that's how we keep our strength
and talent in the U.S. Sell to anyone you want to, but keep the R&D and jobs in the U.S.
Sadly, we may have passed the point of no return...
If (according to TFA) R&D and Chinese manufacturing is spared, and sales is increased, I suspect that most of the cuts will be in IT and other infrastructure. Two thoughts occur:
1) It'll be *really* interesting to see what happens to HP after this. They may be able to run along on inertia for awhile, but inevitably something bad will happen and nobody still there will have the competency to fix it.
2) If you're in IT and you're planning to change jobs, you probably want to do it *before* HP dumps a bunch of skilled IT personnel on the market.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
From the summary: CEO Meg Whitman reportedly wants to use that money instead for new products and for bolstering the sales force.
New products are great, but what about ditching some of the old ones? Seriously. Go buy an HP printer. Which one you ask? Well I don't know, you probably have about 30 to chose from. PC? Same thing. They have TOO MANY products, all with slightly varying specs. As a former HP employee in the printer division, I know first hand of the efforts to restrict refilling inkjet cartridges, and reducing the amount of ink in each one, etc. The same thing happens in the laser printer division. Customers get it. They know they are being fleeced every time they run out of ink. Instead of producing so many products, at so many price points, maybe HP should slash about 70% of their product lineup, and concentrate on making the remaining 30% ACTUALLY GOOD.
As others have said their older products were much higher quality. Their old printers, calculators, PC's, and servers were bullet-proof. I still have several older examples which have outlasted their replacements. HP lost their way when the focus became price. Just look at Apple. Their focus for the last ten years or so has been on the product first. Make a good product, and people will buy it. You can compete on simply having better stuff. Make crap, and the only thing you can compete on any more is price, because although people will buy crap, they will only buy it if it is cheap enough.
Oh, and don't get me started on sales and support. Companies don't want to buy a printer, a bunch of PC's, some servers, and some network hardware. They want to buy the technology to make their employees productive -- the ability to run software, the ability to print pages, the ability to store and use information. Can you buy that from HP? Not directly. Sure you can buy printers and toner and paper and PC's and servers, and storage, and network hardware, but you'll be doing business with 15 different companies that all call themselves HP and pretend to be one company.
HP might need to fire a bunch of people to get more focused, and that sucks, but maybe that's better than the current slow downward spiral with musical chair CEO's that spit out a bunch of employee's every time they sit down.
So I have this $1,400 HP scanner. It's fast, once you spend a week downloading various drivers, patches, apps, then reading forum notes where others tell you to uninstall the apps, cause they don't work, instead use some older drivers and Adobe Acrobat, because the HP scanning software is hopeless.... Hmmmm...... You try using the HP software, but it *is* really hopeless-- important options scattered across three different dialog boxes, random hangs, random crashes, and hours of wasted work. You decide to follow the user's suggestion and then things go mostly okay, with older drivers and no HP apps.
Then a year later the scanner starts misfeeding the paper. No prob, you think, get a new feed roller, $2.95 tops, right?
Well, no..... HP wants you to buy a small plastic assembly, with three small plastic gears and two rubber rollers.... their price: $487.
I think that tells you a lot about HP.
You may not be a native English speaker, so you may not be aware of the fact that we have no gender-neutral, third person, singular pronoun for a person.
This isn't true. There is a gender-neutral, third-person, singular pronoun for a person. In the nominative case, that pronoun is "he". In the objective case, it's "him".
Yes, it's ambiguous that the gender-neutral pronouns are spelled and pronounced the same as the masculine ones, but it's far from the only case in English where we've got two words spelled and pronounced the same that mean different things. I always figured if people wanted to communicate in an unambiguous fashion, they'd choose a language other than English..
Peter Gibbons: You're gonna lay off Samir and Michael?
Bob Slydell: Oh yeah, we're gonna bring in some entry-level graduates, farm some work out to Singapore, that's the usual deal.
Bob Porter: Standard operating procedure.
I'm so glad Meg Whittman did not become governor of California!
I'd hate to see how she planned to create jobs (in china) and balance the budget (of her business parters) and fix education (by not having any high-tech jobs left to train for).
Thanks for taking my money, ASSHOLE!
I think you left out one new "innovation" in the process. Produce multiple models of the same product using the same model. That way you make one decent product get some good reviews then sell loads of crap imitations in bulk. Unfortunately, this seems commonplace now and you simply can never trust a company that resorts to this sort of thing.
She'd be doing the same thing to the whole state.
HP isn't a very good company anymore since Ms Fiorina screwed it up (another THANK GOD she isn't our senator).
But I wouldn't inflict Meg on anyone. All she seems to know how to do is slash and burn.
This is incorrect. The use of "one" as a pronoun refers to "an indefinitely specified" individual or "anyone". In this case, the use was for a very specific person (the CEO of HP). It wasn't just anyone. It is convention in English to either use "they" or "he" for such a person of unknown gender. In recent years, people have begun using "she," "he or she," "he/she" and other different forms. Quite frankly, the issue is boring. Please let it go.
...200% more productive.
All of which goes to executive compensation and maybe dividends for shareholders. The worker gets none of the benefit of added productivity.
It's been that way for at least 30 years, where have you been?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Minor fix.
There is one, thon. But no one uses it. There's also "they", which in this case, when you're talking about a class of people (a generic CEO) it kind of makes sense. I'd have used "they" here, or "he" with no qualms.
Whitman may not have much of a choice, her bed was made long before she was CEO. It's not like Apotheker left the company in good hands. The worst I'd say about her is "caretaker CEO way in over her head could perform no miracles".
"You may not be a native English speaker, so you may not be aware of the fact that we have no gender-neutral, third person, singular pronoun for a person."
Them/they, if there is no name used and no gender declared, are appropriate to use as a gender-neutral third person pronoun.
So much for our American educational system.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Use of male descriptors as gender neutral is far too convenient in allowing language to be interpreted in men's favor. In many instances, it was used to deny rights to women, while hiding the fact that women were excluded using ambiguous language. Consider: The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
...because if HP instead had a liberal democrat for a CEO, they would suddenly once again become a vibrant, thriving company due to having no shame to tap into an endless supply of government money just like GM.
Works for Apple. Yes, Steve Jobs was a staunch Liberal. So is Steve Wozniak. Besides Eisenhower [who taxed corporations and the wealthy in high numbers] not a single Republican President has ever balanced the budget once. But in reality, HP cannot find Hewlett or Packard with their technical prowess and ability to find skill to rebuild HP in its current form. HP is better of breaking up into several corporations and selling off some of the units, fire all the MBA hats making decisions and take 18 months to rebuild and retool their direction with technical talent.
You know what's kinda funny? I agree with your assessment and during one of my MBA courses this semester I stated a very similar argument and no one refuted it because it's plain as fucking day.
"Bolstering the sales force'
Always a straw grasp by CEOs who don't understand the money is in development and service. Since they are cutting people, and not creating new product her plan is to bolster a sales fro to sell..what?
Why don't these CEOs learn from Jobs? Find the most creative and froward thinking you can. Get the engineering, development, and manufacturing to support them.
You only need to bolster your sales staff when you have to many sales for the current staff to handle well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The better question would be WHY is Gateway sitting in the corner? I'd argue its because their quality and service went to shit and ran off their customers. too many are trying to play Dell's "Lets sell some cheap shit!" game and frankly it just doesn't work. Cheap shit is just that, cheap shit, and many folks don't like getting burned by a laptop or desktop that barely lasts beyond the warranty.
The last numbers I could find in chart form is 2011 which was 350 million units sold which is ANYTHING but a dead market. I'm sure someone will point out the higher number of cell phones in the chart but frankly other than iPhone I've found most folks treat those as disposable. Other than the "i" products there is pretty much ZERO brand loyalty whereas you get a good rep in the PC market and you can build some loyalty there.
While adding those other markets is a fine idea and a company should have more than a single product Apotheker was frankly an idiot for talking about exiting the PC business and there is no telling how many customers he spooked off with that stupidity. Not only are their PC sales making a solid 6-8% profit but it also helps them to sell more printers thanks to bundle deals. Funny how many think Apotheker was right, yet is IBM doing better than they were before? last I checked they were still cutting more and more from the payroll while Lenovo has been enjoying nice steady 7% profits last i checked.
Frankly its THAT attitude that is destroying American business because all act like profits should be "iMoney or bust!" when all you get is just that, bust. Sure they won't make iMoney on their PC line but profits is profits and trying to fight their way into a completely different market while killing a successful line was just a retarded as hell idea and frankly I'm not surprised that Apotheker got the boot.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The singular "They" is perfectly cromulent. You (and many English teachers) just need to get hip. Now pardon me whilst I go squirt block rockin bleats using my Zune
Or you could use the singular "they." It was good enough for Shakespeare
Which involves either very passive sentences, which are weak, or repeating the full name over and over, which makes you sound like an autistic.
Oh, show a little vision...
Modern CEOs don't grow their companies in the long-term. They don't build good products and increase sales, putting profits back into R&D, new products, and new hires. They don't pay shareholders modest dividends and explain their long-term strategies for slowly growing and maintaining profitable companies. That shit is old school!
21st century CEOs boost short term profits by cutting jobs and forcing existing workers to pick up the slack. They show the shareholders that the next quarter's profits are great and the shareholders call them visionaries. They hide debt with shell games, cut workers to hide sales declines, and outsource everything they can to sweatshops that produce crap product at lower prices. 21st century CEOs look AMAZING on paper.
And in the long-term...well, who gives a shit about the long-term? By then the 21 century CEOs have long since bailed out with their golden parachutes. Let Uncle Sam bail their companies out.
Breakfast served all day!
The mods *cough* sockpuppets *cough* have been kind to you on this thread, jj.
Well written. Very well written.
It's a race to the bottom now. Obama shit-canning an entire nation vs. Whitman firing people to save a company. Guess we'll just have to kick back and see what happens.
This is a cliche. Mastodon-like technology company fights for survival caught in a world that just seems to be moving to fast for it to survive? What did IBM do? What will Amazon do in the future? Don't appear second guessing Whitman is extremely productive. If she asked for your advice what would you tell her? I don't believe the answer for the US is to become more like China, but what are the alternatives?
Being a dot com kid and looking back, that era really messed up the expectation of the street. A five year plan means a plan to exit as CEO with a parachute of cash and leave the mess. It takes time to change a culture but the street is too much about a single quarter. The only thing good going for HP is their public cloud. T least there is one one Goliath in that space. Maybe they can walk down and f them all. But then again, the street will push them to run a f one quarter then trip, grow too fast and fail. I hate the mentality of the street.
As others have pointed out, "they" is a plural pronoun. It is not correct to match it with the singular "CEO". I wouldn't have bothered to reply, except that I felt like rubbing your nose in your final snarky comment.
This is a cliche. Mastodon-like technology company fights for survival caught in a world that just seems to be moving to fast for it to survive. What did IBM do? What will Amazon do in the future? Doesn't appear second guessing Whitman is extremely productive. If she asked for your advice what would you tell her? I don't believe the answer for the US is to become more like China, but what are the alternatives?
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
You're a fucking retard.
These people are being fired because of the decision of 1 man, the former ceo of HP who decided to cancel the HP tablet and stop building computers and cost the company more then $1.2 billion. Luckily he was himself fired before everyone at HP lost their jobs. He went away with many millions of dollars. These 30,000 people are paying for his bad decisions.
Attack of the Clones? Oh evil HP.
Sam Palmisano !
We all agree that they're doing a horrible and bone headed thing for the sake of their own short term profits and bonuses. So tell me again why we let these people run the world? Why the hell don't we just take it away from them? I don't know about you but I'm getting tired of racing to the bottom and always looking over my shoulder for the next round of layoffs...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You may not be a native English speaker, so you may not be aware of the fact that we have no gender-neutral, third person, singular pronoun for a person. One must choose either "he" or "she" or the much more awkward "he/she."
I just recently discovered "Lexicon Valley" podcast through Slate.com, and they have a podcast (I think it's this one: Lexicon Valley #8: When Nouns Grew Genitals), where the guest professor makes a strong case for using "they" as a gender-neutral, 3rd person singular pronoun.
i.e. "I was talking to my friend, and they said, '...'" It's perfectly clear in that case that the friend is singular.
Otherwise, I agree with your points from both posts.
Cheers.
After Silicon Valley moves production and R&D to China, houses will sell cheap in SV.
They can be used, as in 'they then attacked the plaintiff,' as long as no gender or number has been specified.
Again, so much for the educational system in America.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
In English "they" does the trick. :(
It's looks like your schools never recovered from Reagan and the Ebonics pidgin-english crap designed to save money
Actually the sales departments are naturally the biggest of all in healthy corporations, whatever form they have. :-) Apparently as this one sounds like this, apparently it's not, I hope.
HP doesn't say that they will cut R&D. From what they say I understand that they will sack management and other operations managers, which means they will cut down the over-grown bureaucracy.
On the other hand, the worst what could happen is to say: "sales is the only dept. bringing money, so let's cut everybody else"
Like Slashdot's darling Google you mean?
More and more IT jobs are being outsourced mostly to India. Alan Blinder is writing that this trend is likely to accelerate and include all kinds of high and low paying jobs. Corporate CEOs have too much power, both within the corporation and in the government and courts and they are using their power for short term gain only. In Germany, corporate boards include representatives from labor and financial interests, and they are not doing crazy amounts of outsourcing, their workers get much better benefits, shorter hours, more vacation and the ratio of CEO pay to average pay in the firm is much lower (see Oligarchy article in Der Spiegel)
How do we combat the outsourcing trend? Could IT workers ban together with others within the firm or across firms to influence decisions inside the workplace and in the political sphere? Can corporate charter law be changed or could corporations be regulated at the state level? (currently regulators from individual states can create mandates for large insurance companies that do business in their state, just as California sets standards for auto companies that do business in their state. Could individual states block outsourcing? Could corporations be forced to consider the needs of their workers? Please post your ideas here or at my brand new site VoicesFromTheCorporation dot org. Thanks.
By the way, 30 years ago is when the US went off the gold standard and the Fed got the opportunity to "print" money and give it to their friends on Wall Street.
How the Fed Favors the 1%
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
is an oxymoron that is allowing the usa to slide into second place
why is it theirs? What made it theirs? Almost all of this wealth they claim is inheritance being used claim more of society's output. They didn't 'earn' it in the way you think of earning; e.g. by producing something of value. These people are making most of their money buy rapidly buying and selling investments and skimming off the top, and by gutting productive companies. These are people that spend all day making money, not useful products, services or inventions.
We as a society have chosen to give Meg Whitman an enormous amount of money. She'll pass that on to her children who will leverage it to maintain that. But That money isn't any thing useful; it's a representation of what we think Meg Whitman's contribution to our civilization is worth. Can you tell me what she does for society at large that justifies this? Can you tell me why we can't have a society that makes intelligent decisions about where to allocate it's resources?
One way to spend out capital as a civilization is giving it all t 1000 families and then the rest to a military and political apparatus who's job is to protect those 1000 families from the other 6 billion left without food, shelter and health care. That's pretty much what we're doing now. Your standing on principle, saying it's theirs. But it's more complicated than that. They didn't make or even discover the lands they claim to own. They didn't build the houses that stand on it or invent the technology that made it possible to build it. They just claimed it as theirs, and we all just sorta agreed with them. That was fine when the economy was growing and we all had good jobs and enough of what we want. When I wasn't worried about money I didn't care that Meg had a private jet or that some Sheik built his own private ski resort in the middle of a desert. Well, my wages have been falling for 30 years and my productivity has doubled or quadrupled. Those productivity gains created unemployement that's being used to further depress my wages. I'm asking tough questions... difficult questions. Sorry sir, but you're going to have to come up with a better answer than 'Because it's not yours'. I did the work, I put up the houses. I fixed the computers that ran the accounting firm. I wrote the software they use. I did all the work. Why the hell isn't it mine?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Look up "singular they". Most style manuals do not permit it and at this point the consensus seems to be that it's not correct English, although I imagine this will change over time.
The American educational system teaches that you match the plurality of a pronoun with its antecedent, which is correct.
I can understand that you might be upset that you didn't learn anything in the American education system (which certainly has its problems), but in this case I think it's your fault that you didn't learn.
HP will never be successfully in the Service Delivery arena until it changes it's culture.. Currently IT is in charge of making desisions, creating finance application and deciding what the sales team needs to sell... ALL WRONG.. IT needs to support the Business side of HP and GiVE THEM WHAT they need to sell the business.. UNTIL HP realizes this, HP will bleed a slow misiable death.. IT should NOT drive business... Business MUST drive IT to serve.
I've got to ask HP employees, does everyone raspberry when someone says Meg?
But esteemed writers - including Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and George Orwell - have used it for centuries. Effective writing must be crisp and accurate, and those who condone "singular they" frequently depend on its use.
Sorry, it's in the lexicon, despite what the lacking American system teaches. Singular they has existed for longer than anyone currently on this planet has been alive.
I think you were the one lacking the education if you didn't pick up on this kind of simple during your assigned summer reading.
I was taught to actually think critically, hence the sense 'they' makes when the subject being discussed is singular and of indeterminate gender.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I can't believe I just wrote that.
Went to my Facebook page. Zero ads. Of course, some people like ads, or can't figure out how to block them.
So you've figured out how to stop Facebook from selling your personal information and demographics to every company with a media budget? Congratulations, you win the internets.
Meh, so they know my name and where I live, you can get that out of the phone book. I still don't have to look at their ads.