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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.
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 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?
They are cutting jobs but concentrating efforts on sales. Yeah.. What I hear is please by from us but don't expect cutting edge, anything innovative, or decent support after the sale.
That pretty much puts the final nails in the coffin for what once was an inovative tech company.
Its more like they are cutting jobs to show a profit. Its says we are clueless and know no other way of turning a profit. So we will toss out our knowledge base people and hope the cheaper ones in China will work out. Kodak tried this except the engineering went to Japan and Xerox is still trying it. Good luck American worker.
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?
There's good news in this.
HP has been making trash equipment for a long time. Their printers are garbage, the software for them is worse. Their business laptops ship with non-functional radio chipsets and I've been told they just won't be fixed. I've gotten servers shipped to me with unsigned drivers that just don't work, and their foreign tech support is the consistently the worst I've ever had to deal with (and over phone lines that barely work). Not to labor the subject, but I actually had someone in India call me a thief when I called to ask them to replace a missing part on a laptop that came back from depot service. Worse yet, I've seen zero indication that they intend to do anything, about any of this, for years.
Any company that pumps out crap product and treats its customers like garbage for the sake of short term cost cutting, trying to squeeze out another .03 bump in their stock price, deserves to die the kind of death HP is going to suffer.
For my part, I say, "fuck em".
I like that idea. Enslave your people, fire them when they're worn and hire new slaves. What can possibly go wrong?